Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia

This week I’d like to share with you the following excerpt from Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia, a book by Rob Brezsny. For those of you familiar with his “Free Will Astrology” column in Now Magazine, you know how much magic he can pack into his prose. The following few paragraphs speak to the challenges we all share trying to push the evolution of consciousness forward in these modern times:

Let me remind you who you really are: you’re an immortal freedom fighter in service to divine love. You have temporarily taken on the form of a human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins, in order to liberate all sentient creatures from suffering and help them claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright. You will accept nothing less than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to earth.

Your task may look impossible. Ignorance and inertia, partially camouflaged as time-honored morality seem to surround you. Pessimism is enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Stories about treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are readily believed.

To grapple against these odds, you have to be both a wrathful insurrectionary and an exuberant lover of life. You’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as you resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by very self-important people who act as if they know what they’re doing. You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

What can we do to help each other in this work?