Part 1: Let's Expose the Obvious Miracles

(excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)

Thousands of things go right for you every single day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don't fully understand, you're still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you've been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that's just right for your body's needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect. The interesting gift of these vivid hues is made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear reactions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.

You can't live without the sun's inexhaustible flood of unconditional love. Every move you make depends on it. Luckily, it never fails you.

Did you know that your personal star is located at the precise distance from you to be of consummate service? If it were any closer, you'd fry, and if it were any farther away, you'd freeze. Is that just a happy accident? Or is it a sign of favor -- a big, broad hint, from a cosmic intelligence that adores you?

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Of the many things that have gone right for you during your time on Earth, the most crucial was your birth. As you crossed over the threshold, trading the warm dark sanctuary for the bright noisy enigma, you didn't die! It was a difficult act of high magic that involved many people who worked very hard in your behalf. The skills they provided in helping you navigate your rite of passage were in turn made possible by previous generations of threshold-tenders who bequeathed their expertise.

Months before that initiation, a more secret miracle bloomed: Your life began as a single cell, spawned by the explosive fusion of two highly specialized bundles of chromosomes. How could that tiny package of raw material have possibly grown a brain and liver and heart and stomach over a period of a few months? What inscrutable genius guided and oversaw the emergence of your fully formed infant body, that virtuoso creation, from the slimmest of clues?

"Something unknown is doing we don't know what," said astrophysicist Arthur Eddington about the universe. And we are the beneficiaries.

P.S. You have continued to grow since your birth, with millions of new cells continually blooming to replace the old ones that are always dying. At this moment, you're host to about 50 trillion cells, and each of them is really a sentient being in its own right. They all act together as a community, implementing the monumental collaboration you call your body.

True Beauty

‎"Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself." - Deena Metzger, "Entering the Ghost River"

Albert hoffman

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"Take time to stop and smell the flowers," says an old homily. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD and lived to age 102, had a different approach. "Take the time to stop and be the flowers," he said.

That's my advice to you. Don't just set aside a few stolen moments to sniff the snapdragons, taste the rain, chase the wind, watch the hummingbirds, and listen to a friend. Use your imagination to actually be the snapdragons and rain and wind and hummingbirds and friend. Don't just behold the Other; become the Other.

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Butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and bats love to drink the nectar that flowers offer. In return, these pollinators are expected to get some pollen stuck on their bodies and carry it away to fertilize other plants.

While the nectar is tasty, it's usually not pure sweetness. If it were, the first pollinator to come along would suck it all dry, leaving nothing for further visitors. And that wouldn't be good from the plant's point of view, because it would limit the number of places where its pollen would be disseminated.

To keep nectar-drinking sessions short, therefore, most plants include a touch of bitterness in the blend.

Bit like life really aint it!!!if we had everything we wanted all in one moment, or in one fulfilling ambition, we'd never seek further...but we continue to look and discover more...and more, and this is the beauty of Life...

2012

It's Already December 21, 2012

(excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)

Many visionaries and prophets expect there to be a huge and sudden shift in the world's story sometime soon. Whether it happens on December 21, 2012 or a later date, a sizable proportion of them even predict that it will be "in the twinkling of an eye" -- a sudden cascade of events that completely changes everything everywhere.

Some paint the scenario in broad, catastrophic strokes, expecting something -- they're not sure what -- that will have the impact of a large meteor strike or nuclear war or pandemic disease. Others harbor a more benign but equally fuzzy expectation, speculating that maybe some higher psychic powers will kick in to the multitudes all at once, or that benevolent extraterrestrials will arrive to solve our energy crisis.



What very few of the prophets do, however, is make a precise prediction about exactly what will happen. Their visions contain no assurances, no specifics. And in my view, that's worse than useless. It fills us with a vague buzz of fear or amorphous sense of hope, but offers no concrete directions about what to do to prevent the dreaded thing or help create the hoped-for thing.

And the fact is, as I see it, they can't possibly know what the Big Shift is -- if, that is, a Big Shift is really looming. The very nature of any Big Shift will be so unexpected, so beyond our imaginations, and so utterly alien to what we understand, that we can't possibly delineate its contours in advance.

I'm reminded of Jung's formula, which is that we don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

This theory can be applied in reverse: If we have not yet grown wiser than our current predicament, then we can't see what the evolved state is beyond the predicament. Our minds are as-yet incapable of embodying the vision that will catapult us beyond the problem we're stuck in.

When the Big Shift comes, whether or not it comes in the twinkling of an eye, it will be something that no one foresaw, let alone described in detail. It will be beyond our comprehension, unlike anything we could have visualized headed our way. (Thirty years ago, did anyone imagine the Internet or the impact it's having?)

And if that's true, then the inescapable conclusion is: There's no use trying to plan ahead for it. It's counterproductive to hold a particular scenario in our mind as the likely development. And it's downright crazy to harbor a chronic sense of dread about an unknowable, unimaginable series of events.

The best way to prepare for a Big Shift is to cultivate mental and emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:

* a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;

* a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, and worries about the future;

* a trust in empirical evidence over our time-worn beliefs and old habits;

* a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast and tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner's mind fully engaged;

* and an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of all the interesting questions that tease and teach us.

Everything I just described also happens to be an excellent way to prime yourself for a chronic, low-grade, always-on, simmering-at-low-heat brand of ecstasy -- a state of being more-or-less permanently in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone.

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Even if you don't call yourself an artist, you have the potential to be a dynamic creator who is always hatching new plans, coming up with fresh ideas, and shifting your approach to everything you do as you adjust to life's ceaseless invitation to change.

It's to this part of you -- the restless, inventive spirit -- that I address the following: Unleash yourself! Don't be satisfied with the world the way it is; don't sit back passively and blankly complain about the dead weight of the mediocre status quo. Instead, call on your curiosity and charisma and expressiveness and lust for life as you tinker with and rebuild everything you see so that it's in greater harmony with the laws of love and more hospitable to your soul's code.

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Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's Big Island. You own everything, my dear sovereign -- the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the Internet and the wild horses and the eight-lane highways.

Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.

Do Your Good Thing

I'm putting out a call to the rebel in your heart -- not the cranky, vindictive rebel in your mind, but the joyful, yearning rebel in your heart. I am asking this tender renegade to rise up against narcissistic behavior wherever you find it. Don't shout it down or try to shame it, though; rather, work around it through outrageous displays of empathy and radical acts of compassion and feisty outbreaks of wild kindness. Your job, is to be a one-person wrecking crew devoted to smashing the boring inertia of egotism with your zealous concern for the good of all.