Pronoia:
the opposite of paranoia; the sneaking suspicion that the
whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings.
Symptoms include sudden attacks of optimism and outbreaks of
goodwill.
"I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my
edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard
to make me happy." --Terence McKenna
If you have not yet read the last
two
weeks' pieces on pronoia, they might be fun to read along with
the stuff below.
The Sorcery of Pronoia
by Rob Brezsny under the influence and inspiration of Hakim
Bey
THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Pity the educated cynics who
refuse to enjoy the fun, choosing instead to remain faithful
to their numb anguish.
THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Mourn for the humorless
devotees who refuse to join in the juicy unpredictable game so
that they might feed their spiritual greed, pretzeled up
motionless on prayer mats with the torment of grave
meditations.
THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Have compassion for the
imagination-dead heroes who cling so tightly to the masks
they've forged for themselves that they're dead to the delight
of molting.
PRONOIAC SORCERY is the daily cultivation of playfully
altered states of awareness for the purpose of accomplishing
practical miracles.
Pronoiac sorcery begins with your hunger for ingenious
beauty and ever-fresh truth. It thrives and ripens as you
discover that everything you behold is bursting with conscious
intelligence.
Pronoiac sorcery is not about reading auras or divining
past lives. It's not the corrupt shamanism of teachers who
soar adeptly through astral realms but treat the people in
their daily lives like crap. Goddess forbid that pronoiac
sorcery might be confused with the dry lust for a godlike ego
offered through the occult magic of Crowley's Golden Dawn. If
it's elitist hocus-pocus you want, go for the real thing --
political power, the accumulation of financial wealth, or
becoming one of the media mind-controllers.
Your perceptions gradually open under the quiet, steady,
friendly shock of pronoiac sorcery. As they do, they kill off
your false will and banish your artificial self.
Real pronoiac sorcery breaks holes in the consensual
hallucination called "reality," allowing you to
escape to your lost home. It metamorphoses the place where you
actually live, right here and now -- wild, messy heaven
brought kicking and screaming with delight into this eternally
virgin planet Earth. Here amazement is normal; sudden
mutations -- actual transformations of things you've never
before been able to change -- are possible.
As a pronoiac sorcerer, you prove the taboo truth that all
of reality is inherently designed to bring about our
liberation. Best of all, you do it not only for yourself. The
enhanced perceptions you enjoy, the altered states you craft,
are not just for your own use in the silence of your selfish
needs. As a pronoiac sorcerer, you yearn to awaken the gift in
other people, to expand the intoxication through benevolent
contagion.
Pronoiac sorcery: Let it spread. May it multiply. Unleash
it and unmask it -- not just in exotic once-in-a-blue-moon
dreams, but in the throb of the simple dramas you live from
day to day.
Everything in the universe is alive with playful
intelligence and wants to improvise with us.