Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter November 16, 2011

Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
NOVEMBER 16, 2011
FreeWillAstrology.com

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The piece below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA
available at Amazon: bit.ly/Pronoia
or Powells: bit.ly/PronoiaPowells

Listen to the podcast here: bit.ly/tRRjcK

YOU ARE A PROPHET

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. In fact, it's an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We're often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values. That's the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we're blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren't good for us and that we don't really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists deride as the "monkey mind." It's the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind's slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to the life that's right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.

Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize?

Here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings.

That's one reason why I'm reverent in composing my messages for you. If I'm to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.

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MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

WILD STRONG BRAVE YET FUN AND GOOD
A video of people doing amazing things. (You might want to turn down the music, though.)
tinyurl.com/3su7g8j

CREEPING EQUALITY
Women now get more than half of all the doctorates awarded in American universities, but they're still catching up in the fields of chemistry, engineering, and math.
tinyurl.com/3wo3bt9

WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO IMAGINE THE WONDERUL TRANSFORMATIONS LOOMING
Technological breakthroughs happen so often and we adapt to them so quickly, they make miracles seem commonplace.
tinyurl.com/3ukzw5j

(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They are not advertisements, and I get no kickbacks.)

Please tell me your own personal nominations for PRONOIA RESOURCES.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning November 17

Copyright 2011 by Rob Brezsny
FreeWillAstrology.com

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21):

In his poem "Ode to the Present," Pablo Neruda tells us how to slip free and clear into the luxuriously potent opportunity of the present moment. The here-and-now is so ripe and willing, he says, so malleable. "Take a saw to its delicious wooden perfume," he continues, and then "build a staircase. Yes, a staircase. Climb into the present, step by step, press your feet onto the resinous wood of this moment, going up, going up, not very high . . . Don't go all the way to heaven. Reach for apples, not the clouds." Such good advice for you, Scorpio! It's a perfect time to learn more about the magic of the present moment as you free yourself from "the unrepairable past." (Read the poem at bit.ly/NerudaOde.)

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

Seminal psychologist Carl Jung wasn't afraid of applying his scholarly analytical skills to the phenomena of pop culture. Late in life, he even wrote a thoughtful book on UFOs called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. To be as thorough and careful as he could possibly be about such an elusive subject, he wrote an afterword to his main argument, to which he added an epilogue, which in turn was followed by a concluding supplement. I hope that you are as scrupulous in wrapping up loose ends in the coming week, Sagittarius, especially when you're dealing with enigmas and riddles. As you seek resolution and completion, go well beyond the bare minimum.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):

A great deal of land in the Netherlands has been reclaimed from the sea by human effort. But the system of dikes that holds back the primal flow is not a foolproof or permanent guarantee against flooding. That's why more and more people are building homes that can float if they have to. "We are actually trying to move away from fighting against the water," says architect Koen Olthuis. "We are beginning to make friends with the water." I recommend you adopt this as a useful metaphor, Capricorn. During the coming months, you should be doing a lot of foundation work. What can you do to add buoyancy?

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18):

According to my old philosophy professor Norman O. Brown, "Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness: open your eyes and look around you -- madness is in the saddle anyhow." Let's take this hypothesis as our starting point, Aquarius. I propose that in the coming weeks you make an effort to get more accustomed to and comfortable with the understanding that the entire world is in the throes of utter lunacy. Once you are at peace with that, I hope you will commit yourself to the sacred kind of lunacy -- the kind that bestows wild blessings and perpetrates unreasonable beauty and cultivates the healing power of outlandish pleasure.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20):

It won't be enough to simply maintain your current levels of strength, clarity, and intelligence in the coming weeks. To stay healthy, to keep up with the rapidly evolving trends swirling in and around you, you will have to actively push to get stronger, clearer, and smarter. No pressure, right? Don't worry, the universe will be conspiring to help you accomplish it all. To trigger the boost you'll need, imagine that you have a reservoir of blue liquid lightning in the place between your heart and gut. Picture yourself drawing judiciously from that high-octane fuel as you need it, bringing it first to your heart and then to your brain.

ARIES (March 21-April 19):

If you go into a major art museum that displays Europe's great oil paintings, you'll find that virtually every masterpiece is surrounded by an ornate wooden frame, often painted gold. Why? To me, the enclosure is distracting and unnecessary. Why can't I just enjoy the arresting composition on the naked canvas, unburdened by the overwrought excess? I urge you to take my approach in the coming weeks, Aries. Push and even fight to get the goodies exactly as they are, free of all the irrelevant filler, extraneous buffers, and pretentious puffery.

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20):

"Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle," said the 13th-century poet Rumi. More prosaically put: Evaluate people according to the nobility and integrity of the desires they're obsessed with. Do you want to hang around with someone whose primary focus is to make too much money or please her parents or build a shrine to his own ego? Or would you prefer to be in a sphere of influence created by a person who longs to make a useful product or help alleviate suffering or make interesting works of art? It's an excellent time to ponder these issues, Taurus -- and then take action to ensure you're surrounded by moths that favor beautiful candles.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20):

In Santa Cruz there used to be a nightclub that featured live rock bands on a big stage but enforced a strict policy forbidding its patrons from dancing. The one time I went there, the music was loud and infectious, and I naturally felt the urge to move in vigorous rhythm. Moments after I launched into my groove, a bouncer accosted me and forced me to stop. I think this situation has certain resemblances to the one you're in now, Gemini. Some natural response mechanism in you is being unduly inhibited; some organic inclination is being unreasonably restrained or dampened. Why should you continue to accept this?

CANCER (June 21-July 22):

During the time a blue crab is growing to maturity, it is very skilled at transforming itself. It sheds its exoskeleton an average of once every 18 days for an entire year. You're in a phase with some similarities to that period of rapid ripening, Cancerian. Your commitment to change doesn't have to be quite as heroic, but it should be pretty vigorous. Could you manage, say, two moltings over the course of the next 30 days? If done in a spirit of adventure, it will be liberating, not oppressively demanding.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22):

"Progress isn't made by early risers," wrote author Robert Heinlein. "It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." That's exactly the kind of progress you are in an excellent position to stir up in the coming weeks. You don't have to match the stress levels of the Type A people who might seem to have an advantage over you, and you won't help yourself at all by worrying or trying too hard. The single best thing you can do to supercharge your creativity is to think of yourself as a "happy-go-lucky" person while you go around dreaming up ways to have more fun.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):

"Our elders know you don't find the answer by asking thousands of questions," says an essay on the website of the environmentalist group The Last Tree (thelasttree.net). "The wise way is to ask the right question in the beginning." I recommend this approach for you in the coming weeks, Virgo. Given the sparkly mysteriousness that now confronts you, I know you may be tempted to simultaneously try a lot of different routes to greater clarity. But the more effective strategy in the long run is to cultivate silence and stillness as you wait expectantly for the intuition that will reveal the simple, direct path.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22):

In a review of James Gleick's book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, The Week magazine reported that "the world now produces more information in 48 hours than it did throughout all human history to 2003." From that dizzying factoid, we can infer that you are more inundated with data than were all of your ancestors put together. And the surge will probably intensify in the coming weeks. You are in a phase of your astrological cycle when you'll be asked to absorb and integrate a voluminous amount of interesting stuff. Don't be hard on yourself if you sometimes need to slow down to digest what you've been taking in.

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HOMEWORK:

What thing do you desperately want that would also benefit other people? Testify by going to FreeWillAstrology.com and clicking on "Email Rob."

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Submissions sent to the Free Will Astrology Weekly Newsletter or in response to "homework assignments" may be published in a variety of formats at Rob Brezsny's discretion, including but not limited to newsletters, books, the Free Will Astrology column, and Free Will Astrology website. We reserve the right to edit such submissions for length, style, and content. Requests for anonymity will be honored with submissions; otherwise, reader names, screen names, or initials will be used. Please be sure to note your preference when sending to us. We are not responsible for unsolicited submission of any creative material.

Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright 2011 Rob Brezsny

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