For the last several Thursdays, we have been discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. This is the last Pronoia post. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

Last week, I told you that I would do an exercise from Pronoia and share my results with you for this, our last discussion of this funny and eye-opening book. The exercise I’ve chosen is #2 on page 271, just a few pages before the book’s end. Here’s the text of it:

The iconoclastic physicist Jack Sarfatti proposes that all “creative thought by artists, craftsmen, and scientists involves the subconscious reception of ideas from the future, which literally create themselves.” Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher Vimala Blavatsky puts a different spin on it. “Our future selves are constantly transmitting great ideas to us back through time,” she says, “but most of us don’t believe that’s possible and consequently are not alert for it.”

What do you think is the most pressing communique your future self is currently beaming your way?

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For the next few Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

For the last few weeks, I have been feeling some resistance to reading and writing about Pronoia. It actually irritates me—much of the language strikes me as very 60s-ish, and there’s nothing that annoys Gen X-ers like me more than Boomers waxing rhapsodic about divinity, sacredness, sex, and Burning Man.

I’m well aware that this is much more about me than it is about the book. I have to admit that there is still a part of me that equates pronoia and positivity in general with weakness, frivolity, and naivete. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think for many of us, cynicism is like a comfy old pair of jeans that we can easily throw on without looking like we’re trying too hard. I’ve often made the joke that the reason I had to start The Sunny Way is because I am the most cynical bitch who ever lived, so I need it worse than anyone. And although I recognize that this is not precisely accurate, there’s enough truth in there to make it hard for me to fully embrace a pronoiac, positive view.

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For the next few Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

Yesterday, I had a bit of a rough day. An unfortunate confluence of hormones and a difficult conversation left me feeling both enraged and powerless. Angry tears formed a volcano in my chest as my heart pounded righteously. I was hankering for the gym, a hard sweat, something heavy to pick up and put down several times to take my mind off it, but there wasn’t time just then. I had to soldier on with my day.

As time went by and I calmed down, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed in myself that something as small as a tactical disagreement could impact me so deeply and so physically. One part of me felt pushed around and victimized, but another part of me realized that I had colluded in creating this drama, and that I could pop out of it by shifting my perspective.

How would I see this situation if I was a master of pronoia?

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We’ll get back to our regular Pronoia discussion next week. This week, I wanted to share with you a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, which can be found on page 151 as part of the Pronoia News Network:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

I’ve been pondering this since I read it. What does this mean in the context of all the problems we face now, and the future that will be created out of the solutions?

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For the next few Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

As the season of Lent begins, I wonder how many Christians will be participating simply out of habit. How many will give up chocolate until Easter more for the practical goal of losing weight than for getting closer to a higher power?

The truth is many traditional religious rituals like Lent have become empty for recent generations or, even worse, negative in spirit. Many of us look at Christmas, see materialism run rampant and lose our taste for the whole affair. Yet ritual, in essence, remains a powerful human experience with the ability to cleanse, revive and humble us. In Pronoia, Robert Brezsny demonstrates that anyone can make up his or her own ritual: a special dance to welcome the rising sun; a chant for all things that grow on the Spring Equinox; saying your own version of grace before you eat a meal.

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This week was a busy one, and I’m looking forward to the 3-day weekend! Here’s a recap of what we covered on The Sunny Way:

• Monday I posted on the way our expectations can alter the way we experience reality, and some techniques for laying down what we think we know so that we can see what is.
• Tuesday and Wednesday Sarah shared her inauguration story, from sunrise to sunset.
• Thursday we looked into what Pronoia has to say about evil.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts by Robert Anton Wilson, an author and exploratory thinker whose terrain includes physics and subjective reality, and who Rob Brezsny quotes extensively in Pronoia. “Maybe things are going to turn out okay,” Wilson says, “in which case pessimists are killing themselves and being miserable for no good reason.”

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For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

So, if pronoia is about willfully choosing to focus on the positive, functional, glorious aspects of life, then where does negative, dysfunctional, ugly stuff go? Brezsny addresses this in the articles we’ll discuss today: “Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse” (page 99), “Pronoia’s Villains” (page 103), and “Shadow School” (page 113).

In “Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse,” Brezsny says that he suffers from a most unusual form of chauvinism—he thinks that “those of us alive today are on the cusp of a radical turning point in the evolution of humanity. Or so I like to imagine.”

I tend to agree with him—and, like Brezsny, I wonder what that radical turning point will look like. Are the fundamentalist Christians right to wait for Jesus to ride a pony down through the sky? Will we be blasted by an asteroid? Killed by superbugs resistant to antibiotics? Vaporized in the blink of an eye by an errant nuke?

Or will our transformation be more personal, more interior, and as much about growth as destruction? As RB puts it, “Why are Things Falling Apart thought to be inherently more gripping than Things Being Reborn?”

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For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

In “A Dangerous Taboo,” (page 61) Rob Brezsny discusses the fact that our society’s conventional wisdom perceives pessimism as intelligence, and optimism as naivete. “If you cultivate an affinity for pronoia,” he writes, “people you respect may wonder if you’ve lost your way. You might appear to them as naive, eccentric, unrealistic, misguided, or even stupid.”

I can understand why so many people feel this way. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity’s focus has been simply to stay alive, to survive what the day brings. We’re born, we struggle, and then we die. And after we die, we might be rewarded if we bore our burdens without complaint, or punished if we strayed too far from what’s expected of us. If we have a little fun or make a little progress along the way, that’s great, too, but we certainly shouldn’t expect it.

But, as our friend and coach Maia put it the other day, we’re at the cusp of something new now. We are beginning to see the truth in the Observer effect—our perceptions of things clearly change the thing we are perceiving, whether those things are waves of light or other people. And, grasping this, we begin to understand our own responsibility. If we want a creative, useful, and joyful world, we must learn to perceive in a creative, useful, and joyful way.

Brezsny is exploring this new frontier and asks us to do the same, though rewiring thousands of years of caution, worry, and fear is demanding work. But our task is not to put our heads in the sand and refuse to look at things we don’t like the look of. “Pronoia is fueld by a drive to cultivate happiness and a determination to practice an aggressive form of gratitude that systematically identifies the things that are working well. But it is not a soothing diversion meant for timid Pollyannas strung out on optimistic delusions. It’s not a feel-good New Age fantasy used to deny the harsh facts about existence. Those of us who perceive the world pronoiacally refuse to be polite shills for sentimental hopefulness. On the contrary, we build our optimism not through a repression of difficulty, but rather a vigorous engagement with it.”

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This Thursday, our discussion will focus on “A Dangerous Taboo” (page 61), “Let’s Make Morality Fun” (page 72), and “Bigger, Better, More Interesting Problems” (page 77).

For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

What is pronoia? Well, obviously it’s the opposite of paranoia—instead of thinking everyone’s out to get you, you think that the world is conspiring on your behalf. And, the funny thing is that it’s true!

“Glory in the Highest” (page 4) starts with the sentence “Thousands of things go right of you every day, beginning the moment you wake up.” Brezsny then goes through dozens of examples of things that go right before you even leave for work in the morning—you wake up still alive! the sun is shining! the toilet works!—and asks of each wonder, how does that happen? How does your body know to keep breathing and pumping blood even as you sleep? How did your hands come to be such “astounding creations that allow you to carry out hundreds of tasks with great force and intricate grace”? Who sewed the clothes in your closet, baked the bread in your cupboard, and engineered the miraculous feat of hot and cold water flowing at your command?

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It’s time for another Sunny Way Book Club! This time we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. This book first caught my eye a few months ago, when I read about it in a comment thread on Worldchanging.

I was intrigued by the title—how often do we look at the world through a lens of suspicion, when the fact is that we are custom made for this planet, and millions of events go off without a hitch every single second? On this site, we talk a lot about reframing our view of the world to be creative and positive, so I thought Pronoia would be a perfect fit for us. And I was right!

Leafing through Pronoia, I catch myself alternately laughing and closing my eyes to ponder certain ideas. This book is not only an introduction to the concept of pronoia—it’s also a manual/workbook through which we can learn how to live pronoiacally, with our eyes on sacred creation and silliness instead of doom and gloom.

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This is the last installment of our book club examining Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

Will’s month in Pala passes peacefully. He spends time with Vijaya’s family and sees a Mutual Adoption Club in action. He spends time at the school and watches how the Palanese educate their children in how to live in both the internal and external worlds they inhabit. And, finally, he witnesses the death of Lakshmi, the wife of Doctor Robert, who is losing her long battle with cancer.

Lakshmi isn’t pumped full of opiates or encouraged to go to sleep. While young nurse Radha sits in meditation to set the tone, Susila encourages Lakshmi to stay awake, to witness her own dying the same way she has witnessed every moment in her life:

“Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply ... I was so preposterously serious is those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi ... Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic ... Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly ... On tiptoes ... Completely unencumbered.”

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For the last several weeks, we have been discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

Chapter 9 of Island begins with this quote from the Old Raja’s Notes on What’s What: “Patriotism is not enough. But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.”

Now that Will has been officially welcomed into Pala for a month, and now that he is healed well enough to get around a bit, his hosts offer take him on a proper tour of the island in order to show him what “nothing short of everything” looks like in action. He arrives before they do at the Experimental Station and runs into Murugan, the soon-to-be Raja, who has his nose in the Sears catalog. Murugan shares with Will his dreams of bringing progress (and motorscooters) to Pala. He also shares his contempt for hallucinocenic moksha-medicine: “All it gives you is a lot of illusions.”

Of course, Murugan’s ideas are formed by the European education he has received, rather than by his own direct experience. “You’re like that mynah,” says Dr. Robert after arriving at the Station and getting involved in the conversation. “Trained to repeat words you don’t understand or know the reason for, ‘It isn’t real. It isn’t real.’ But if you’d experienced [this for yourself] ... you’d know better. You’d know it was much more real than what you call reality.”

As they begin their tour, Dr. Robert tells Will that Murugan’s subjects have very different views on progress and reality than does their Raja-in-waiting. “They’ve been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness. And, on top of that, they have been shown the world and themselves and other people as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers. Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles. Jewels and miracles.”

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For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

Like many people, lately I’ve been a little obsessed with the results of the presidential election. Every time I hear the words “President Elect Obama,” I get a thrill up my spine. Possibility is in the air; I can feel it and it seems like lots of other people can, too. It is with this electric sense that now is the time when we can make things happen that I turn my attention back to Pala, the practical, functional society of Aldous Huxley’s Island.

When we last discussed the book, we talked about the Palanese conception of family, and how a diversified family structure allows children to grow up in a world of options. In the next chapter (chapter 8), Will asks to spend a little more time in Pala, to learn about all the options which are part of the Palanese way of life, and Dr. MacPhail decides to allow him to stay for a month, even though he works for an oil man’s newspaper and oil companies have been trying to make destructive inroads into Pala.

“When in doubt,” said Dr. Robert, “always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are.” Reading this phrase, I couldn’t help but think of the way President Elect Obama ran his campaign, appealing to the better angels of our nature and a desire to create a better world. Who would have thought that so many Americans would respond to this hopeful message?

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For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

On Susila’s second visit to Will Farnaby, they talk about their families and the ways in which they did and did not function. Farnaby’s mother was weak and his father domineering and cruel, while Susila had a quiet father and an exuberant mother. To Susila’s more reserved constitution, her mother “was like a permanent invasion of one’s privacy.”

The difference between the fractured, resentful result of Farnaby’s upbringing and the integrated, forward-looking result of Susila’s is the Palanese family structure.

The first difference is a conception of family relationship which is not fixed or based on duty. Susila explains that although her mother raised her, as adults there is no pressure for them to maintain a deep relationship. “‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function,” she says. “When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘Mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of each other. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving—isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”

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