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.”

This kind of dynamic engagement with those things that we want to change requires us to have morals, Brezsny says in “Let’s Make Morality Fun” (page 72). Not the “authoritarian, libido-mistrusting perversity of the right wing moral code,” nor the “atheism embedded in the left wing’s code of goodness,” but instead a “value system rooted in beauty, love, pleasure, and liberation.” Instead of demanding that everyone fall in line behind The Word of God, or blithely agreeing that everyone’s truth is as true as everyone else’s truth, we need to listen for a new way of judging right and wrong. Brezsny suggests that this new moral code should not require a devil or enemy; should never tolerate automaton-like behavior; must be fun; has to include a sense of humor; and must acknowledge that EVERYTHING CHANGES ALL THE TIME.

Of course we need to enjoy the process, and we can no longer require common enemies to unite us. But the last point strikes me as the most important—any framework for living needs to be flexible enough to adapt to an ever-changing world. This is not to say that our moral code should be wimpy or relativistic—only that this moral code should be less about telling people what to do and more about enabling people to discern the truth in different situations.

To me, a new morality is all about turning each of us into a more conscious, empathetic, playful, and sensitive instrument. Instead of following a list of rules, we need to get over ourselves so that life itself can have access to our hands and feet and brains and hearts to do what needs to be done. As a side note, doing good work with trustworthy, free-spirited, strong people also happens to be a great deal of fun.

In thinking about a moral code, I automatically start thinking about culture, which is the way a society’s moral code is transmitted from generation to generation. Culture is made up of millions of interactions, including everything from how we drive together on the road to what’s on the news. Each one of those interactions can reinforce or change the culture. When we yell at each other or get obsessed with stories of crime and violence, we reinforce the part of our culture that is rooted in fear. But when we come together in new ways to celebrate, put our heads together, and explore possibilities, we create a new culture based on freedom and communion.

As my perspective and morals have changed, I’ve noticed the kind of problems that attract my attention changing, too. I am so sick of feeling bad about my body, or questioning my place in the world, or wondering if my boyfriend loves me as much as I love him. Thoughts like this lead me straight to Yawnsville. But bigger questions excite me. How do we get New York City running on solar power? How do we as women stop putting 99% of our energies into our relationships and take our destinies into our own hands? How can I change people’s minds and open their hearts to the fact that being alive right now means that each of us is The One on whose shoulders falls the responsibility for ensuring that our race and our planet continues to survive and grow and learn?

It’s not that my little me problems have gone away. They just don’t feel as important (usually!) as the big ones. And, in considering the big ones, the little ones also seem more manageable. Brezsny discusses this phenomenon in “Bigger, Better, More Interesting Problems” (page 77). He writes, “Is there anything more dangerous than getting up in the morning and having nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no friction to heat you up? That state can be a threat to your health. If untreated, it incites a conscious yearning for any old dumb trouble that might rouse some excitement.”

There’s an element of habit in the problems we choose to concern ourselves with—both on the personal and communal levels. If we’ve always been afraid of something, chances are we will continue to be afraid of it unless something big comes along to knock us out of it. My dear friend was a first-class emetophobic (vomit phobe) until the person she loves best in the world got sick and needed to be cared for, so she got over it.

But it doesn’t necessarily take a crisis to shift us (though they do seem to do a good job). We can also choose to put our attention on problems further away than the ends of our noses. Brezsny predicts that if we choose to live pronoiacally, each of us will gravitate to hairier, more interesting, and more fulfilling problems. “You’ll be so alive and awake that you’ll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you’re forced to do so by divine kicks in the ass.”

Brezsny ends this short article with a quote from Robert Anton Wilson. “We should feel excited about the problems we confront and our ability to deal with them. Solving problems is one of the highest and most sensual of all our brain functions.”

To me, this brings to mind Al Gore’s last TED talk, which we put up here at The Sunny Way almost a year ago. “Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying Oh this is so terrible, what a burden we have. I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which 1,000 years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying They were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let’s do that.”

What do you think about this? Can embracing pronoia change our consciousness, elevate our commitment, and help us change the world?