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?

On page 168 in “Receptivity Remedies,” Brezsny describes in detail how to pronoiacally perceive truth:

To be the best pronoiac explorer you can be, I suggest you adopt an outlook that combines the rigorous objectivity of a scientist, the “beginner’s mind” of Zen Buddhism, and the compassionate friendliness of the Dalai Lama. Blend a scrupulously dispassionate curiosity with a skepticism driven by expansiveness, not spleen.

To pull this off, you’ll have to be willing to regularly suspend your brilliant theories about the way the world works. Accept with good humor the possibility that what you’ve learned in the past may not be a reliable guide to understanding the fresh phenomenon that’s right in front of you. Be suspicious of your biases, even the rational and benevolent ones. Open your heart as you strip away the interpretations that your emotions might be inclined to impose.

He then quotes his teacher Anne Davies:
Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything, we have to be wililng to ignore what we would like to be true. Before we can receive the entire truth about anything, we have to love it.

Just reading these words, I can feel the self-righteous knot in my chest relax, and I can see the situation I was upset about from the other party’s point of view. This is not to say that I agree—I can still see the limitation from which that person is operating—but it’s not quite as upsetting and it doesn’t feel personal. Space opens up around the dispute, and other pathways to resolve it become visible.

More importantly, I can also see the limitation from which I am operating, which is that I am undisputably right, and whoever disagrees with me is either dumb, evil, or misguided. What a condescending bitch am I!

This realization is incredibly humbling, and it’s also liberating. Looking for the pearl of truth in this encounter I see this: Maybe I don’t always have to be right, right off the bat. Maybe I can be both receptive and discerning. The trick now is to shorten the gap of time between when something crazy happens, and when my ability to see it in a reasonable, rational, loving way kicks in ...

Can you look at some conflict in your life—big or small—from a pronoiac point of view? What happens when you do?