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.

Of course, I also recognize that my resistance to any task is usually related to its value, and so I open up Pronoia again, determined to navigate around my cynicism and small-mindedness. And as I dive into the book more deeply, I realize the skill with which Brezsny has constructed it. What appears to be a bunch of breezily-related, hippie-feeling articles is actually a guided journey into our own wiring, each chapter going deeper and wider into how we are, and how we can transform.

This week, one of the passages that caught my eye was “Welcome Home” (page 185). “Let me remind you who you really are,” it begins. “You’re an immortal freedom fighter in service to divine love ... You will accept nothing less than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to earth.”

Brezsny goes on to list the obstacles in our way—ignorance, inertia, pessimism, skepticism, irony (don’t I know it)—all vestiges of the old. And he instructs us to collaborate with each other as we retrain for what’s next: by creating spaces where “everyone who’s devoted to the slow-motion awakening” can be free to practice, by goading each other on, and by inspiring each other to “perpetuate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom.”

As I read this, I thought, “Oh great, another Burning Man devotee wanting to play the divine trickster. How are tricks going to solve global warming and help us build a new economy?” I don’t like to think of myself as Puritanical, but there she is on my shoulder, a tiny harping Pilgrim in buckle shoes. Creating the future is HARD WORK, she says, and part of me believes her.

Of course, Brezsny got skills, so his very next paragraph answers my question:

What? Huh? What do tricks and mischief and jokes have to do with our quest? Isn’t America in a permanent state of war? Isn’t it the most militarized empire in the history of the world? Hasn’t the government’s paranoia about terrorism decimated our civil liberties? Isn’t it our duty to grow more serious and weighty than ever before?

I say it’s the perfect moment to take everything less seriously and less personally and less literally. Permanent war and the loss of civil liberties are immediate dangers. But there is an even bigger long-term threat to the fate of the earth, of which the others are but symptoms: the genocide of the imagination.

He then goes on to say that most of us ascribe to worldviews so fixed that they can rightfully be called fundamentalist—everyone from right-wing Christians who deny the existence of anything outside of scripture to scientific materialists who deny anything outside of the matter we can all see and hear and touch. These fundamentalist views keep us constricted and separated from each other, and they prevent us from seeing or developing anything new.

We are infected, you and I, with fundamentalism. What are we going to do about it? I saw we practice taking everything less seriously and less personally and less literally.

My own brand of fundamentalism says this: we humans have screwed up this beautiful, natural world, and now we must pay penance. It also says that the blame is to be placed squarely on the heads of greedy bastards like Dick Cheney who manipulate the rest of us into serving their evil ends. And it says that we have an incredible amount of work to do, the biggest pile of homework ever, and it shies away from the responsibility of taking it on.

This fundamentalism colors the way I see the world, in ways I probably am not even aware of. Does my unconscious belief in life as a big pile of homework actually turn it into one, at least in my own experience? More importantly, how can I—how can we—get beyond these beliefs? Taking everything less seriously, less personally, and less literally seems rather pointless and indulgent at first, but on deeper examination reveals itself to be a smart and needed strategy for growth. We need to crack our calcified, boring, and rigid patterns of thought if we want the rich, inflected, and surprising workings of life to operate in and through us.

Pronoia is full of exercises to help us learn to do this. I typically read through exercises in books without ever actually engaging with them, but that’s largely a function of cynicism—skating over the surface rather than taking something seriously enough to dive in deep. This week, I’m going to actually do some of these exercises and see what happens. I’ll tell you all about it next week, in our last Pronoia installment.