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Tag: Rob Brezsny

Oh, thank you, package from Amazon.com

Oh, thank you, package from Amazon.com

Oh joy! Books! Books I ordered, but that now appear like a comic gift to me from Benevolent Deities Inc.

Happy sigh. Ahhhhh…. two for browsing at leisure, one for candy satisfaction:

Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
Rob Brezsny

Diva Lion says:

Pronoia is a philosophy book of a most unusual stripe. It takes a lot of the ideas that Breszny has developed on the Free Will Astrology site and particularly that he included as themes in his amazing novel, The Televisionary Oracle, and expands on them, shaping them into a chaotically coherent philosophy of life. The style is undeniably Breszny– quirky, irreverent, soulful, linguistically athletic, challenging, hopeful.

The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark
Sera Beak

Synopsis:

The Red Book” is a nothing less than a spiritual fire starter—a combustible cocktail of Hindu Tantra and Zen Buddhism, Rumi and Carl Jung, Mary Magdalene and modern psychics, goddesses and Gnosticism, shaken with cosmic nudges, meaningful subway rides, haircuts, relationships, sex, dreams, humor, and intuition. It’s a book that encourages women to live more consciously so they can start making clearer choices across the board, from careers to relationships, politics to pop culture and everything in between. For smart, gutsy, spiritually curious women whose colorful and complicated lives aren’t reflected in most spirituality books.

Making Money (Discworld Novels)
Terry Pratchett

Publisher’s Weekly review:

Reprieved confidence trickster Moist von Lipwig, who reorganized the Ankh-Morpork Post Office in 2004’s Going Postal, turns his attention to the Royal Mint in this splendid Discworld adventure. It seems that the aristocratic families who run the mint are running it into the ground, and benevolent despot Lord Vetinari thinks Moist can do better. Despite his fondness for money, Moist doesn’t want the job, but since he has recently become the guardian of the mint’s majority shareholder (an elderly terrier) and snubbing Vetinari’s offer would activate an Assassins Guild contract, he reluctantly accepts. Pratchett throws in a mad scientist with a working economic model, disappearing gold reserves and an army of golems, once more using the Disc as an educational and entertaining mirror of human squabbles and flaws.

The Multi-faceted Goddess Prayer

The Multi-faceted Goddess Prayer

This most astounding of Goddess prayers is from Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings– the latest addition to my wishlist. You may know Rob Brezsny if you follow his witty syndicated column Free Will Astrology. Thanks to sweet Nessa for suggesting it – I found it posted at Killing the Buddha.

Prayer for You

How do you get God’s attention? Try sweet talking his girlfriend.
by Rob Breznsy

This is a perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I’ve been roused to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of you — even those of you who don’t believe in the power of prayer.

And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods… the God beyond all Gods… the Girlfriend of God… the Teacher of God… the Goddess who invented God.

Dear Goddess, you who never kill but only change:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.

I pray that you will give them what they don’t even know they need — not just the boons they think they want but everything they’ve always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.

Dear Goddess, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:

Many of the divine chameleons out there don’t even know that their souls will live forever. So please use your brash magic to help them see that they are all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own personalities.

Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what they’ve been led to believe about themselves, and more exciting than they can possibly imagine.

Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for them to be in love with anyone or anything that’s no good for them.

O Goddess, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:

I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed the wise and sexy virtuosos out there.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung to them, no matter how long they’ve suffered from it, and even if they’ve become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.

Please conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring another hex or plague into their lives in the future.

Dear Goddess, sweet Goddess, you sly universal virus with no f*cking opinion:

Please help all the personal growth addicts out there to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.

Teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating self-control.

Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.

Arouse the Wild Woman within them — even if they’re men.

Dear Goddess, you pregnant sl*t who scorns all mediocre longing:

I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate rascals communing with this prayer to kick their own asses and wash their own brains.

Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that encourage them to believe that they are better than anyone else.

Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do not have.

Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they never love their own pain more than anyone else’s pain.

Oh Goddess, you wildly disciplined, radically curious, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically logical master of rowdy bliss:

I ask you to give your unconventionally unconditional love to all the budding messiahs who read this prayer; love them with all of your ocean and sky and fire and earth.

Cultivate in yourself a fervent yearning for their companionship. Play with them every day. Answer their questions. Listen to their stories.

Inspire them not just to nag you for what they want, but also to thank you for the uncanny gifts you flood them with.

And if there are any pockets of ignorance or hatred these insanely poised creators might be harboring, any inadvertent idiocies that keep them blind to your blessings, please flush them out as soon as possible.

Dear Goddess, You psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains:

Bless all the inscrutable creators out there with lucid dreams while they are wide awake, and their very own spin doctors, and solar-powered sex toys that work even in the dark, and vacuum cleaners for their magic carpets, and a knack for avoiding other people’s hells, and a thousand masks that all represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not psychotic stalkers.

Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river, or a boulevard in an exotic vacationland, or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn or Jupiter.

Teach them to push their own buttons and unbreak their own hearts and right their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and save their own lives.

Dear Goddess, You fiercely tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm animal bodies:

I pray that you provide all the original sinners out there with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love.

Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from their daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach them that they can have anything they want if they’ll only ask for it in an unselfish way.

And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change everyone out there in the exact way they’ve needed to change in order to become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be.

Amen. Awomen.

Wow. That really charges my battery – how about you?