Let me remind you who you really are: You\u2019re an immortal freedom
\nfighter in service to divine love. You have temporarily taken on the
\nform of a human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins, in
\norder to liberate all sentient creatures from suffering and help them
\nclaim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright. You will accept
\nnothing less than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to
\nearth.<\/p>\n
Your task may look impossible. Ignorance and inertia, partially
\ncamouflaged as time-honored morality, seem to surround you. Pessimism
\nis enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism
\nmasquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Stories
\nabout treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions
\nof people who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful
\ntruths are suspect and ugly truths are readily believed.<\/p>\n
To grapple against these odds, you have to be both a wrathful
\ninsurrectionary and an exuberant lover of life. You\u2019ve got to cultivate
\ncheerful buoyancy even as you resist the temptation to swallow
\nthousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively
\npackaged by very self-important people who act as if they know what
\nthey\u2019re doing. You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you
\noverthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred
\nto as reality.<\/p>\n
What can we do to help each other in this work?<\/p>\n
First, we can create safe houses to shelter everyone who\u2019s devoted to
\nthe slow-motion awakening. These sanctuaries might take the form of
\ntemporary autonomous zones like festivals and parties and workshops,
\nwhere we can ritually potentiate the evolving mysteries of pronoia. Or
\nthey might be more enduring autonomous zones like homes and cafes and
\nbusinesses where we can get regular practice in freeing ourselves from
\nthe slavery of hatred in all of its many guises.<\/p>\n
What else can we do to help each other? We can conspire together to
\ncarry out the agenda that futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard names: to
\nhospice what\u2019s dying and midwife what\u2019s being born. We need the trigger
\nof each other\u2019s rebel glee as we kill off every reflex within us that
\nresonates in harmony with the putrefaction. We need each other\u2019s
\ndauntless cunning as we goad and foment the blooming life forces within
\nus that thrive on the New World\u2019s incandescent questions.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a third way we can collaborate: We can inspire each other to
\nperpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks,
\nblasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom . . . .<\/p>\n
What? Huh? What do tricks and mischief and jokes have to do with our
\nquest? Isn\u2019t America in a permanent state of war? Isn\u2019t it the most
\nmilitarized empire in the history of the world? Hasn\u2019t the government\u2019s
\nparanoia about terrorism decimated our civil liberties? Isn\u2019t it our
\nduty to grow more serious and weighty than ever before?<\/p>\n
I say it\u2019s the perfect moment to take everything less seriously and less personally and less literally.<\/p>\n
Permanent war and the loss of civil liberties are immediate dangers.
\nBut there is an even bigger long-term threat to the fate of the earth,
\nof which the others are but symptoms: the genocide of the imagination.<\/p>\n
Earlier I cited pop nihilist storytellers as vanguard perpetrators of
\nthe genocide of the imagination. But there are other culprits as well:
\nthe fundamentalists. I\u2019m not referring to just the usual suspects\u2014the
\nreligious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism.<\/p>\n
Scientists can be fundamentalists. So can liberals and capitalists,
\natheists and hedonists, patriots and anarchists, hippies and goths, you
\nand me. Those who champion the ideology of materialism can be the most
\nfanatical fundamentalists of all. And the journalists, filmmakers,
\nnovelists, critics, poets, and other artists who relentlessly generate
\nrotten visions of the human condition are often pop nihilist
\nfundamentalists.<\/p>\n
Every fundamentalist divides the world into two camps, those who agree
\nwith him and like him and help him, and those who don\u2019t. There is only
\none right way to interpret the world\u2014according to the ideas the
\nfundamentalist believes to be true\u2014and a million wrong ways.<\/p>\n
The fundamental attitude of all fundamentalists is to take everything
\nway too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. The
\nuntrammeled imagination is taboo. Correct belief is the only virtue.
\nEvery fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination
\nunless the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system.<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s the bad news: Like almost everyone in the world, each of us
\nhas our own share of the fundamentalist virus. It may not be as
\nvirulent and dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the
\nfundamentalism of Islamic terrorists or right-wing Christian
\npoliticians or CEOs who act as if making a financial profit is the
\nsupreme good or scientists who deny the existence of the large part of
\nreality that\u2019s imperceptible to the five senses.<\/p>\n
But still: We are infected, you and I, with fundamentalism. What are we going to do about it?<\/p>\n
I say we practice taking everything less seriously and less personally
\nand less literally. I suggest we administer plentiful doses of healing
\nmischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence,
\nholy pranks, and crazy wisdom.<\/p>\n
\n*
\n“Welcome Home” is an excerpt from PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia:
\nHow the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings, which
\nis available on the Web at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Powells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let me remind you who you really are: You\u2019re an immortal freedom fighter in service to divine love. You have temporarily taken on the form of a human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins, in order to liberate all sentient creatures from suffering and help them claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}