Rob Brezsny saved a part of my heart and soul through his brilliant prose, facts, figures, reminders and promises that spill forth in his book published in 2005,

PRONOIA Is The Antidote For Paranoia, How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Bessings.

Birthed in part during Burning Man that year, Brezsny believes in the power of truth and beauty - things that were slowing waning from my view of the world. I devoured this book - a journey of insights, realizations, exercises and experiments. I was so busy absorbing lightness and wisdom that I forgot to give up. In fact, I carry with me one of his most enlightening truths: “DESPAIR IS LAZY.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain’t easy to carry out our mission. We’ve got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers.

We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.

That’s especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame.”

Tags: activism, culture, health, history

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Green Misc., Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.