Pronoia Is The Antidote For Paranoia by Rob Brezsny (2005, Paperback)

I picked up this book a couple of months ago and I have not been able to put it down. Or perhaps more accurately I have not been able, nor have I desired, to resist the compulsion to pick it up and read its mental massage. Written By Rob Brezsny and his cohorts at the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, Pronoia has kicked the residual fat corporate devil voices out of my head and replaced them with the voices of Pan, songbirds, Jesus, Buddha and Yoda. Early in the book Rob explains how he and his friends came up with the idea for the Beauty and Truth Laboratory at the 2001 Burning Man gathering.

“Its name was immediately clear: Beauty and Truth Laboratory. It would be a tribe of hope fiends. A hotbed of loving geniuses. A gang of lunatic saints and emotional giants and crafty optimists. A think tank of sacred agents and scientific poets and dissident bodhisattvas and virtuosos bliss-invokers.”

While the book is ordered into 16 chapters one can quite comfortably bounce around from anecdote to poem to story to meditation and news report compilation. Under a recurring section throughout the book called the “Pronoia News Network” one will find analysis of reality such as this:
“Rapture Update
The World Health Organization reports that over 100 million acts of sexual intercourse, involving more than 200 million partners take place on the earth every 24 hours. According to the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, if even one out of every two of those communions is motivated by love, the planet is continuously awash with tender ecstasy.”

Other sections are labeled “Let’s go wash some water”, “Bin Laden’s Wife’s Bra”, “Crimes that don’t Break any Laws” and my current favorite “Love Bomb” in which Brezsny pontificates on the spiritual ramifications of the nuclear bomb.

“The bomb is a blind, a trick memory we’re sending ourselves from the future that shocks us better than all the abstract devils.”

I guess what appeals to me most about Pronoia is the way in which Brezsny uses a form of metaphysical Aikido to battle the forces of confusion so prevalent in modern media. Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings (2005) is published by Frog, Ltd. and Televisionary Publishing of San Rafael, California. Rob has also written the astrological column “Free Will Astrology” available in at least on free weekly paper in Seattle as well as the book “The Televisionary Oracle” which I have yet to read.