story about Brezsny:
Berkeley: 'Pronoia' invites surrender to the unfathomable
- Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, October 7, 2005
Rob Brezsny says the apocalypse is now, so let's dance.
"We are in fact living through the apocalypse," the San Anselmo astrology columnist-author-musician declares in his radically optimistic self-help bible, "Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings," (North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd., Berkeley, 296 pages, $19), a surprise top-1,000 seller on Amazon.com.
The book rotates, something like a Tibetan prayer wheel, around the idea that love underpins being and that it's ours if only we have the courage to take it. If we don't go to this original and endless source, then we inherit the classical hell-on-earth of depression, decay and destruction.
Around and around his theme the verbally acrobatic, mystically literate Brezsny lets fly a thousand zingers, each with the feel of having been carved with some poetic effort to express a hard reality instead of a platitude.
Love is Brezsny's prescription. Love smarter, love till it hurts. Up the ante on love. Take chances to express it through intimacy, dialogue and work. Express it sexually, intellectually, artistically, meditatively, socially.
"Again and again over the years," Brezsny writes, "you're pushed to a brink that challenges you to either rise to the occasion or else surrender to demoralizing chaos. The crises may come in the form of divorce or illness or job loss, or even in less dramatic events like a misunderstanding with a friend or the inexplicable waning of a once-passionate dream.
"Seeded inside each of these personal turning points is the crux of the evolving global apocalypse: You get to choose whether you'll adjust by taking a path that keeps you aligned with the values of the dying world or else a path that helps you resonate with what's being born.
"In effect, you get to vote, with your entire life," he writes, "for which aspect of the apocalypse you want to predominate."
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