The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  So will your own experience of the apocalypse and resurrection be excruciating or liberating—or both? It’s up to you, beauty and truth fans. I truly believe that the Goddess (or whatever passes for the Goddess in your world view) will conspire to corrode, dismantle, or blow up anything that’s getting in the way of you expressing your soul’s code—the blueprint you came to Earth to embody. Will you cooperate or not?

  My own personal soul’s code, by the way, compels me to ask whether our expectations actually help create the future. What if there is even a grain of truth in the notion that what we think will happen tends to come to pass? No need to get fanatic and literal about the idea; just imagine it has some credibility.

  By this hypothesis, it is both insane and stupid to revel in visions of doom to the exclusion of other scenarios. And it is just as dumb and crazy to be entertained by bad news and to yawn in the face of good news.

  One of my favorite games here at the Televisionary Oracle is to pose and then answer the question, “How can we kill the apocalypse?” In other words, what leaps of the imagination and ingenious actions can we take to crush rampant pop-nihilism? What entertaining tricks can we employ to create an environment in which it is more fun and interesting to play with prophecies of boom and zoom instead of prophecies of doom and gloom? How can we reinvent ourselves so as to interpret the Goddess’ daily little deaths as a gift to outwit the huge, irrevocable annihilations?

  Here is one of my answers to the question: Cultivate a tradition of pronoiac prophecies. Pronoia, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings.

  I would like to get started on those prophecies immediately. Here’s my first batch for you, beauty and truth fans.

  • A rowdy new class of genetic engineers will arise. They’ll have little interest in creating oil spill-eating bacteria, frost-resistant strawberries, or other useful hybrids. Considering themselves to be a cross between computer hackers and performance artists, they’ll create fun monstrosities that appeal to their sense of play and perversity, like winged horses and trees that grow leaves resembling one-hundred-dollar bills.

  • The rise of the pantheosexual movement will present a new threat to sexual law and order. Describing heterosexuals, gays, and bisexuals as narrowminded, pantheosexuals will claim to have erotic feelings for everything from tornadoes to garden hoses to rose bushes to all twenty-two genders of human beings.

  • A new breed of well-read, charismatic homeless people will arise. They’ll spread understanding and laughter through their communities and will be routinely feasted in the homes of grateful Americans.

  • Nintendo will shock its target audience with the release of its “Codependent Bodhisattva” video game, the first-ever model with socially redeeming value. In it, kids must negotiate all eight levels of Buddhist enlightenment with a grinning, bespectacled, red-robed character who resembles the Dalai Lama.

  • Cities strapped for funds will create a 900-number option for the 911 emergency line. Wealthy users will pay one thousand dollars per minute for the privilege of having their calls answered first and fastest. Poorer users may get slower response, but at least the service will remain operational—thanks to the 900-number subsidies.

  • Supernatural apparitions of the Cackling Vulture Goddess will outnumber those of the bitchy Virgin Mary four to one. Furthermore, unlike the Virgin Mary’s, the Cackling Goddess’ chimeras will appear to people of all socio-economic classes, appearing on the hoods of lobbyists’ BMWs and the wine glasses of legitimate scientists, as well as on pizza billboards or oil slicks in parking lots.

  • Citing the growing threat from “entertainment criminals” who relentlessly create soul-shriveling films, TV shows, music, and magazines, Amnesty International will launch a campaign against a previously unacknowledged form of terrorism: the genocide of the imagination.

  • The national murder rate will plummet after a cable TV network begins to broadcast live childbirths twenty-four hours a day.

  • The average length of an act of heterosexual intercourse in America—which is currently only four minutes—will jump to eighteen minutes by the end of this year.

  • An organization calling itself Morality Is Trendy will launch a successful boycott of all products that advertise on TV shows that refuse to depict in a favorable light the following: talking hummingbirds, green eggs and ham, senior citizens playing water polo, and healthy people with multiple personalities.

  • Stunning new trends will include gay children, holistic crack, and computers that can talk to the Goddess. Also look for digitally remastered CDs of the Big Bang, prestigious vacations in refugee camps, and an aphrodisiac that stimulates compassion even more than sexual passion.

  • A mass ecstatic frenzy will infect more than twenty thousand housewives in Iowa next summer. Much like the maenads of ancient Greece, they’ll renounce their volunteer slavery and take to the woods and hills for an orgy of singing, dancing, and dramatic readings of Women Who Love Too Much.

  • Shamanic scientists at Drivetime University will reveal the process by which the pineal gland in the human brain can be turned into the “Televisionary Oracle.” They’ll describe the Televisionary Oracle as a kind of naturally occurring “television” that serves as a switching station for one’s “Holy Guardian Angel.”

  • The recovered memories movement will take a bizarre turn when many adults begin to recall under hypnosis long-suppressed memories of joy and peace experienced when they were children.

  • Biologists at the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will furnish conclusive evidence that men have “periods” analogous to a woman’s menstrual cycle. They seem to correspond to changes in the relationship between Earth and the planet Mars, the biologists will claim. At the peak of the male “marstral cycle,” which can last up to ten days every month, the adrenal glands release a hormone that makes men more likely to be irritable, more skilled at disguising their irrational impulses with logical explanations, out of touch with their feelings, and prone to violence and poor judgment. There’s also a vulnerable phase preceding the period, which the biologists will dub PMS, or Pathological Macho Stress. Fortunately, revolutionary new meditation techniques also developed by the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will offer hope in the struggle to reduce the social costs caused by this under-recognized natural problem.

  That is it for “Pronoiac Prophecies,” beauty and truth fans. Hope you enjoyed them. I would now like to turn things back over to the Head Shamanatrix herself, Rapunzel Blavatsky.

  Rapunzel?

  Thanks, Osiris, and hi again, beauty and truth fans. I’m very pleased to let you know that this is an incredibly perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer for all of you. I’ve been roused by your gorgeous vibes to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every creature who can hear me—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.…

  O Dear Goddess, Who Never Kills But Only Changes:

  I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on all the beauty and truth fans who hear this prayer.

  I pray that you will give them what they don’t even know they want. Not just the boons they think they need, 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. Please use your blinding magic to help them see that they are all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own bodies.

  Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what they think
they are 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.

  Oh dear Goddess, Who Gives 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 black magic that has ever been cast on all the wise and sexy geniuses 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.

  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 or voodoo into their lives.

  Dear Goddess, You Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion:

  I pray that you will help all the personal growth addicts within the sound of my voice to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation not destruction.

  I pray that you will 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.

  And please, dear Goddess, give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

  Oh Goddess, You Pregnant Slut Who Scorns All Mediocre Longing:

  I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate fuckers out there to love their enemies just in case their friends turn out to be jerks.

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

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

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

  Dear Goddess, You Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud at the Center of All Our Brains:

  These curiously divine human beings I am communing with deserve everything they are yearning for and much much more.

  Please arrange for a statue to be built in their honor, or a memento of their genius to be launched into orbit around the Earth, or a flurry of gossip to be spun out by smart people who adore them.

  Help them win the battle against time, and learn to talk the language of the most scientific angels, and master the zen of temper tantrums, and get a fabulous mommy and daddy in their next incarnation.

  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.

  And please give them lots of gifts, dear Goddess. More gifts than they think they deserve. Bless them with lucid dreams while they are wide awake and solar-energy-operated 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 secret admirer that is not a psychotic stalker and a thousand different masks that all fit their face perfectly and their very own 900 number so that everyone has to pay to talk to them.

  Oh Goddess, You Fiercely Tender, Hauntingly Reassuring, Orgiastically Sacred Feeling That Is Even Now Running Through All Our Soft Warm Animal Bodies:

  I pray that you provide all the compassionate fuckers 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 tone of voice.

  And now dear God of God, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God,

  I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that You have begun to change everyone in the exact way they’ve needed to change.

  And if I’ve forgotten anything that will help their cause, please flash it into my imagination in the coming days and months and decades, and motivate me to perform any tricks or carry out any project that will encourage an abundant flow of sweaty creativity to flow through them, inspiring them to become more wildly disciplined, compassionately horny, aggressively sensitive, ironically sincere, lyrically logical, insanely poised, and macho feminist.

  Amen. Awomen. And glory halle-fucking-lujah.

  There you have it, beauty and truth fans. A personalized prayer just for you. A prayer that’ll probably come true simply because you didn’t even ask for it.

  You may now kiss yourself on your own lips.

  Calling all wise fuckers

  Calling all love bombs

  skilled in the art

  of lusty compassion

  Calling all sexlaughers

  whose every burst of love

  recreates the divine joke

  that birthed the cosmos

  Prepare your gorgeous self

  for

  Twenty-Two Months of World Orgasm

  If we’ve got to annihilate the boundaries,

  let’s do it with eros, not thanatos

  LUST GLOBALLY, FUCK LOCALLY

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  Delirious waves of gratitude are pouring out from me towards my psychotherapist Jennifer Welwood, my daughter Zoe Brezsny, my friend Joseph Matheny, my teachers Paul Foster Case and Ann Davies, and my freaky crony and luck buddy Rapunzel Blavatsky. Their help and inspiration were crucial.

  Sincere yowls of thanks go to Shoshana Alexander, Richard Grossinger, and Chuck Stein for extremely useful feedback on the ripening text, as well as to Kathy Glass for stupendous copyediting.

  Booming thunderclaps of lusty reverence spiral out to the best deity in the universe—the funniest, smartest, and most lovable deity—the Great Goddess Herself.

  About the Author

  Rob Brezsny is an aspiring master of curiosity, perpetrator of sacred uproar, and founder of the Beauty and Truth Lab. He writes “Free Will Astrology,” a syndicated weekly column that reaches an audience of millions in over 100 publications and on his website, FreeWillAstrology.com.

  As much a storyteller as astrologer, Brezsny brings a literate, myth-savvy perspective to his work. When Utne Reader named him a “Culture Hero,” it summed up his role this way: “With a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on, Brezsny breathes new life into the tabloid mummy of zodiac advice columns.”

  Before The Televisionary Oracle, many of Brezsny’s artistic artifacts were music albums. He created one as a solo artist, one with the band Tao Chemical, and three with the “Jungian beatnik funk” band World Entertainment War. Among the latter was a major-label CD that was nominated for a “Bammie,” California’s version of the Grammies. It benefited from the promotional wizardry of rock’s top impresario, Bill Graham, who managed World Entertainment War until his death.

  Since the publication of The Televisionary Oracle, Truthrooster (as he is called when attending festivals) has also created the book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.