“How can you not be optimistic? I mean, that's the purpose of life itself.”
— Wade Davis, anthropologist
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Paranoia you might well know – the suspicion that the world is against you; that life is happening to you.
It can be easy to feel this way, given the unexpected and unwelcome that gets chucked at us every day.
But why not consider pronoia as an option?
Pronoia?
Why, it’s the suspicion that the world is out to help you; that life is happening for you …
I mean, why not?
We don’t have a lot of control over the events of the world, but we do definitely control how we see it.
Delusional thinking?
Maybe, but consider this:
We are constantly deciding our reality – we define it – through our assumptions and choices, attitudes and expectations.
These are the filters or windows that result in our experience of life.
Change the window you look through, and you change what you see.
Now, there is no neutral.
It’s on the spectrum from full-blown paranoia to lovely pronoia. We're leaning to either one or the other. With the average human with an untrained mind, there is no neutral observer.
It’s why a practice of gratitude is so powerful – you’re consciously choosing to celebrate what is good, beautiful and right rather than focus on what is wrong, broken and missing.
What you focus on, grows.
Some people think this is an excuse for a lack of action.
That by embracing pronoia and gratitude and an attitude of Good, that you’re living in a pollyannaish dream world, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring reality.
But –
a). It’s not about lack of action – do this and you’ll find Good is a foundation of action that is free from fear and anxiety.
and,
b). If you give it a try, you’ll quickly find that the world responds to your attitude to it.
It really does.
I have no idea how that works, but the world responds to you in subtle and dramatic ways.
This might be a little wild, but here goes anyways –
MSI (my Ishaya teacher’s teacher) once said that,
“The world is made of magic, not rocks”.
Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna also wrote,
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“Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.
This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood … This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”
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Alrighty – now, I’m not asking you to believe anything. Just give it a shot.
The main thing is "What if?". What if these optimists are onto something, something good?
And,
What have you got to lose anyways, but a pessimistic, limited and limiting point of view?
Give it a shot.
Go well,
Arjuna
PS.
Do let me know how I can help – questions, queries, whatever.
Want more peace, calm, clear thinking? To stop over-thinking and reacting? To be a better version of you? Whatever …
Reply, or here’s the link to my Facebook Messenger: m.me/mrarjunaishaya