I kind of love Rob Brezsny’s horoscopes. They are a weekly wakeup call… a few lines of text that grab me by the nape and throw out into the real world, to come to my senses.
Here is what he writes about it:
Many of us are essentially asleep, even as we walk around in broad daylight. We’re so focused on the restless narratives and repetitive fantasies unfurling in our heads that we only dimly perceive the larger story raging in all of its chaotic beauty around us.
To have any hope of permanently breaking out of our fuzzy trance, we require regular shocks. A single jolt might cause us to briefly come to attention and see the miracle of creation for what it is, but once the red alert has passed, we relax back into our fixation on the dreamy tales our mind never stops telling us.
In the course of its conspiracy to shower us with blessings, life does its best to provide us with a steady flow of healing shocks. But because it tends to err on the side of tenderness, its prods may be too gentle, allowing us to ignore them. Gradually, life will up the ante, trying to find the right mix of toughness and love, as it encourages us to WAKE UP!
But our addiction to the phantasmagoria is tenacious. The stream-of-conscious narratives and ever-bubbling fantasies, even when they’re racked with torment and terror, are perversely entertaining. And so we may avoid responding to the kind shocks for so long that life finally has to resort to stronger medicine. Then we might get sick or lose our job or muck up our closest relationship.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We could cultivate in ourselves a sixth sense for the wake-up calls life sends us. We might develop a knack for responding with agile grace to the early, gentler ones so that we wouldn’t have to be visited by the more stringent measures.
There’s also another possibility: With hungry intent, we could seek out and hunt down invigorating jolts. We wouldn’t wait to have our asses kicked, but would kick our own asses — over and over again, with a creative ingenuity.
Who knows? We might even master the art of inducing shocks that feel really good. 1
Rob Brezsny lives in Plato’s Cave 93% of the time. Obviously life doesn’t happen in the cave. And all I am trying to do is shock you, jolt you, rouse your aliveness… But, as you can see, the powers that put you back to sleep are more powerful than whatever I am doing.
My articles, my coaching program, the 67 steps audios all serve the purpose to wake you up.
And of course the sleep wins you back every time we talk. You are awake for a few minutes and go back to sleep. And I want to kill myself. Again and again.
Because I am alone out in the world… No one to play with. A desert planet. No intelligent life.
You are not here… you are somewhere in dreamland.
I can see that the movie Vanilla Sky is all about this sleep and your choice to wake up or not.
When I first saw the movie, after it came out on DVD, I watched it many times.
Where I was at, my consciousness, at the time, I didn’t, I could not comprehend. I didn’t know I lived in a dream… it didn’t look like a dream.
My vibration was 100… that is the “living in the basement” level of consciousness… Now it is clear why it was such a difficult to understand movie.
The ending of Vanilla Sky is actually pretty straightforward. Everything that Tech Support says is true. Tom Cruise is having a lucid dream. He did kill himself, sort of. … He does have a choice of waking up or continuing the dream.
Since then I have awakened. But awakening is gradual, awakening is painful… as it was for him, Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky.
You can’t die in your dream, and you cannot really sleep in your dream.
You can only sleep, and sleep well, if you are awake when you are awake.
The fuzzy trance is calling me back, and it takes all I’ve got to kick my own behind to stay awake.
I am an alien on a beautiful planet where sleep drought is in every breath.
- I hate Rob Brezsny’s soothing voice, I hate his soothing Pronoia… Whispering to wake up someone is inauthentic. Whispering puts them in deeper sleep.
Here are his Starting Point Measurements:
1. your vibration (1-1000): 160
2. your overall intelligence, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, body, relationship, etc.: 100
3. the number of spiritual capacities you have: 10
8. your relationship to feedback and instruction: The Precious I is on high alert
9. The level of discomfort you are willing to allow w/o trying to fix it. This is your TLB score… 1
10. The size of your vocabulary: the number of words you can use accurately: 1000
11. To what degree you think of yourself: 20%
12. # of fixed mindset: 7%
13. Ambition: 50%
14. Desire: 10%
15. Degree of inauthenticity overall: 70%
16. Level of integrity 1-100: 7%
17. how enslaved are you to memes? (what percentage of your life is run by memes?) 70%
18. Do you have a bridge between your precious I and your actual I? What is your level of delusion 60%
19. To what degree you have access to your adult capacities 7% (we could call this the awakeness score)
20. How teachable/how coachable are you? 7%
21. The level of your awareness? 7%
