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Broken Crackers

Rackstraw's Reply To Demo

Music From The Uneven Years V2

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Bravo 
Viva 
Aloha
Blessed be
We are free
Abracadabra


This is a perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I have been roused to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of us -- even those of us who don’t believe in the power of prayer.

And so I'm starting to pray right now to the God of Gods . . . to the God beyond all Gods . . . to the Girlfriend of God . . . the Teacher of God . . . the Goddess who invented God.

DEAR GODDESS, you who always answer our very best questions, even if we ignore you:

Please be here with us right now. Come inside us with your sly slippery slaphappy mojo. Invade us with your silky succulent salty sweet haha. 

Hear with our ears, Goddess. Breathe with our lungs. See through our eyes.


DEAR GODDESS, you who never kill but only change:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who hears this prayer.

I pray that you will give us what we don’t even know we need—not just the boons we think we want but everything we’ve always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.


DEAR GODDESS, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:

Use your brash magic to help us see that we are completely different from what we have been led to believe and more exciting than we can possibly imagine.

Help us to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.

Teach us to know the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating self-control.

Awaken in us the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.

And arouse the Wild Woman within us -- even if we’re men.


O GODDESS, you who give 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 bad ideas and dumb decisions that have cursed all of us wise and sexy virtuosos.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that clings to us, no matter how long we have suffered from it, and even if we are addicted to its ugly companionship.

Conjure an aura of protection around us so we get an early warning if we're ever at risk of bringing another curse into our lives in the future.


DEAR GODDESS, you universal virus with no opinion

Give us bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

Help us learn the difference between stupid suffering and smart suffering

Provoke us to give away all the things we own that encourage us to believe we are better than anyone else.

Brainwash us with your compassion so that we never love our own freedom more than anyone else's freedom.

Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for us to be in love with anyone who is no good for us.


DEAR GODDESS, you psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains

Give us license to bend or even break all rules, laws, and traditions that alienate us from the riotously tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling of your presence in our soft warm animal bodies.

Show us how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract us from our daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach us that we can have anything we want 
if we will just ask for it in an unselfish way


DEAR GODDESS, you riotously tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now flowing through all of our soft warm animal bodies.

Help us to be just like you -- extravagantly disciplined, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, paradoxically truthful, and ferociously tender

Amen 
om 
hallelujah
Shalom 
Namaste 
more power to you

Bravo 
Viva 
Aloha
Blessed be
We are free
Abracadabra


+

The lyrics for "Prayer for Us" are drawn from page 178 of my book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pronoia-Antidote-Paranoia-Revised-Expanded/dp/1556438184/ref=ed_oe_p">PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia</a>. 

+

Composer, producer, vocals: Rob Brezsny
Sung vocals: <a href="http://jessicarice.net/">Jessica Rice</a>
Guitar, bass, production assistance: <a href="http://www.joshbrill.com/">Josh Brill</a>

Prayer for Us

Although we are all born geniuses, the grind of day-to-day living tends to de-genius us. That's the bad news. The good news is that you have the power to re-genius yourself.

I'm going to give you a ritual you can use to jump-start the process.


The Greek philosopher Plato long ago recognized that in addition to eating, drinking, sleeping, breathing, and loving, every creature has an instinctual need to periodically leap up into the air for no other reason than because it feels so good.

 Please face south, leap up in the air, and say these words: "From the south, I purify, electrify, beautify, and fructify this sacred space."

+

When I was a kid I used to love to go out in the middle of a meadow and whirl around in spirals until I got so dizzy I fell down. As I lay on the ground, the earth and sky and sun kept reeling madly, and I was no longer just a pinpoint of awareness lodged inside my body, but rather I was an ecstatically undulating swirl in the kaleidoscopic web of life. I invite you to feel that way right now.

 Spin yourself around until you topple over. And while lying on the ground, face west and say these words: "From the west, I sanctify, unify, clarify, and intensify this sacred space."

+

The people I trust the most are those who are always tenderly wrestling and negotiating with their own shadows, making preemptive strikes on their personal share of the world's evil, fighting the good fight to keep from spewing their darkness on those around them. I aspire to be like that, which is why I regularly kick my own ass. Will you try that right now wherever you are?

 Jump off the ground and snap your heels up against your butt. Then face north and say these words: "From the north, I immunize, psychoanalyze, satirize, and exorcise this sacred space."

+

In one sense each of us is an intriguing, intricately unique individual, justifiably proud of and in love with our own personal story. In another sense, we are all one body, descended from the same primordial mother and made of identical stuff -- the calcium in all of our bones and the iron in all of our blood originally forged in a red giant star that died billions of years ago.

 Rotating slowly in a clockwise direction, look down at your belly as you imagine that at this moment, everyone in the world is breathing along with you. Then face east and say this: "From the east, I lubricate, pollinate, consecrate, and emancipate this sacred space."


Now it's time to confess the truth about who you really are.

 Gaze upward and stretch your arms out high. Say the following: "I am a genius."

 And say this: "I am a lucky, plucky genius."

 And say this: "I am a lucky, plucky, good-sucking genius."


Thank you for finally confessing the truth. It's about time you admitted that you are a miraculous work of art.

You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises.

I'm not pandering to your egotism by telling you these things. When I say, "Be yourself," I don't mean you should be the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and stand alone at the end of time on top of a Mt. Everest-sized pile of pretty garbage.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the self that says "Thank you!" to the wild irises and the windy rain and the people who grow your food.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the rebel creator who's longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the dissident bodhisattva who's joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the spiritual freedom fighter who's scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve your fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with rowdy blessings.


Now let's move on to the next stage of your confession.

 Squat. While patting and massaging the ground or floor in front of you, say this: "I am insane."

 And say this: "I am an insane hurricane."

 And say this: "I am a highly trained, entertainingly insane hurricane."


Thank you for finally confessing the truth, which is that you are constitutionally incapable of adapting nicely to the sour and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." You are too amazingly, blazingly insane for that.

You are too crazy smart to lust after the stupidest secrets of the game of life. You're too seriously delirious to wander sobbing through the sterile, perfumed labyrinth looking in vain for the most ultra-perfect mirror. Thank the Goddess that you are a fiercely tender throb of sublimely berserk abracadabra.

You will never get crammed in a neat little niche in the middle of the road at the end of a nightmare.

You refuse to allow your soul's bones to get ground down into dust and used to fertilize the killing fields that proudly dot the ice cream empire of monumentally demeaning luxuries.

You're too brilliantly cracked for that.

You're too ingeniously whacked.

You're too ineffably godsmacked.


 Now stand up and make a series of small jumps, rotating a quarter turn in a clockwise direction with each jump. And as you do, say this: "I am a lucky, plucky, good-sucking genius and a highly trained, entertainingly insane hurricane."

+

This is a piece from the soundtrack for my book, 
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pronoia-Antidote-Paranoia-Revised-Expanded/dp/1556438184/ref=ed_oe_p">PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia</a>.

Re-GeniusYourself

Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy that's guaranteed to keep you well supplied with blessings.

What kind of blessings? Ten million dollars, a gorgeous physique, a perfect marriage, a luxurious home, and high status?

Maybe. But it's just as likely that the blessings will be interesting surprises, dizzying adventures, gifts you hardly know what to do with, and conundrums that dare you to get smarter.

Novelist William Vollman referred to these types of blessings when he said that "the most important and enjoyable thing in life is grappling with a complicated, tricky problem that you don't know how to solve."

Sculptor Henry Moore had a similar idea. He said, "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do."

So in other words, pronoia does not guarantee that you will forevermore be free of all difficult experiences.

It doesn't ask you to pretend that everything is sweet and harmonious all the time.

On the contrary, when you embody the spirit of pronoia, you build your optimism by loving your challenges, not repressing them.

You know that your problems are gifts from the Goddess that are designed to make you smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

You welcome each fresh puzzle as a potential source of your future bliss, as an exciting teaching that will usher you to your next breakthrough.

Now here's a spell to commit pronoia. I invite you to say it with me.

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;

Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within me;

Opening to my loss and pain and ignorance,
I remember who I am and what I'm here for.

Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me

and becomes itself transformed
into the blessing it always was.

+

"Shadow Blessings" is from the soundtrack for my book 
"Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings," which is available here:
http://bit.ly/Pronoia
http://bit.ly/PronoiaPowells


Shadow Blessings

Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don't fully understand, you're still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you've been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that's just right for your body's needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect. 

The interesting gift of these vivid hues is furthermore made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.

Your hands work wonderfully well. Your heart circulates your blood all the way out to replenish the energy of the muscles and nerves in your fingers and palms and wrists. And after your blood has delivered its blessings, it finds its way back to your heart to be refreshed. This wondrous mystery recurs over and over again without stopping every minute of your life.

You can smell intoxicating aromas. You can hear provocative and soothing sounds. You can taste a thousand different tastes. How is any of this possible? You can think thoughts any time you want -- big, wide, colorful thoughts or tiny dark burrowing thoughts. You can revel and wallow in great oceans of emotion. What colossal secret intelligence or improbable series of fabulous accidents conspired to bestow these superpowers upon you? 

Language is another stupendous marvel. Millions of souls have cooperated intricately for untold centuries to cultivate a system of communication that you understand very well. Your ability to speak and read and write makes you feel strong and dynamic. It connects you with the world. It allows you to indulge in one of your greatest pleasures, which is to hear and tell stories.

Maybe this is the best gift of all: You have a staggeringly potent creative tool: your imagination. You use it to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is the engine of your destiny, the catalyst with which you design your future. 

Or maybe this is the best gift of all: You know that you are you. You are exultantly and extravagantly aware that you are alive and conscious and awake and unique. You have a million different feelings and fantasies about what it means to be you.

Do you remember when you were born? It was a difficult miracle that involved many people who worked very hard on your behalf. No less amazing is the fact that you have continued to grow ever since then, with new cells being born within you all the time to replace the old cells that are dying. 

At this very moment, there are 50 trillion cells in your body, and each of them is really a sentient being in its own right. They all act together as a community, blessing you with their astonishing collaboration. It's just like magic.

Everywhere you look: glory

Every step you take: glory

Every breath you take: glory glory

Soaring roaring uproarious glory 
is our story

This succulent burst of glory has been brought to you by the imaginary lightning bolts you can shoot out the ends of your fingers any time you want to.


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"Glory in the Highest" uses material from a much longer piece called "Glory in the Highest" in the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pronoia-Antidote-Paranoia-Revised-Expanded/dp/1556438184/ref=ed_oe_p">PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia</a>. The longer piece can be found online in three parts: 

<a href="http://bit.ly/GloryPart1">Part 1</a>
<a href="http://bit.ly/GloryPart2">Part 2</a>
<a href="http://bit.ly/GloryPart3">Part 3</a>

Glory in the Highest

This piece is inspired by Diana's Baths which is a series of waterfalls and cascades in New Hampshire. A favorite hiking destination.

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Mark Sirdevan

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