Read The Televisionary Oracle Online
Authors: Rob Brezsny
If so, congratulations and hallelujah!
But if you’re still a little short of mastery, the Televisionary Oracle is here to help. Whether you’re a tantric adept-in-the-making or a struggling neophyte just beginning to understand how important it is to involve your body in your spiritual quest, we’re happy to welcome you now to the Kundalini Pledge Drive.
The Kundalini Pledge Drive is nothing less than the Dress Rehearsal for the Big Event … the Warm-Up for the Ultimate Celebration …
the Ritual Foreplay for the End of History! Guaranteed to whip your erotic riches into a reverent frenzy in plenty of time for the coming of Twenty-Two Years of World Orgasm!
I’m your co-host with the Holy Ghost grin, Rapunzel Blavatsky, and I’m proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment because even though none of us knows the exact arrival time of Twenty-Two Decades of World Orgasm, and even though we have not yet fully guessed all of its shockingly intimate secrets, the seductive signs of readiness are mounting.
Have you seen them, beauty and truth fans? The omens and hints? Have you sniffed the pheromones of the Cackling Goddess as she invades us with her full-scale, pull-out-the-roots anamnesis, Her Reverse Armageddon of Pure Joy? Have you caught a glimpse of the coming Covenant of the Global Jiggy Snake? Do you know the sweet, moist fire of the Fuckissimus?
Let us know. We want to hear. Report the healing emergencies you’re witnessing … the spiral lightning juice you’re feeling on the inside of your endorphins … the rowdy ruby glissando you’re invoking as you die to the old way of dying.
Tell us every secret, beauty and truth fans. Amaze us. Reveal how many hours you’re making love without losing your concentration, how deeply you’re looking into your lover’s eyes until you see the birth of solar systems erupting therein, how fiercely and craftily you’re working to make your compassion and lust flow from the same primal reflex, how sincerely you’re doing everything in your power to love every creature, every plant, every rock in the world with the same primrose hurricane juju you bestow upon the slippery sacred soul who excites you most.
Use your imagination! Surprise us. Unveil the idiosyncratic trick you use to stoke the old spiritus frumenti, the amethyst dragon gumbo, the fiery doppelganger blubber. Our Grails are standing by, ready to register the signature of your diamond moonflower chrism and pearly chthonic thunder.
Reveal your own personal strategies: What magic do you invoke to lust globally and fuck locally?
Now I’m going to turn it over to the chronicler of the Televisionary Oracle, my colleague Osiris Rockstar. Osiris would like to present his own special perspective on killing the apocalypse.
I’m pleased to call attention to the fact, by the way, that his ideas both dovetail with and contradict my own. And that’s exactly the way we like it here at the Televisionary Oracle!
Osiris?
Thanks, Rapunzel, and hello everybody.
Excuse me a minute, please, while I shout.
WAR! FAMINE! PESTILENCE! EARTHQUAKES! CRIME! SCANDAL!
Those storytellers known as “journalists” love and thrive on the nihilistic vision of the world captured in screaming headlines like that. But they’re not the only fabulists to do so. A majority of the prophets down through the ages have been allergic to the possibility that the future might hold something besides endless tragedy.
The sixteenth century’s creepy horror-meister Nostradamus wasn’t the first, but he has been one of the most enduring. “In the year 1999 and seven months,” he bellowed back in 1555, “a king of terror will come from the sky.” Nope. Didn’t happen. Yet his mystique still infects the imaginations of millions.
Ghoulish modern soothsayers continue in the scare-the-crap-out-of-’em tradition. At last count, three hundred twenty-two notorious latter-day oracles foresee cataclysmic “earth changes” that will create beach-front property in Nebraska. There are innumerable other augurs who, though they agree that most of humanity will be wiped out any minute now, see the death blow coming via other means: lethal solar flares, nuclear war, incurable new diseases, global warming that leads to the melting of Antarctica and the inundation of coastal areas on every continent, or an evil artificial intelligence that achieves sentience on the Internet.
We shouldn’t neglect to mention the sentimental old favorite, the plagues of the seven angels as promised by the Bible’s Book of Revelations. Though conjured millennia ago, the vision is as fresh as a morning kiss for hundreds of thousands of fear-worshiping fundamentalists, who fantasize that it predicts the Lord will scour the Earth clean of
everyone but them.
So why are only the most terrifying omen-slingers so popular and prominent, even though their track record is so dismal?
First of all, the few optimistic prophets that have arisen are usually so boring that no one wants to bother listening to them. In the last five hundred years, Jules Verne is one of the rare exceptions.
Secondly, zoom-and-boom seers typically offer up far more hard-to-believe scenarios than their doom-and-gloom counterparts. Millions of angels will swarm into view of our naked eyes, they promise, for instance. The restrictions of gravity will be abolished. Time will no longer move in just one direction. And it will all happen in a twinkling.
The third reason the terror-mongers sell the most newspapers and captivate the most imaginations—and it hurts me to say this—is that our culture treats cynicism as a sign of intellectual vigor. It’s smart to look for the worst in everything!
What’s my view? I confess that I suffer from that peculiar variation on chauvinism which leads me to fantasize that the historical era I live in is more glamorously important than all the others. Secretly, and to my embarrassment, I harbor the hope that we are indeed approaching a radical turning point in the history of humanity. What fun, what glorious delirious dangerous fun, it will be if Twenty-Two Days of World Orgasm really does occur, unleashing a series of planet-mutating events that will rapidly expedite the end of history and the beginning of a shatteringly different future.
And yet, there is a part of me, a part of me that feels older and wiser, who suspects that even if we ARE in the midst of the Logos Calling Us Home or the Collective Upgrade to the Fourth Dimension, it just won’t be as simple and obvious as all that. The change will not be some overnight world-wide presto-chango like an asteroid plunging into the Earth or everyone instantaneously developing telepathic powers.
Happily, the jingoistic part of me that yearns to be alive when Everything Changes can find a common ground with the cool eternal part of me that regards the all-or-nothing mindset as the peculiar signature of patriarchy’s death throes. Together these two aspects of my psyche conclude: We are living through the apocalypse and the resurrection
right now. The corruption and redemption are happening and will continue to happen side by side. The collapse and the renewal. The grievous losses and the unpredictable awakenings. There will be no clean break.
But more than that. We are each living through the apocalypse and the resurrection in our own little personal way. The radical turning point, the death of the old order and bloom of the new, is framed in the storylines of our most intimate dramas. You are being pushed up to and over the brink that is most challenging and meaningful to you personally, and I to mine.
A Cosmic Crucifixion may indeed come—maybe even Twenty-Two Weeks of World Orgasm, who knows?—bringing a global brouhaha that whips up media hysteria to psychotic levels. But what’s more likely is that you will be invited and divinely assisted to mercy-kill your life’s most oppressive structures—thus clearing out an empty space for an as-yet unimaginable new groove in the shockingly beautiful future.
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.