◆ Dedication
▪ Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” – Frank Zappa
◆ Introduction
▪ Literalism is idolatry
▪ We have idolized the scientific method and the rational process to such a degree that anything trying to speak to us from the irrational or the symbolic is easy to ignore.
▪ Weird people are not crazy, hunched-over outcasts who must survive by picking through trash to find crusts of bread discarded by normal people. In fact, we are an honorable tribe with deep, ancient roots, and our time on earth has come.
▪ In this new renaissance, the highest-value currency is not money or faster machines; it is the ability to see and see and keep seeing the world through different eyes—and then do something with the unique way you see it
▪ People who fill the space of their lives with their own creations tend to live longer, have more sex, and actually improve life on this planet
▪ When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
▪ Beatitudes for the Weird Blessed are the weird people —poets, misfits, writers, mystics heretics, painters & troubadours— for they teach us to see the world through different eyes Blessed are those who embrace the intensity of life’s pain and pleasure, for they shall be rewarded with uncommon ecstasy. Blessed are ye who see beauty in ugliness, for you shall transform our vision of how the world might be. Blessed are the bold and whimsical, for their imagination shatters ancient boundaries of fear for us all. Blessed are ye who are mocked for unbridled expression of love in all its forms, because your kind of crazy is exactly that freedom for which the world is unconsciously begging. Blessed are those who have endured breaking by life, for they are the resplendent cracks through which the light shines
◆ Chapter One - Listen to Your Heart
▪ savoir-faire
▪ gift of not fitting in
▪ We learn to hide and lie about our true selves because what felt like treasure turned out to be dangerous or of little value
▪ we quickly learn that being curious and sensitive are not rewarded by the teachers or our peers
▪ we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible.
▪ world is still new and undefined?
▪ The creative adult is the child who has survived
▪ These weird people led insurrections against the forces of stupidity and petrification.
▪ kept the human spirit alive during the darkest ages
▪ Yggdrasil
▪ They were portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, as in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
▪ The Invitation
▪ All dreamers and poets are pirates navigating by the stars, raiding the private places of inner worlds for the gold hidden there
▪ we are in a world that says, “Just pick something and do it.”
◆ Chapter Two - The Poets
▪ Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” — Mary Oliver
▪ My king, something has been created that no one has created before
▪ we stopped paying poets to teach us in this way.
▪ poets were often called upon to conceal the literal truths they were trying to share under layers of soft language
▪ Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.
▪ Poets tell us truths that the authorities of the day have not caught up with yet.
▪ And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom
▪ am a hole in the flute through which the Christ’s breath moves. Listen to this music.
▪ Poetry is a break for freedom
◆ Chapter Three - The Misfits
▪ Jesters were not just happy idiots prancing about for the amusement of royal courts. They were given nearly complete immunity to say whatever they needed to, even if it would have been a hanging or beheading offense coming from anyone else.
▪ This is where we are right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart
▪ they hold up a mirror so society can see its own absurd and often ugly reflection
▪ inconvenient people to have around
▪ “Behold the field in which I grow my fucks and see that it is barren
▪ Weird people are especially susceptible to feeling alone in the world
▪ We were imprinted from earliest memory with the sense of not belonging
◆ Chapter Four - The Writers
▪ Without people who are willing to follow imagination beyond the edge of what is currently possible, we can’t move forward
▪ You must be prepared to work always without applause
◆ Chapter Five - The Mystics
▪ “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” – Rumi
▪ little use for the way most people see the world
▪ Mystics have a simplicity about their vision that is almost too pure for this world
▪ Meister Eckhart wrote, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”
▪ When we reach beyond the realm of common reason, we connect with the vast energetic matrix of information
▪ Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery, you have health; when you destroy mystery, you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.”
◆ Chapter Six - The Heretics
▪ True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
▪ Many of the great truths were blasphemy first
▪ Most of us live in places where we won’t get tortured for going against the grain
▪ probably the worst thing that will happen to us is that we get criticized
▪ The powers that be in these days don’t often need to kill the messenger. They only need to buy them, then co-opt and dilute their message.
▪ The keen edge of many a heretic’s sword is blunted with cash and popularity
◆ Chapter Seven - The Painters
▪ Art is alchemy
▪ Tomasz Alen Kopera,
◆ Chapter Eight - The Troubadours
▪ It is not easy to be a servant of Hermes and the Muses and still maintain a human form
▪ like
◆ Chapter Eleven - This Is Personal
▪ “An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.” – Seth Godin
▪ Surrounded by so much luxury, almost no one knows how to luxuriate
▪ starving to death at a banquet
▪ Art is about intent and communication, not substances
▪ The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.
◆ Chapter Twelve - It’s Not Optional
▪ “We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” — Joseph Campbell
▪ If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
▪ Listen to the call of your authentic self; that part of you that lives just outside of your own skin
▪ What one can be, one must be
▪ culture that values the worth of something by how popular it becomes, how much money it generates, or how famous its creator is.
▪ Hunter S. Thompson wrote a prescription for the antidote: “As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing,’ I will be a writer.”
▪ noblesse oblige
▪ nobility obliges
◆ Chapter Thirteen - Making Potential Real
▪ “Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. “ ― Buckminster Fuller
▪ The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
▪ The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
▪ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and true renaissance man (and a heretic whose books were censored by the Catholic Church). He wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
◆ Chapter Fourteen - The Call of Soul
▪ Unless you become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven
▪ Dare to dream again. For dreaming is the language of your soul, And nothing your soul truly desires Could ever be wrong or impossible
▪ , Janet Conner, is the author of the bestselling book Writing Down Your Soul .
▪ Janet says that the soul wants five things— To Connect To Commit To Serve To Express To Create
◆ Chapter Sixteen - What If I Fail?
▪ The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek
▪ “At any given moment, you have the power to say, ‘This is not how the story is going to end.’”
▪ optimism is a by-product of creating
◆ Chapter Seventeen - Rebel Magicians
▪ The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
▪ It takes a certain rebelliousness to stop doing what everyone else is in favor of what works for us
▪ Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing
◆ Chapter Eighteen - Raw and Sexy
▪ A person with great creative energy is likely to have above average sexual energy too
▪ Many artists have suffered persecution or, at the very least, tremendous misunderstanding for their sexual expressions
▪ Many Weird People have struggled with a world that judges them harshly for stepping outside the sexual lines drawn by society.
▪ Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot
◆ Chapter Nineteen - Leading the New Renaissance
▪ The world is crying out for grounded mystics and earthly new mythmakers right now. We have mostly emptied our basket of the old, but yearn for real magic to guide us into a different paradigm.”
▪ A man’s character is always his destiny
▪ Isolation is the gift.