Divine Warriors and Villains (Pronoia Pt. 3)
Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, ca. 1525–50.
Molly Hankins July 17, 2025
We all have different roles to play in the great human drama advancing the plot of our evolution. A pronoia-informed perspective invites us to consider the possibility that characters we fear or dislike might be playing critical parts in our stories. Pronoia author Rob Breszney’s worldview is that of a benevolent, conscious universe, one conspiring to facilitate evolutionary opportunities for our highest good and sometimes greatest delight. Those we perceive as enemies are often our greatest teachers and Breszney believes we owe them a debt of gratitude for “sharpening our wits and and sculpting our souls.” How could the universal conspiracy to give us exactly what our souls need operate without the plot twists facilitated by seemingly bad actors?
Breszney writes, “Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes to elaborate.” By offering gratitude to those characters, we can neutralize our innate, egoic reaction to them and instead grease the wheels of evolution by welcoming their teachings. Kabbalah recommends responding to any stimulus that elicits a negative reaction by consciously pausing, followed by saying, “What a gift!” It can be said out loud or simply to yourself, but it’s an essential part of rewiring our perspective away from paranoia and towards pronoia. With practice it becomes muscle memory, and a means of washing our own brains to default to pronoia.
Those souls willing to play the villain are actually doing a great service,sacrificing their ego to play the part. By asking ourselves why someone is in our life story and what archetype they’re playing, we zoom out from the minutia of human drama and start to see such patterns as part of a greater cycle of life. Perhaps this moment of disidentification is all we need to be able to move with, “...the shifting conditions of the Wild Divine’s ever-fresh creation,” instead of fighting the flow. Practicing pronoia simply means training our perception to perceive life as giving us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. To perceive our enemies as old, soul friends playing a tough part in our story is to both neutralize the emotional effect they have on us and to send them love.
Without villains, how can the hero become the warrior?? Breszney recommends always thanking our adversaries for the crucial roles they’ve played in our lives and believes we owe extra gratitude to those we feel have slowed us down. By causing blockage or delay in our journey these people are actually preventing things from happening too fast, which is often impossible to perceive as it’s happening. “Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: it needs to reach its full term,” he wrote. Life has its own timing and when we sync up with it we can feel it. This is the flow-state, and it’s often punctuated by an uptick in synchronicities and what the untrained eye might call coincidences.
Cultivating flow and authentic presence is a feature of the warrior archetype, which according to Tibetan texts, has four features of dignity.
Relaxed confidence (often mistranslated as “meekness”)
Relentless joy (perkiness)
Outrageousness (which can help us overcome both fear and hope)
Inscrutability (inability to be pinned down by a label that would only limit the warrior)
Many of us may play the villain in the story of another without meaning to or even realizing it, a reminder that our souls play every part, often in the same lifetime. By consciously cultivating the above features of dignity through focused attention, we wash our brains to act more in the interest of our higher, heroic warrior nature. Even if we’re playing the villain and stooping to our lower, animal nature in the process. however, we can still live in what Breszney calls “alignment with the infinity of the moment.” To be aligned with the infinity of the moment is to revel in pronoia as a practice.
He writes, “Even if some of us are temporarily in the midst of trial or tribulation, human evolution is proceeding exactly as it should, even if we can’t see the big picture of the puzzle that would clarify how all the pieces fit together perfectly.” Pronoia is not about absolute truth, which us humans don’t fully get to know anyway. It is about utility. Believing the universe is conspiring in our favor is useful because it’s empowering and accounts for the influence we have on reality just by perceiving it. As the book ends Breszney leaves readers with the assignment to imagine everything in the world belongs to us and take good care of it, the way we want others to.
“And make sure you also enjoy the level of fun that comes with such mastery,” he encourages us. “Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.”
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
