#Trickster definition how to

#Trickster definition how to

I had to confess to the class how to save five minutes, I had lost a day. The next class I began by recalling our discussion of hyper-control and its estranging effects in our live. After hours of frustration, having blown all those appointments, I finally had my keys returned by the “Lost and Found” department. To make this long story very short, I had left them in the classroom, a passing administrator picked them up and forgetfully carried them in his coat pocket the rest of the day. When I rushed to my car, en route to several patient appointments in a distant city, my keys were missing. That particular class, to save time, I carried my car keys in my pocket rather than return to the office to retrieve them. In a course on myth, we had been examining Buddhist perspectives on the relationship of the ego, with its various management scripts, to the autonomy of nature, noting how we are so often invested in micro-managing what we cannot control, and then being frustrated at reminders of our existential limitations. It is most autonomous, most likely disruptive to the expected order of things, when it operates unconsciously in our lives.Ī personal example of the trickster at work occurred to me, decades ago, when I was teaching at a university. If we can image it, we can then begin to establish some conscious relationship to it. We gain a provisional recognition of trickster energy when we personify it as coyote, fox, hare, imp, devil, Kokopelli, “Murphy’s Law,” and the like. We might say that the “trickster” is the personification of the absolute autonomy of nature. On the personal level, we all know about Die Schelm at work in our daily lives, the little devil that moves our keys from where we know we left them, which causes us to forget what we intended to remember, that disrupts the flow of daily life as we would have it. One such recurrent energy is what Jung called “the trickster” archetype. A specific kind of organizing energy or pattern may be called “archetypal” when it appears in multiple cultures, however differently disguised, appareled, or enacted.