The Power of Coincidence (10 page)

Spiritual choices are those in which we hearken to and say Yes to these messages. To say Yes is to let the Self take precedence over ego. The F.A.C.E. of ego changes: Fear becomes love. Attachment becomes letting go. Control becomes allowing and honoring others’ freedom. Entitlement becomes standing up for our rights without retaliation if they are not respected. These transformations make us unconditionally loving, wise, and a source of healing, the qualities of the Self.

Thus, a spiritual choice has two main characteristics. It expresses unconditional/universal love, perennial wisdom, and healing power, and it emanates from an unconditional
yes
to the conditions of existence. It includes an awareness of and a trust in the friendliness of psyche and matter. Since the transcendent has entered the temporal, consciousness is indivisible. Material events and tangible realities declare the conditions of cosmic consciousness.

A spiritual choice is one that honors inner rhythms that may not match conventional milestone choices: “There are waves by which a life is marked, a rounding off that has nothing to do with events,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her journal. Awareness of our personal spiritual messages helps us ride the waves rather than be drowned by them (overincorporate stimuli from outside) or run from them (underincorporate outside stimuli).
What in me has remained steadfastly meaningful through all the vicissitudes of my life? That is what has nurtured me.

How can one know which messages are from the inner Self and which are merely fictions of the ego? First, true messages feel so strong and real, they feel as if they could not be otherwise. One has a felt sense, an intuitive certainty that they are authentic. Secondly, authentic messages arrive along more than one avenue, for example, not only in synchronicity but also in dreams and intuitions, etc. Thirdly, a true message does not submit to the ego’s attempts to dismiss it. Finally, authentic messages move us in the direction of love, wisdom, and healing. They are never aimed at boosting the self-serving ends of the ego.

If our choice is to have recourse to astrology or other divination modalities, do we seek wisdom about our spiritual path or advice about how which investment to choose? The oracle of Apollo at Delphi was closed in Christian times. It had fallen into misuse and had lost its numinous power. People were asking ego questions—how to have more—rather than how to go beyond desire to destiny. There was no room left for miraculous wisdom, and so it passed away without protest when the emperor discontinued it. Oracular wisdom may be demolished in us once ego ambition crushes the spirit of a transcendent intent.

Appropriate spiritual choices find a resonance in nature. Plato says, “The motions akin to the divine part of us are the orbits of the universe. Everyone may follow these, correcting those circuits in the brain that were deranged at birth. We need to learn the harmonies of the universe.” The poet Baudelaire adds, “Man walks through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things and they watch him affectionately.” To learn from nature makes sense since we are part of her and children resemble their mother. To allow seasons of blooming and decay, to welcome changing conditions and patterns, to hibernate in some seasons and activate in others, to live and be ready to die, these are nature’s lessons and lesions. To acknowledge their applicability to ourselves is to join in their celebratory cycles of renewal. This is conscious alignment to the synchronicity of nature. Our interpretation is correct when it leads to “Yes!”

This sign I once saw at Patrick’s Point in Humboldt, California, strikes a chord here: “Relentlessly, wave swells roll in toward the shallows, rise high, break into foaming crests, and plunge onto the shore. Waves are born when winds create friction with the sea’s surface and infuse it with energy. As waves near the shore, the rising slope of the bottom of the ocean forces them into crests, and then into breakers. Waves release enormous energy when they crash upon the shore. All life in the surf zone must be able either to hide or to hold on for dear life.”

J
UST
C
OINCIDENCE

The Trickster Ego

A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE,
Romeo and Juliet

In
Tom and Jerry
cartoons, Jerry, the powerless mouse, overcomes and outwits Tom, the powerful cat. The humor is in the reversal of nature’s usual arrangement. We see this reversal also in
The Wizard of Oz:
little Dorothy kills the powerful witch. In the Christmas mystery, a helpless infant intimidates the powerful King Herod. Lowly characters continually humble imperious ones. The trickster is the archetype of that comeuppance. We have certainly noticed in our own lives how persons and events keep coming along to depose our ego’s arrogance, to show us how little in control we really are, to strip us of our imaginary entitlements, to disrupt our best laid schemes. Such people and events are trickster visits to us, more assisting forces on our path.

The trickster is the ego demolitions expert who helps us become more realistic about our psychological limitations and ultimately our spiritual limitlessness. He leads us to border crossings where we are tricked into finding our own wholeness. This is an energy within ourselves and within the universe that humbles us, topples our ego, upsets our plans, demonstrates to us how little our wishes matter, and dissolves the forms that no longer serve us though we may be clinging to them for dear life. Comfort and routine are the two sworn enemies of our lively energy, and the trickster battles these enemies on our behalf. His visits may feel like plagues, but they are gifts in the long run.

The trickster is the mythic personification of synchronicity. Within all of us is an instinct to consolidate an axis between ego and Self. To do this requires some deflating of our ego. The trickster is the archetype of that deflation. The trickster in relationship is that man who fooled you, that woman who betrayed you, that predator/partner who used you, that shyster who took your money, etc. In each instance, someone, something, or some event turned your life upside down or showed you how vulnerable you were, how you were not all you cracked yourself up to be. Fear and desire are the calisthenics of the trickster ego, and the rough tools he uses to show the ego its inadequacy.

Humor, irony, and paradox are the milder transformative tools of the trickster, the transpersonal source of wit. A pretty face may be the trickster; alcohol and cocaine are the trickster; romantic attachment is the trickster; the penis is definitely a trickster. All of these can absorb our energy, direct our choices, fool us into mistakes, and lead us to desperate addiction and out-of-control behavior. We are seduced into believing that any of these can grant us permanent happiness or increase our personal stature. Indeed, the trickster makes the same promises that Adam and Eve fell prey to when this whole human enterprise began.

The trickster is the archetype of synchronicity and of illusion and ambiguity. He tricks us out of the status quo and into new perspectives through unruly events that at first seem negative but become positive or at first seem positive and then show themselves to be negative. The trickster archetype is the psyche’s answer to oppression and grandiosity. Fearless and uncompromising, it exposes pretension and pomposity wherever we manifest it or fall prey to it. The joker or fool fulfilled this function for the king in medieval courts. The king chose to be in the company of the trickster; we meet him unawares, unready, and unsuspecting.

Opposites constellate in the psyche as complementaries. This is because the psyche reconciles while the ego attempts to divide. We all contain both arrogance and humility. An inner force of Self wants to reconcile these polarities. When we are overly arrogant, the trickster may humble us. He makes our hidden humility conscious and visible. Then our arrogance becomes tamed and appears as healthy self-esteem. This is how opposites are reconciled as complementaries. The trickster fosters such wholeness in spite of our ego’s objections or resistance. He will not allow one-sidedness but will arrange our circumstances so that our other side will have its chance to emerge. Selfish people may be forced by a crisis to be selfless; macho men may be forced to be tender. Big shots may be forced to knuckle under. Indeed, wholeness, the opposite of one-sidedness, often comes into our lives uninvited. The trickster is its escort, cruel in order to be kind.

The trickster character in stories dupes and is duped, gets into trouble and out of it too, shuffles chance and mischance, shows the hero his dark side, has irresistible charm, is spontaneous and unpredictable. He is a comic or a jinx who employs art, artifice, sedition, and dishonesty. The trickster energy appears in unexpectedness, mischief, disorder, shock, or amorality. He balances rigid and righteous attitudes with humor and flexibility. He comes to the entrenched to release spontaneity and thus restore psychic balance, thwarts careful plans, creates inner and outer upheavals, induces or forces us into new arrangements, topples thrones and supplants the royal ego. He is the lord of topsy-turvy, the hand that pushed Humpty Dumpty to his great fall.

The trickster helps deflate the warrior version of heroism in which the object is only to triumph over an opponent rather than to win over an opponent by honor, honesty, and love. The trickster leads us to a primordial dawn of order from dissonance. He devours ego, unites opposites, and thereby transforms meaninglessness into meaningfulness, predicament into path, sterile voids into fertile pastures, stuckness into a way out, and ultimately, death into life.

In our culture, the trickster has appeared as the Cheshire cat, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, etc. The trickster is Puck, Ariel, poltergeists, the Joker, the devil, imps, sprites. He is a rascal and a prankster but not totally a scoundrel. These are all personifications of an energy in us and in the world of synchronicity that we encounter in daily life.

The trickster is the oldest of all mythic characters, hence the Crow and Blackfoot see him as the Old Man. His longevity is explained by the liveliness of the stories about him and our fascination with them: “So stubborn a refusal to forget could not be an accident,” says the anthropologist Paul Radin, referring to the trickster. In other native cultures, he is a rabbit, raven, coyote, spider, monkey, and plumed serpent. He is the clever animal who helps in time of need and upsets the plans of those who think they have no needs. He comes from and leads us into a realm in which the controlling ego is exposed as the great pretender and a more realistic self assumes its rightful power.

In Greek mythology, some heroes and gods become tricksters. Dionysus is the trickster when he grants greedy Midas’s wish. Eris, the goddess of strife, is the trickster who triggers the Trojan War with her golden apple. Hermes the trickster is the principal god of synchronicity. He meets us with lucky chances and windfalls. As a god of ambiguity, he invented language that explains
and
hides, hence his name gives us the words
hermeneutics
and
hermetic.
Hermes is the messenger, the god mediating between the ego world and the world of the Self. He is the God of revelation who manifests spirit in matter, showing how matter matters, the god of alchemy cooking up the precious from the useless.

Since he was born at night in a cave, Hermes can see at night, that is, he can see our shadow and force us to see it and thereby show us how to learn from it. Zeus gave him the task/gift of bringing souls to Hades and back again. He is thus the mediator who bridges the gap between life and death. It was he who brought Persephone back from the underworld. Hermes is the
psychopomp,
the guide of souls, who guides us to the ego-slaying underworld, our own unconscious. Hermes is indeed the personification of the unconscious, of prime matter, and of the power to hold all opposites, both material and spiritual. Thus the trickster energy is the artificer of our individuation—the consummation of personal wholeness. So much of our destiny is in humorous hands.

Hermes was invoked as the patron god of the crossroads. The ancients believed that choices of paths took more than the human ego to navigate. Transcendent help was required and was gladly bestowed by Hermes, especially through synchronicities, but often in tricky ways. The cover of this book shows the road sign that is sometimes used to alert drivers to crossings on the road ahead. The trickster energy meets us at crossings, a metaphorical description of synchronicity. In the course of life we are wise to be ready for many unexpected characters crossing our path. To believe that our ego provides all the support we need in those moments might be the most comical of all our human notions. To trust that grace wants to come our way may rouse a cosmic smile upon us.

P
RACTICING AN
E
TIQUETTE FOR
T
RICKSTER
V
ISITS

He has pulled down the mighty from their thrones; he has exalted the lowly.

—L
UKE
1:52

In each of the following listings, try to locate the positive and negative hidden parts of yourself or of the events and people that have influenced you.

•   A treasure is lost or found: I have powers or riches but am tricked out of them by promises or misplaced trust and thereby lose them, for example, the young man who leaves his gold in the keeping of the dishonest innkeeper.