Without a doubt, we spend so much of our lives playing tricks on ourselves. The infamous archetype of the Trickster is alive and well in many of us. I know it is alive in me. He’s always causing me to head in one direction and forget what I’m doing as I’m moving that way in the first place.

What am I avoiding? What do I purposely avoid each day? I have a feeling that there is a lot that I am avoiding. What do I want in my life right now, and what am I avoiding in order to get it? There’s a question.

What is it that I need to face in my life in order to get what I want? What am I avoiding in that respect?

Is it anger? Is it the creation of a vision? What am I hiding from myself?  

The essence of what everyone must manufacture is the value of self: ‘Hey, if my body manifested sickness, it can manifest wellness as well. Whose limitation and whose decree of illness am I going to accept?’You have stored within you an abundance of magnificent knowledge. (Barbara Marciniak, Earth: Pleiadian Keys to the Living Library, p. 118)

I remember the phrase that I’ve heard several times while working with the plant medicine in Brasil: I am playing tricks on myself. There is something deeply true about that statement, about that idea. In that same respect, I am hiding things from myself, as well. There is so much more in my life that I am not accessing, for I am hiding these kernels of wisdom from myself.

It’s that trickster character calling, for sure. When those tricks are being played on myself, I can be sure that archetypal character is around the block.

Paul Radin wrote a classic in 1956 about the trickster archetype, a book simply called The Trickster. In that book, he says the trickster “is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control.”

What am I hiding from myself? What is truly calling me in this moment that I am not hearing? How am I avoiding this calling? What am I missing? In what ways am I not honoring myself, and the journey that I am on in this moment?

And what part of me is causing this blindness, this inability to see?

Some of your dams will break in your world because, as people, you have dammed-up consciousness. Rather than go through the initiation, you stay on your tricycles. You are afraid to get on bikes that are bigger and fall off. Let go…you can get off the tricycles and get on bigger bikes and ride them faster and see another world. You are growing now as a collective to ride something bigger, a vehicle you are just beginning to imagine. Have compassion for those who are afraid to get off the trikes of life. (Marciniak)

Yes, indeed! She also notes “some of you are discovering that you are like prisoners, trapped in your own Eiffel Towers. Resolve your confinement” (p. 245). I indeed dreamed of being in prison this morning, realizing that I getting close to being released. A man I know was there, and I was hearing how the prisons in Texas were full and they were transferring the prisoners to Colorado before their release. Hmm: what does this mean in regards to my own inner prison in this moment?

Is it that I’m afraid to leave this inner prison that I have created for myself? Am I fearful of what true freedom will be like for me? Is all of that too frightening?

It is as though the Trickster archetype is representative of this human situation, this one in which we are here, yet aren’t actually here—humanly, that is—on our own accord. We have somehow landed here, and, dammit, we’re stuck. Perhaps in this trickster character, as Radin writes, is “depicted man’s struggle with himself and with a world into which he had been thrust without his volition and consent.” That is, indeed, the human condition.

I can feel the energy drawing me to sleep, lulling me to sleep: it is like a spell. I am not fixed in my movement, not committing one way or another, or somehow limiting myself in the process. Like the Trickster, I am permeable. Like the human I am, I am, indeed, playing tricks on myself.