The Trickster vs. The Chaotic Butterfly: Who's Responsible for Global Angst ?

[Wade]

Every since i read george hensen's and chris o'briens respective books on the trickster phenomena (patrick harpur's diamonic reality is also a interesting read) i have been intrigued ( o.k... in love) with the idea that an all encompassing immortal force or energy has been playing the man behind the curtain, conjuring up little exotic events for some unknown purpose, maybe for the amusement of itself or mankind or even to act as a causal agent for some paradigm changing event. even if one does accept this phenomena as a possibility there has to be some limits. as i could also accept the possibility that some of these events could just as well be byproducts of extraterrestrial or interdimmensional origin which would seem to me to seperate from any trickster "intervention" however, i do find myself at odds with associating jung's trickster archtype as a causal agent for change unless it could fit into the chaos theory, why would we need a trickster element (or in some quarters,God or Satan) to put a face on "unexplainable" events when chaos theory fits so well, unless one wanted to suggest that a butterfly effect event was put in effect by one of the three previously named forces. consider...

Some time ago, a friend of mine had to go down to the airport to pick up his gf who was coming back on a delayed flight from india, not that far from the terminal he got a flat and because he drove his gf's car (no spare)and not his own truck ,and he didn't belong to aaa (don't drive enough to warrent the cost) he was soon out $120 + bucks and bore the wrath of his jet-lagged gf who was tweaked at what he did to her car. at the time he held responsible any one he could think of. i asked if he ever asked her about the delayed departure from new delhi and he mentioned it was a late departure because of mechanical problems and that was that. but was it? now the following is completely hypothetical but bear with me....what if the mechanical problem was caused by a mechanic having an "off" day in new delhi and he left some things undone? what if he wasn't completely on the ball that day because he was fatigued, what if his fatigue was caused because he was up all night the previous day becaused he had to comfort a distressed baby, what if he was doing this because the missus was away on a business trip to bangalore (or anywhere) else, what if she was doing so because she was pressed into service because the client she was visitng was a troublesome high-maintence cient, and the wife was deemed the best person for the job. when you look at it, one could say my friend was out over $100 because of a troublesome client halfway across the world and, it wouldn't necessarily stop there because it would be suitable to bring into the mix certain factors such as the paths all the participants in this scenario took in their lives and even their births and the lifes path of their previous ancestors that were in place to hook up and create the successive generations. Why brought the client in bangalore to bangalore, relatives maybe? then they are a causal agent as well as their parents, if their parents didn't meet and have them there would be no relatives to live there to bring the troublesome client to bangalore, gary was out the money because of a series of random events that took place well before the invention of the bow and arrow.

Now, as with everyone else on this board, I do keep an open mind...this should be our mantra...But I do not go with the concept of destiny in the sense that most people think of it, Gary was not doomed to get a flat right then and there or even furthur along in life, had he left earlier (if the flight was on time) or had the flight been delayed even more I know things would most certainly be different, its possible that he could have run over that nail but I think it could have been harmlessly stuck in the tread of a previous vehicle minutes before, or, it had been kicking around the road for some time, maybe even on the opposite side of the expressway and never caused a problem until a previous car jostled it into the perfect position. If it wasn't him at that time and place it would be someone else. The EVENT was inevitable the victim was the variable.

Like chris, one of the reasons why I am not big fan of the ETH theory is if I were that advanced a civilian and been around for some time ( apparently since biblical times at least) earth would be a been there done that and if they really were checking up on us it could done in a less intrusive manner without causing a lot of fuss. If it is their intent to be seen then it can't be to reassure us as it usually has the opposite effect, usually increasing the anxieties of a trigger happy world and those flying craft/mandelas/vimanas could be death of a lot of people ,but that is for a different thread.

So what is my point? If one was going to accept the possibility if a trickster element in this world where and when would it step in and take the bull by the horns? Is it arrogant to argue that my friend was the victim of a trickster assault ? Did he unfortunately pop up on the trickster's radar ?Even major events like Einstein's theory leading to Oppenheimer's bomb leading to Chernobyl and Fukashima has a very pragmatic minor chain of events leading up to it. If the trickster is a big picture guy and not a micro manager where does he crash the party? Would the trickster be a bottom up or a top down guy. Would he take a look at the raw materials he has now and capriciously ( a human quality I know but apt and maybe he does take qualities from us , if the trickster can become sentient then he can also become us) act or would he take the long slog, setting the table up well into the past setting into motion the events leading to a big payoff ? Are we just talking about a vicious never ending feedback cycle with the trickster energy and mankind feeding off one another thus we are accelerating the chaoticness (?) of the world?
Well, I hope I didn't lose too many people to boredom back there and I would appreciate any insight or ideas anyone has, as I have a book idea rattling around in the back of me head that consists of these very elements and I hate paradoxes.

 

[Kim323]

Spooky, you're spookin' me out, man. You lost me a bit in the first paragraph, but I understood your points better with your story and subsequent hypotheses.

I do, though, draw some different conclusions from your friend's adventure on the roadway. To wit:

1. Your friend is a heck of a nice guy.
2. Tell him to run not walk to the nearest courthouse and file a small claims case for recovery of his well-intentioned expenditure of $120. The maximum allowable I believe is $7,500, which he deserves as a punitive allowance that no doubt will be levied by any fair minded judge of the male gender.
3. I have a one word description of your friend's girlfriend, a word you assiduously and kindly avoided in your zeal to attribute this misadventure to the trickster. I think deeper problems await your friend, and the trickster will not be culpable.
4. Back to court, if a larger case is warranted after you pass on this advice, I will represent him pro bono if he feels he cannot go in before the judge per se. I have no legal schooling, but can spout some impressive Latin, though his case is clearly a prima facie victory.
5. I think the trickster is getting a bum rap here. The person whose wrath he bore was the wrath of the goddess maligned, and I fear for your friend should his future include matrimony. As Washington Irving so eloquently described Rip van Winkle's state at home: his "temper was rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation".
6. Tell me the name of that airline. I will be sure and avoid it should I ever go to India.

No denigration of the fair sex in general is to be presumed in my observations of the events related by spooky. I do believe it to be the gentler sex indeed. I am merely voicing my concerns for the trickster in this specific case, notwithstanding that he may indeed be the perpetrator of misadventures in other cases.
Kim

 

[mike]

Like chris, one of the reasons why I am not big fan of the ETH theory is if I were that advanced a civilian and been around for some time ( apparently since biblical times at least) earth would be a been there done that and if they really were checking up on us it could done in a less intrusive manner without causing a lot of fuss. If it is their intent to be seen then it can't be to reassure us as it usually has the opposite effect, usually increasing the anxieties of a trigger happy world and those flying craft/mandelas/vimanas could be death of a lot of people ,but that is for a different thread.

But if the earth is a baby step in the larger picture that might not be true.
We are for the most part forced to look at our reality, via the filter of that reality.
If the picture is "bigger" we may not see it from down here.

Looking for answers, but not having the right questions.

If you ask the wrong questions (shaped by local filters) you get wrong answers.

 

[Wade]

"You lost me a bit in the first paragraph"
yeah i am pretty good at rube goldberging even the simplest concept, i tend to overthink and overanalyze things and find myself taking the most simple basic principle and making it hard to understand via my thoughts and how i express them, and yet i dare try my hands at writing???

the funny thing is this situation didn't even effect me and it took me a whole weekend to try to work out. what i didn't even mention because i didn't want to muddy the waters even furthur was how this example got me wondering about free will. as i said i'm not a destiny type of guy, there is a certian inevitability to all events, they just need a specific catalyisis to start a chain of events to become fully realised. Now that being the case, one could say o.k. so you're a free will kind of guy, then? Now, gary made a unfortunate choice (free will?) but no matter if he had taken his truck, spare and all he would still would have been inconvienced, just not as light in the wallet.that doesn't sound like it is free will and judge not to harshly jenna (the gf) she was in india on a working vacation (she's an engineer) but regardless of the matter this event still led me to this question:

do we truly enjoy a free will existence if, as it seems, it's mostly based upon making a choice regarding situations that we may or may not have control over? if it does constitute free will, it should come with an asterix. if there is any free will to be had in my life it usually comes in my dreams where it seems there are no rules.

 

[mike]

I know it wont be popular with some, but i honestly feel the trickster answer, like the god answer is a gap filler, an explanation you whack in there when you dont have a detailed one.

And its all relative

From the pov of the lady in the lab coat, this is a just a scientific exercise, a study in behavioural psychology.
From the pov of the less evolved subject, the trickster is at work here.

Another one

Kanzi may well be thinking why not just give me the bannanas ? why make me jump through hoops to get something you could have just dropped in easy reach ?

To me the trickster works well as an explanation for things we dont understand, but is it the reality ?

Whats the better answer fruit weilding scientists studying animal behaviour ? or tricksters.
The answer will depend on where you are in the scenario, and your level of understanding.

From the primative primates pov its the trickster.....

Same goes for the monkeys (i know i know kanzi is an ape, but you get the joke)

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

I know it wont be popular with some, but i honestly feel the trickster answer, like the god answer is a gap filler, an explanation you whack in there when you dont have a detailed one.

You obviously don't understand why & what the trickster mechanism appears to be... but that's OK. For the most part, neither do the rest of us

 

[mike]

Chris thats no different to saying "god moves in mysterious ways" as an answer.

Its a makeshift or stopgap answer.

The answer is a description of the effect not the mechanism thats caused it

In mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic animal who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior

Trickster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But even the description of the archetype while stating , not necessarily supernatural or divine, none the less cant avoid a mythical characteristic (imo)

For me at least the concept does not survive the intellectual autopsy i invariably apply to any construct. when i drill down there is nothing there.

And so as an explanation for anything i find it unsatisfying.

When i look at example like above i "see" the trickster, but also recognise its an illusion born in ignorance of and even inherant limitation in regards to the seeing of the larger reality.

To me the belief in a "trickster" as a cause of an effect is as empty an observation as a belief in "god" as cause.

Same explanation, different labels

 

[stonehart]

Nice thought out posts here but I have to back Mike up here Chris and say this is not really any different to the god of the gaps argument..

We can only asses our reality through our own learned experience, so as such anything that is out of our experience could appear as mysterious and unknowable this is true.
But to place an identity to it such as "god/s" is simply no better than saying I do not know.. so why not say that in the first place. I also feel that we run into serious implications on free will when we add a trickster to the mix.

The problem with free will at this point, is that, in order for any event to be preordained all aspects of your life must have been preplanned and no matter how you try you could not avoid a significant event and as such this comes over as hard determinism and far to vulgar fatalist for my taste.

Some examples

Wiki on Free will for those who do not know the debate and development as philosophy sees it Free will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Below is a good example on Fatalism

International tensions are high, and a captain spies a foreign frigate off his starboard. He reasons,

1. Either there will be a battle or there won’t be a battle.
2. If there will be a battle, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.
3. If there won’t be a battle, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.
4. So, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.

Something is wrong here.
“There’s no harm in firing the cannons now” means something like “Firing the cannons now will lead to no worse consequences than doing otherwise.” Now let’s suppose that “if” expresses a material conditional. Then the argument is valid. But the world could be like this:

• The captain fires the cannons. It starts a battle, which leads to a terrible war and thousands of ugly deaths. If the captain hadn’t fired the cannons, none of this would have happened.

In this case, the first premise is true. The third premise is also true, because the antecedent is false. But the second premise is false: there will be a battle, but there’s very great harm in firing the cannons now. Moreover, whatever “if” means, it means something at least as strong as the material conditional. So Premise 2 really is false in the war-world.
Then why does it sound true? Probably because we naturally hear it as saying something like “If there will be a battle anyway, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.” That is, we implicitly give the antecedent some kind of modal force.

• If (necessarily, there will be a battle), then there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.

This is true: if the battle is inevitable, the captain might as well take the first shot. But the reasoning fails precisely because the battle is not inevitable: the antecedent of this conditional is false.
There may be something more general going on here: maybe when someone says “It will be the case that P”, in general we hear this as saying “No matter what, it will be the case that P”. Maybe “will” even has this modal force as part of its content. On this alternative story, Premise 2 is true after all, and the fatalist argument shows roughly what the fatalist thinks it shows: in general, “There will be a battle or there won’t be a battle” is false! But this does not mean that the future is “open”: rather it means that this is false:

• Necessarily, there WILL be a battle, or, necessarily, there WILL not be a battle.

Where “WILL” is an artificial version of “will”, with all of the modal overtones stripped out—it means merely “at some future time”. If something like this semantic story is true, it would explain a lot of our confusions about the future: our language naturally leads us to confuse tense with modality.

Anyway this could turn into a very nice debate so keep the posts coming

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

To me the belief in a "trickster" as a cause of an effect is as empty an observation as a belief in "god" as cause. Same explanation, different labels

Sure, if you are looking at the "trickster" by the classic anthropological definition. I am not. My hypothesis (as you should know) refutes this standard view somewhat and proposes that the trickster is a synchronistic mechanism that triggers events that introduce novelty and change in the culture. The trickster is not necessarily the agenda behind manifestations of this triggering process, it is not self-aware nor has an agenda (classical view). I do suspect that the trickster mechanism may be becoming self-aware, but that's for another conversation...

 

[mike]

Where does this mechanism reside ?
Whats its substrate ?

 

[dyingsun]

An interesting thread title.

 

[stonehart]

I will admit Chris I have your book but have not had the chance to read it as yet.. yes it is in one of my piles of books I never read the books as fast as I get them..

I have dug it out and will now read it so I apologize for jumping into this thread without having done so

 

[Goggs Mackay]

It's all conjecture really. There is no way anyone has so far devised, of identifying any cause to the events that can be attributed to the trickster.
I kinda like the explanation that it could be a non-aware entity. I genuinely think the whole universe can be alive and conscious, just not the way in which our own brains are.

 

[stonehart]

It's all conjecture really. There is no way anyone has so far devised, of identifying any cause to the events that can be attributed to the trickster.
I kinda like the explanation that it could be a non-aware entity. I genuinely think the whole universe can be alive and conscious, just not the way in which our own brains are.

This is what I am having trouble getting my head around.. so I will read the book so I understand in full (well as much as I can) where Chris is coming from.

 

[Voyager]

This is what I am having trouble getting my head around.. so I will read the book so I understand in full (well as much as I can) where Chris is coming from.

You can name the UFO phenomenon anything you choose. Whatever it is, it is tricky enough to coexist with us here on earth without fully revealing its true nature. You can speculate all you like; we simply don’t have enough information about the phenomenon to reach any definite conclusions. From my observations over the years, I will tell you this: It is stranger than you know, stranger than any of us know. It does exist, and the implications are profound!

 

[dyingsun]

Well, I reckon there is value somewhere even thinking about it, Voyager.

 

[Wade]

I will admit Chris I have your book but have not had the chance to read it as yet.. yes it is in one of my piles of books I never read the books as fast as I get them..

I have dug it out and will now read it so I apologize for jumping into this thread without having done so

If I may interject here stonehart, I would also google " christopher o'brien + download" or various words to come up with a list of chris's appearences on various podcasts.no offense to chris but I did buy his book and i did have a hard time initially understanding his point....o.k im sorta dense...but upon listening to his podcasts, some 13 in all at the time,I had a much clearer grasp of what he was saying. His sessions with our own don ecker on dmr and greg bishop on radio misterioso are really revelatory, but my ah-hah moment was upon listening to his appearence on mike clelland's hidden experience. chris's prescence on this forum is why i joined so you can blame him for that.
lastly, he had an appearance on some podcast...i beleive it was bigfoot's pad??..where he absolutely eviscerated the Three(?) hosts who were not yet ready for primetime. i almost felt sorry for them

 

[stonehart]

If I may interject here stonehart, I would also google " christopher o'brien + download" or various words to come up with a list of chris's appearences on various podcasts.no offense to chris but I did buy his book and i did have a hard time initially understanding his point....o.k im sorta dense...but upon listening to his podcasts, some 13 in all at the time,I had a much clearer grasp of what he was saying. His sessions with our own don ecker on dmr and greg bishop on radio misterioso are really revelatory, but my ah-hah moment was upon listening to his appearence on mike clelland's hidden experience. chris's prescence on this forum is why i joined so you can blame him for that.
lastly, he had an appearance on some podcast...i beleive it was bigfoot's pad??..where he absolutely eviscerated the Three(?) hosts who were not yet ready for primetime. i almost felt sorry for them

Thanks Spooky I will track down the shows I have not listened to yet, but I have listened to the DMR sessions and found the subject very interesting and of course the other shows I would listen to would be Misterioso (grailian report as well).

It was a -4 degree frost here over night so I am still in bead with the laptop and Chris's book ... even the cat refuses to get up this morning.

 

[Wade]

Thanks Spooky I will track down the shows I have not listened to yet, but I have listened to the DMR sessions and found the subject very interesting and of course the other shows I would listen to would be Misterioso (grailian report as well).

It was a -4 degree frost here over night so I am still in bead with the laptop and Chris's book ... even the cat refuses to get up this morning.

here's a few

hidden experience: audio conversation - STALKING THE TRICKSTER with Christopher O'Brien

Internet Archive Search: subject:"christopher o'brien"

Christopher O'Brien discusses UFOs and folklore of the San Luis Valley | Radio RMN

 

[Wade]

" It was a -4 degree frost (???) here over night so I am still in bead with the laptop and Chris's book ... even the cat refuses to get up this morning. '

where's here ? mt. washington? kilimanjaro? r u santa claus?