The trickster is the transformer the cunning serpent undulating around the firmly rooted tree, the manipulative taunting opportunist , the boundary crosser from the sacred to the profane, the saint and the sinner. He initiates life from that which has outlived its purpose, the stagnated life of security and certainty, undermining the carefully constructed life which shield us and the creativity around us. Without him we are limited to the things we already know. To take the fall is to waken the unconscious and move beyond the self imposed limitations. With chaos, he brings a moral choice. It takes restraint and spiritual maturity to move beyond the trickster and his teachings. It is the tragedy that accompanies the shattering of old forms so that new life and meaning may immerge.

For everyone there comes a time of crisis, when the world around us no longer fits the soul's vision of who we really are and the old forms must be broken down. Life as we know it just doesn't satisfy us anymore. Like Eve, we are tempted to explore the belief that there is more to life than what we had come to concede. We feel that we have outgrown our partners. Our surrounding no longer seem to fit with our new perception of ourselves, cracks are starting to show and things need a shake up. Eventually the restrictions we feel become too much to bear and we are ready to take action, no matter what the consequences. We simply can not exist as before.

As often as not, this crisis is brought about by an intensely emotional call from Eros: love. At the time the love interest may seem like the answer to all our worldly problems. We may feel like we have found the one true soul's companion, someone to complete us What we have found is the magician who can unlock the most subconscious hidden aspects of our inner being. The complex suppressed shadow side, which we have denied in ourselves. It is no wonder that is such cases people feel like they have found themselves in this new other, in essence they have! The uncanny sense of familiarity is that of their own repressed archetype struggling to be free. It doesn't help matters, when the attraction is usually accompanied by a strong sense of fate playing a hand. Perhaps it is the cosmologic cycle providing, the supernal world intersecting with the tangible world. It certainly seems that if we do not take heed ourselves, then indeed fate will intervene and do it for us. Ironically this kind of "love" is all smoke and mirrors. The soul's journey of the love interest is irrelevant and we soon discover that prince or princess charming is flawed after all .The result being that we feel cut in half. After it's all over, the lover who promised great things leaves promises unfulfilled; it's the same old situation. The joke is that what we fail to realize by our nescience is that we have been transformed. What was sought was pleasure, what was realized was transformation. He or she was merely a medium for transformation, for getting in touch with the new self. It is rare that these types of compelling love interests survive, but what is certain is that transformation and self illumination survives.

It is the cosmic pattern for personal metamorphosis to occur at different stages of life. Never easy, just like Eve, an encounter with the trickster carries with it the weight of integrity and moral expectations from the self and others. In Eve's case she carried the fate of humanity. In our case we may carry the weight of our family and friends. Our actions hold direct consequences for others. Opposition will gather around as we struggle to find our new identity. Do we go against the status quo, and break the mould, knowing that the consequences of our actions will mean certain risk and chaos? Or do we stay put in a desert of self imposed limitation, depressed afraid to let go? What we are attempting to hold on to has become so worn, damaged and fragile, that it no longer has the capacity to hold us, or anyone else around us. Sooner or later the threads will rupture and we will fall. Letting go of the threads that bind us is one of the scariest, most uncertain times in our lives. It is a crisis that involves certain loss and therefore grief. However without the help of the trickster our lives would be stagnated. The trickster can be like an oasis in a desert of sameness and to that degree has an enormous attraction to the dehydrated soul. The capacity is to revive in order to survive and move forward out of the desert that has become our lives and meet new horizons. Does the tree try to hold on to its dead leaves, or does the tree have the faith to know that when they fall, new life can then begin to grow? Nature teaches us all we need to know. The fall of our lives; when we shed what has died in us and outlived its purpose, at least in its old form. Yet most of us resist this change, we will do everything in our power to keep alive what is dieing because we know change brings about great suffering and that is to be avoided.

The Buddha's first noble truth is "All life is suffering". The painful vicissitudes of life are the one constant in a temporal universe. The details of our sorrows and sufferings may differ but the encounter of painful change is not and never has been unique to the limited few. If you are living and experiencing life and its full range of emotions then despair at times in our lives is inevitable. If we can learn to accept these universal truths we can learn to dispel the fears and terrors that hold us back as we attempt to avoid the pain that living and loving brings to us. Fears only serve to limit ourselves of our full participation in life; building self imposed prisons, afraid of change and encounters with the tricksters. But neither should we become passive victims;

There are two aspects to a thing of this kind. One is your judgment in the field of time, and the other is your judgment as a metaphysical observer. You can't say there shouldn't be poisonous serpents ?| that's the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That's not saying no to the serpent, that's saying no to that situation.

-- Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth

Joseph Campbell talks of "joyful participation in the sorrow of the world" being fully in the moment. Saying yes to life with all its despair and sorrows. Being able to greet our endings and new beginnings without fear but with joyful participation; acknowledging the sorrow temporality brings, yet being immensely involved in our position in all of life; feeling the intense pleasures and the intense sufferings by fully engaging in the chaos of life. Living is an experience, one that brings with it a full gamut of emotions. I'm not sure I'd want to live in a perfect world without its cunning serpents, perhaps there is more of Eve in me than I believed.

"The end of things is always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all..."

"I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera -except that it hurts"

--Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth