God is a Desert Trickster

 

The book of life is written by the hand of God, not by well-meaning people.  There is laughter and infinite love in the way He tells His story, the way He reveals Himself to Himself . . .  [T]here is nothing other than His oneness revealing itself in a multitude of ways, in the most beautiful and terrible forms, full of divine purpose and trickery!  It is always other than what we think, than what we can imagine.  Awakening to this is essential to experiencing the wonder and terror of His world.  It is not about us!

One of the first things we learn on the path is that nothing is as it appears.  We realize how we are deceived and how we deceive ourselves.  Life is a play of appearances in which we are caught by our own desires and projections.  The path presents us with these illusions and other tricks; it deceives us.  Even the idea of a path is an illusion because there is nowhere to go, no journey to make.  We learn to laugh as well as cry at how we are deceived . . .

On the path we come to see how we are manipulated, how we are the fool.  Yet we rarely take this knowing into the wider spectrum of life, appreciating how the whole world is a deception and is itself the victim of trickery.  We blame our politicians for deceiving us, for not telling us the truth.  But they are children compared to the way the divine deceives us all.  What is this “world stage” that seems so important?  What is really being enacted?

We have forgotten or dismissed the magical nature of creation, but gradually the blinkers that have shielded us from this dimension of life will be removed.  We will find that our rational perception is quite inadequate to explain what is happening, and we will discover that we are part of a world full of delight and mischief . . . of the Creator witnessing His oneness . . ."

Sufi Master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee 

"Emptiness is form; form is emptiness."

Buddhist Heart Sutra

Photo: Raven the Trickster in the Needles District, Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 27, 2011