Trickster and
Psychic Questing
Presented by Simon Nugent
S
Agenda
S The Trickster Archetype
S The Concept of Liminality
S Trickster in Quantum Theory
S Trickster and Parapsychology
S Trickster goes Questing
Archetypes
An archetype is an unconscious, primordial,
structural element of the human psyche; a preexisting constellation of characteristics and
tendencies.
Examples: the wise woman, the hero, the two
brothers…
Making the Unconscious
Conscious (or Not!)
Until you make the
unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and
you will call it fate.
— C.G. Jung
The Trickster Archetype
Characteristics of Trickster
1. fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous
2. deceiver and trick-player
3. shape-shifter
4. situation-inverter
5. messenger and imitator of the gods
6. sacred and lewd behaviour
Aside 1: Trickster Jesus
The question of identity
Who do the people say I am?
(Moses and Yahweh: I am that what I am)
Who are my mother and my brothers and my
sisters?
• Debate with Pontius Pilate
• Pinning him down
• Appearances to the disciples
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•
•
•
Hermes
The God Hermes is the patron of thieves,
merchants, and travellers; of heralds and what
heralds pronounce[…]Hermes is cunning, and
occasionally violent; a trickster, a robber. So it is
not surprising that he is also the patron of
interpreters.[…]The rules of their art, and its
philosophy, are called “hermeneutics.”
- Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy
Hermeneutics
A woman walked into a
cocktail bar and asked the
barman for a double entendre.
So he gave her one.
Aside 2: The Hermeneutics of
Suspicion
"Three masters,
seemingly mutually exclusive,
dominate the school of suspicion:
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud."
S 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
S Moon Landing
S JFK assassination
S Paul is Dead
Hermeneutics
Be conscious of Trickster when interpreting (or
accepting interpretations):
S Crop Circles
S Zechariah Sitchin’s Interpretations
S Age of the Sphinx
The Concept of Liminality
Rites of Passage – Arnold Van Gennep
Periods of Transition
Victor Turner and Anti-structure (Carnival)
Inside, Outside and Crossing Boundaries
Jungian psychology again: “The trickster is a symbol of the liminal state
itself, and of its permanent accessibility as a source of recreative power”.
“Trickster is a mediator between binary oppositions”, George P. Hansen
Trickster in Quantum Theory
S The search for the smallest piece of reality
S God does play dice
S Quantum Ambiguity
Trickster in Quantum Theory
S Thomas Young’s
Double Slit
Experiment
Trickster in Quantum Theory
Trickster in Quantum Theory
S Fire electrons through double slit = interference pattern = wave
S Fire a single electron through = interference pattern = wave (!!??)
S Maths says: electron has gone through left slit, right slit, both slits
and neither slit!
S Observe which slit electron goes through = bar = particle
(???!!!!????)
“If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly
shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”
Niels Bohr
Trickster in Quantum Theory
The Hermeneutics of Wave
Function Collapse
Wave Function Collapse is the phenomenon in which a wave function—
initially in a superposition of several different possible quantum states—
appears to reduce to a single one of those states after interaction with an
observer.
But what causes it…? Taboo subject for many years.
“Shut up and calculate.”
Copenhagen Interpretation
The Many-Worlds Interpretation
Consciousness Causes Collapse Interpretation
(John von Neumann & Eugene Wigner)
Transactional – Jon Cramer, 1986
Quantum Conclusions
The smallest piece of matter is a cloud of probability.
The cloud is the superposition of all possible states.
An “observer” forces the wave function to collapse into one of the states.
But…can we move in the opposite direction?
Can we stop the collapse of the wave function and increase the number of
possible states (“Quantum Ambiguity”)?
We are now in an age of “Quantum Thinking”.
Quantum Research
S Dick Bierman (University of Amsterdam): Does
Consciousness Collapse the Wave-Packet? (2003)
Source: Mind and Matter, Volume 1,
Number 1, 2003 , pp. 45-57(13)
S Dr Amit Goswami
P.S. Macro Quantum Proven
First Quantum Machine visible to naked eye.
Aaron D. O’Connell “Breakthrough of the Year 2010”, Science
Magazine
Trickster and Parapsychology
S Weight of evidence v smoking gun
S A will o’ the wisp science
S The “sheep-goat effect”.
A meta-analysis by Lawrence (1992), covering 73 experiments by 37
different researchers, clearly confirms that subjects who believe in psi
obtain, on the average, higher results than those who do not believe in it.
S A word on the skeptics…
Trickster and Parapsychology
S Daryl J. Bem (Cornell University): Feeling the Future:
Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences
on Cognition and Affect
“[H]e might show students a long list of
words and ask them to remember as many as
possible. Then, the students are told to type a
selection of words which had been randomly
selected from the same list. Here’s where
things get really weird: the students were
significantly better at recalling words that
they would later type.”, Wired Magazine
Trickster and Parapsychology
Leveraging Quantum Ambiguity:
Imagine a random sequence experiment with a series of spinning
objects like a fruit machine. Also like the fruit machine, a certain
limited number of “nudges” would be possible. Subjects would
attempt to guess the patterns that would appear and would have
the ability to “nudge” the outcome to closer match their
predictions.
Investigators would be able to adjust the eventual results
downwards for the nudge effect but individual nudges *would not
be recorded* thus creating a field of ambiguity around the
experiment.
Trickster goes Questing
Fool Sketches
Messing with Time
Red Herrings & Wild Goose Chases
Information from unlikely sources
The Trickster Manifesto
S There is no “just” about my imagination; I respect it as the faculty
of wave collapse
S I seek to introduce novelty and ambiguity
S I hold the tension of opposites
S I fight inertia by movement and action
S I reach out
S I give voice
The Last Word…
“The real secret of magic is that the world is made
of words, and that if you know the words that the
world is made of you can make of it whatever you
wish.”
- Terence McKenna, "Alien Dreamtime" a
multimedia event recorded live.
OK, really the Last Word
S What they’re doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into
existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as
your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you’re being
shown is impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture,
it’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé
eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery
inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow
alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what’s happening is this
proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying
"Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it!
Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward
your mouth, and when it comes out it isn’t sound, it’s vision. You discover that
you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they’re urging you to
do this. They say "That’s it! That’s it! Keep doing it!". Terence McKenna
Bibliography
“Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey”, Daryl Sharp
“The Genesis of Secrecy”, Frank Kermode
“The Trickster and the Paranormal”, George P. Hansen
“Trickster Makes this World”, Lewis Hyde
“How the Hippies Saved Physics”, David Kaiser
Doctor Quantum on YouTube
simon@atlantisventures.co.uk
Questions