Trickster and Psychic Questing Presented by Simon Nugent.

Trickster and Psychic Questing

Presented by Simon Nugent

Agenda

The Trickster Archetype

The Concept of Liminality

Trickster in Quantum Theory

Trickster and Parapsychology

Trickster goes Questing

Archetypes

An archetype is an unconscious, primordial, structural element of the human psyche; a pre-existing 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-player3.shape-shifter4.situation-inverter5.messenger and imitator of the gods6.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

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."

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Moon Landing JFK assassination Paul is Dead

Hermeneutics

Be conscious of Trickster when interpreting (or accepting interpretations): Crop Circles

Zechariah Sitchin’s Interpretations

Age of the Sphinx

The Concept of Liminality

Rites of Passage – Arnold Van GennepPeriods of TransitionVictor 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


The search for the smallest piece of reality

God does play dice

Quantum Ambiguity


Thomas Young’s Double Slit Experiment


Fire electrons through double slit = interference pattern = wave

Fire a single electron through = interference pattern = wave (!!??)

Maths says: electron has gone through left slit, right slit, both slits and neither slit!

Observe which slit electron goes through = bar = particle (???!!!!????)

“If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.” Niels Bohr

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 InterpretationThe Many-Worlds InterpretationConsciousness 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

Source: Mind and Matter, Volume 1, Number 1, 2003 , pp. 45-57(13)

Dick Bierman (University of Amsterdam): Does Consciousness Collapse the Wave-Packet? (2003)

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


Weight of evidence v smoking gun

A will o’ the wisp science

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.

A word on the skeptics…


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


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.

Leveraging Quantum Ambiguity:

Trickster goes Questing

Fool SketchesMessing with TimeRed Herrings & Wild Goose ChasesInformation from unlikely sources

The Trickster Manifesto

There is no “just” about my imagination; I respect it as the faculty of wave collapse

I seek to introduce novelty and ambiguity

I hold the tension of opposites

I fight inertia by movement and action

I reach out

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

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 KaiserDoctor Quantum on YouTube

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Trickster and Psychic Questing Presented by Simon Nugent.

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