If you’re looking for that creative spark, you need to welcome in the trickster archetype. Although the trickster brings chaos and unpredictability, there are many benefits to its presence in our lives. In this episode, we discuss:
- The trickster archetype in the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita
- Why the trickster isn’t all bad
- How to work with the trickster for creativity
- How nonattachment can help the creative process
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Transcript
Debra Maldonado 00:27
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Soul Sessions with Creative Mind. I’m Debra Berndt Maldonado. I’m here with Dr. Rob Maldonado, founders. And we are so excited to continue our series on the great works of Carl Jung. But before we begin, don’t forget to subscribe because we’d really love for you to catch every episode and the past episodes of our podcast. Today’s topic we take great reverence in speaking about and honor in. We’re talking about the trickster archetype. We’re gonna go deep into what the Trickster archetype is, how to love the trickster versus not love the trickster, and embrace it for what it is, how it impacts our creativity and our creation.
Robert Maldonado 00:49
Archetype is not so much of a character. A lot of people use it as a character, but it’s a behavioral pattern that’s part of our psyche, part of our collective unconscious. Where do we see it? We see it in mythologies, myths often portray the trickster in his varied ways, all the way from a clown figure that brings levity, irreverence.
Debra Maldonado 01:21
The joker, when you were in school, there was always one kid who was the class clown, everything’s serious, and they belt out a joke. Comedians.
Robert Maldonado 01:30
All the way to the devil, personification of evil, or the darkness in the psyche. That’s the trickster. We’re going to talk about, this is an interesting for us: how does the trickster archetype play into creativity? Because he plays an important role in human creativity. Often, he’s not acknowledged for that, we misunderstand what the trickster’s role is in creativity.
The first that everyone can relate to the most, the simplest example is evolution. Cells have a random switch in the DNA, and it creates a new form in that animal that could or could not be more adaptable. That’s how we evolved, through this randomness of “Let’s throw a little curve in this”, instead of making a solid copy after copy. If you think about all the species, we all came from a one-celled organism, and how different we are, even human beings, we’re all so different and so vast, how does that happen? We are not carbon copies of each other. We’re close copies, maybe samples of each other, but there’s always that little uniqueness to each one. Even our thumbprint. We have all very unique fingerprints, which is why we use that for crimes, because we can identify people, but also this idea that it creates a unique individual experience in a vast world. What fascinates me is when you go into deep sea, those deep sea divers, you see these creatures you’ve never seen on the planet. The Divine is so creative. It is a creative force. How does it happen? Just a little shifted DNA, something becomes something new.
Robert Maldonado 03:28
Let’s set up the stage first. What does the average person do with a trickster? Most of us are trying to get rid of the trickster. We’re trying to create certainty, predictability.
Debra Maldonado 03:42
No randomness, risk-averse, the risk management, that’s what our ego likes to do, let’s lower our risks.
Robert Maldonado 03:51
That is an impossibility. When we want to control things, we put most of our effort in trying to predict and control, we’re pushing away the trickster element, the uncertainty principle, as it’s called in physics. The fact that we can’t control everything because we can’t determine in physics the speed or velocity at the same time of a particle, we can never do that. It’s an impossibility so far.
Debra Maldonado 04:26
So we can never create a life like we all think if we just put everything in order, and check all the boxes that everything is going to be okay.
Robert Maldonado 04:34
What this pushing away does, it’s one of the sources of human suffering because we can never do it. We’re fooling ourselves. The more we insist, the more we try, the more we develop mechanisms, technology, systems, organizations, on and on, to try to keep that chaos artistic element out of our psyche, out of our lives, the more power we’re giving it to disrupt our lives, it becomes an unconscious element that plays into what we do, the things we create. If we’re creating a business, guess what, we’re building into it, when we push away the trickster element. We’re stifling it, we’re building in its own destruction. What happens in relationships when we try to control it and determine the outcome? We stifle it, we suffocate it, we don’t allow it to breathe, to grow, to be its own organic way of being.
Debra Maldonado 05:49
A parent with a child, trying to bulldoze through, the helicopter parent that makes sure the child doesn’t have any problems. Then the child doesn’t have the strength within them to cope with problems when they’re adults, because the parent did everything for them. It seems maybe to be nice to get rid of problems and avoid them. But in a sense, these trickster types, these obstacles, the drama that shows up in our life actually make us stronger, they build our immunity to our growth. We get our shot so we can build the strength to fight off disease. It’s the same thing, we need to build resilience within ourselves. If we don’t, something’s just gonna knock us down when it happens if we don’t have the resources. When people really design that predictable life that will never change, it’ll create boredom, a lack of passion, a lack of emotion, it becomes blah. Remember that movie The Truman Show with Jim Carrey? They made this perfect, choreographed life, then he woke up and was like “