3. Dominating the Trickster

                                           DOMINATING THE TRICKSTER

The Trickster is, of course, the Identity, Mara, and he is accompanied by his Daughters. They are are both able and seductive. Even if you set the level of their participation in your life with resolution,s they will continually be pushing the limits of their participation in your decisions. Resolutions are never a productive method of control.

That means that if you really do wish to follow the Mundane Path of Happiness as your approach you will have to be constantly vigilant for Identity presence.

But this vigilance is not sufficient without clear knowledge of the details of this Identity presence in your attitudes, intentions and readiness to respond together with a method of dismissing them so that gradually they desist.

These Identities are not real, but they appear to exist exist as a result of the repetition of habits with a high valence in the Visceral memory traces, the Emotional memory traces, the Mental memory traces and the traces which contain apprehension about future events.

            They produce confusion, acquisitiveness, aversion and fixation.

The Aryans named them the Gunas, and the psychologist Freud named the first three Id, Ego and Super Ego. The fourth perhaps we should name Id-Ego, for there are many Visceral experiences involved in the interference with natural behaviour.

They cannot be identified directly until the actual responses to any external or internal spontaneous stimulus are made. The only conscious awareness of their impending activity is in the presence of the "I," "Me," and "Mine" of Mara.

So that is where your vigilance must begin. It becomes first then a Mindfulness of Identity presence and then a "naming" of the Daughter- provoked responses before they arise as "visceral," "emotional," "mental," or "future fixated."

This identification must be made the moment that the prepared response is ready and preferrably before its execution.

For example, when you sense the presence of the "I" (and when on the Mundane path it is always there) and you are conscious of the beginning of a physiological visceral reaction then you consciuosly NAME IT, declaring in silent voice or in clear vocalization "visceral rubbish --- not required" and let the whole response fall away.

Similarly repond with "emotional rubbish---not required," "mental rubbish --- not required," or "future thought rubbish --- not required."

You can use your own terms as long as they are short and strong and used at the first instant of Identity arising.

At first there will be a mishmash of these, but with practice the Identity Mindfulness will become clearer and their activity more apparent. It does require calmness and patience.