Deception, ambiguity and our ability to handle complexity

Photo: Barbie Robinson

The ancient practice of Deception in the form of Divinities who were bandits and rogues (Skanda, Rudra) held more depth than meets the eye—like Deception itself! The purpose of this practice was manifold and one of the most important teachings was to encounter the multi-dimensional nature of Reality.

We live in an era of information domination with over-simplified AI processes that aim to define and fix Reality, both the external and the internal reality of our consciousness. It is true to say that the tropes of technology have begun to shape our reality, that is we adapt to the machines rather than the other way round. Fragmenting Reality into byte-sized bits of “information” may distort Her nature—that is dividing something into parts is not the same as reality of the whole.

The practice of the Divine as Deception is to invite our attention to the multi-layered deception inherent within and without us. We deceive ourselves in the assumption that Reality is equivalent to our “information” about Her. In turn we are deceived by the complexity and ambiguity of Reality because Reality is inscrutable to efforts to dismantle Her into parts. This is the deceptive essence of Reality/Divine, what appears to us as dissembling, or evasive to our efforts to conquer Her with description and words.

Embodying deception is a revelation about the teaching of how to inhabit Reality with a healthy respect for Her complexity and ambiguity. It is an invitation to accept that the larger movement of Reality is unknowable and that there is a way in which we can meet this unknowability that becomes a dance of intelligence.

For many of us these are times of reckoning—the churning dance of Shiva when so much of what we assumed to be absolute is exposed as hollow. It may be the time for us to reckon with our self-deception in outsourcing our truths to external sources rather than bringing our “robber” consciousness of wariness, 360 degree awareness and accepting that our lives depend on our apprehension of our own reality.

Ancient Deception is a practice of embodying ambiguity, of being in ambiguity and of action that holds ambiguity. This matches the ambiguity and complexity of Reality and allows for us to be in the world as mature beings instead of a childlike need for someone to tell us our truths.