Satan is considered the Great Deceiver.
The Demiurge of the Gnostics, ruler of this plane of existence, likewise is said to have fooled people into thinking that he is God.
The concept of Maya, in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, holds that the world is but an illusion, with no genuine reality to it.
The Kabbalah says that the material world arises from a series of emanations that progressively mask and hide the light of God from ordinary consciousness.
The common theme is one of deception.
At first glance this looks to be a bleak vision of the world. It certainly feels that way to me. I feel like I have clawed and fought my way to a place of relative clarity and centeredness, and I feel a profound distaste for that which is deliberately and maliciously obscured. Moreover, to a certain point it’s a disempowering orientation to hold, to imagine that the world is filled with lies. It has been far more potent to hold close to my heart that experience that all things are an expression of Divine beauty.
And yet, at a certain point this begins to ring false. Not that this timeless truth concerning Divine beauty does not actually hold true, but that in order to appreciate its truth it is necessary to perceive how the Divine shines differently through each speck and mote in existence. And in order to do that it’s necessary and inevitable to notice that some things are darker than others, some things stand more in shadows, some things masquerade or morph, some things are ambiguous or ambivalent. In a very real sense, reality is dishonest.
We can look to the world of nature for easy examples—nature, which is lionized and exalted by many, abounds with examples of deceit, deception, and betrayal. Though I believe it is true in a grander, more “cosmic” sense that there is a fundamental cooperation among all living things to maintain the healthy and balanced flow of life, this does not mean that at local levels, again and again, we do not see competition, struggle, and conflict that is savage and vicious and ends repeatedly in injury and death. That this cycle of warfare is a sublime and enduring part of nature’s beauty (beauty in the Divine sense that it has deep meaning) does not contradict the fact that it is also tremendously and viscerally violent and lethal.
So in this shading between Divine love and Divine light, and the gritty and grimy violence of daily interactions—here is where the mitigating influences enter in, which primarily take the form of deception.
Deception is not the exception. Deception is the norm. To live in this world is at least to understand this, and to have a minimal proficiency in it.
In some senses, to master life in this world is to master deception.
More to come.
