7 Soul-stretching Vials of Heyoka Medicine

“It is the pull of opposite polls that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.” ~Eric Hoffer

Hell-breaker. Reverse-beacon. Heaven-usurper. Madhatter-prefect. Death-wrangler. Phoenix-apocalypse. Ego-masher.

Heyoka moves like hot smoke through the cold conditioning of culture. Trickster-pragmatic and anticlimactic. The laughter in the whirlwind. He eats egos as he usurps thrones. He crushes false gods as he flips the summit into the abyss. He brings water to the wasteland in the form of Magic Elixir. Here are seven vials of Magic Elixir in particular…

1.) Laughter is the thunder that awakens the sleeping heart:

“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.” ~Georges Bataille

Humor is a tool to jolt people into awareness. It leverages over-seriousness into genuine sincerity. Here, laughter isn’t just joy; it’s a lightning bolt of truth, shattering illusions and jolting the soul from its cozy routine.

This thunder doesn’t just awaken—it rewires. It flips the world, showing the absurd beauty in pain and the hidden grief in joy. You’re not just amused, you’re alive, raw, unguarded. Laughter is medicine, a sacred jolt that says the universe is both a joke and a miracle.

But madcap beware: Heyoka’s laughter holds razors and thorns. This kind of laughter shreds armor. It melts through the golden idol of your petty beliefs. It cooks your anthropomorphized God over an open firepit. It’s your laughing, jesting, frolicking higher awareness, dragging you kicking and screaming through a Dark Night of the Soul.

If, on the “other side,” you should be existentially stripped bare, then so be it. It was necessary to get your cultural conditioning out of the way. Your clumsy armor was only ever the illusion of invulnerability anyway. True strength is absolute vulnerability. Heyoka just rubs your nose in it.

Saying, “This is your true Self: a fragile, fallible, mortal animal going through the motions of living for a short period of time. Now, what are you going to do with that?”

As Alan Watts said, “Is it cry, cry, cry; or is it laugh, laugh, laugh?”

2.) The mirror lies until you stand behind it:

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” ~Marcus Aurelius

True understanding comes from shifting your perspective.

The mirror lies with its flat, glossy truth, until you slip behind it on the sly. This is the sacred clown’s dance—twisting perspectives until the world’s rigid facade cracks. Heyoka knows the mirror’s game: it shows you only the skin of things, your face, your flaws; a tidy reflection of what you think you are. But it’s only a half-truth, a mask that hides the wild, swirling depths beneath.

The mirror reflects your identity, your limits, the world’s rules. But step behind it, and the lies unravel. From that flipped vantage, you see the heart that doubts, the spirit that dreams, the soul that connects. The mirror’s truth is a trick, a frozen snapshot. True understanding comes when you dance on the other side, where shadows and light swap roles, where the self you cling to dissolves into something vaster, messier, more alive.

To stand behind the mirror is to see the world upside-down—pain as teacher, failure as guide, the ordinary as sacred. To laugh at your own seriousness, to question the stories you’ve swallowed wholesale. The mirror lies until you play the fool, stepping into the backward dance where truth isn’t found in staring straight but in spinning and giggling until the heart sees itself anew, reflected in the beautiful chaos of everything connected to everything else.

3.) To find the path, lose the map:

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” ~Wallace Stevens

The heart finds its way not by knowing but by unraveling.

Reality is the map’s dull twin: a world of bills, roles, and “that’s just how it is.” It’s the story everyone nods to, robot-walks to, sleepwalks through. But metaphor? That’s Heyoka’s real magic, the backward leap that turns a storm into a lover’s whisper, a scar into a star, a crow into a god.

As Nietzsche said, “No artist tolerates reality.”

Metaphor doesn’t describe reality, it shatters it, spins it, makes it strange and alive. Heyoka lives here, in the sideways glance that sees a saguaro as a sage, a failure as a song, a diamond forged from pressuring a demon. To escape the cliché is to play the fool, to trade the map’s straight lines for the spiraling dance of imagination.

In Heyoka’s blacklight, losing the map is liberation and metaphor is the torch. You don’t just walk the path—you invent it, step by mythmaking step, thumbing your nose at the chaos. Reality’s clichés dissolve when you see the world as not just a puzzle to solve but a poem to sing, a trick to love, a mirror to slip behind. So, toss the map, weave a metaphor out of your darkness and let it guide you toward the light of your own path.

4.) What you give away, you keep; what you keep, you lose: 

“You only lose what you cling to… In a war of Ego, the loser always wins.” ~Buddha

True wealth lies in letting go, and victory blooms in surrender.

Hoard your love, your time, your truth, your money, and they rot in your grasp, weighing down your spirit. But give them away—scatter kindness, share your heart, offer your flaws with a grin—and they multiply, circling back to you as joy, connection, life. Heyoka knows: giving is keeping, because what you release becomes part of the great, wild dance of existence, forever yours in absolute freedom.

The ego’s desperate clutch on “me” and “mine” is a losing game, a map that leads nowhere. Heyoka would strut, puffed up with mock pride, only to trip and fall, laughing, to show the truth: clinging to ego is a trap, a war where every victory is hollow. Surrender the egoic fight, let the ego crumble, and you win the real prize: freedom, lightness, and the vastness of being. Heyoka embodies this, playing the fool to expose the absurdity of pride, losing the self to find the soul.

In Heyoka’s blacklight, giving is a rebellion against the world’s greed, and losing is a triumph over the ego’s lies. What you give away weaves you into the web of life (read The Parable of Blue Elk and Fool’s Feet), while what you keep chains you to a fading illusion. So, fling wide your gifts, let go of your pride, and join the Heyoka’s backward dance—where loss is gain, and the heart keeps what it gives by turning the tables on power through prestige.

5.) Everything the Great Mystery does, it does in a circle:

“In every instant Being begins; around every Here the sphere of There rolls. The center is everywhere.” ~Nietzsche

Step back to move the world forward. A concise paradox for a society obsessed with linear achievement. Every step, every moment, is both center and edge, beginning and ending.

Life is not a line to conquer but a circle with a twist that holds all things: birth curling into death, joy weaving through sorrow, every ending a fresh start. Heyoka knows the circle is the trickster’s truth: nothing is lost, nothing is final. Give away your heart and it returns; fall, and the circle lifts you. Dancing is tripping. Tumbling is as sacred as soaring. Every moment is forever. Every place is all places. It’s all a part of the Great Mystery’s endless spin.

The center is everywhere. This includes you. You are the pinnacle expression of the human condition heretofore. You are the fountainhead, the source, the center of all things in circumference with the center of all other things.

From this center you can finally relax into No-mind and Wu-Wei. You can finally learn how not to take yourself too seriously. You can finally get a grip on being-in-itself and being-for-itself because you’ve embraced the greater power of being-in-fate. You are free to surrender to the Flow state of becoming “God Awake.”

6.) When everyone agrees, doubt is the truest friend: 

“Trust those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it.” ~Andre Gide

“Truth”—a gelded rule, a base belief, a shiny answer that the herd of nonthinkers huddle around like a false fire. Doubt transforms lemming hearts into a Phoenix rebirth.

Heyoka inflicts doubt. Teaching us how to dance in the tangled mess of not knowing. Doubt is the thunderbolt that jolts the soul, the backward step that reveals the path was never as straight as it seemed.

Truth isn’t a thing to discover; it’s a fire to chase, an infinite circle to track, a Fibonacci sequence to seek, a journey to enjoy despite the destination. Those who say they’ve caught the “truth”  have only caught their own ego, and Heyoka is there to trip them up with a tripwire grin.

In Heyoka’s blacklight, doubt is a sacred rebel, a trickster’s gift that keeps you nimble. When everyone agrees on a given “truth” Run! Not toward chaos, but toward clarity, the kind that lives in questions, not answers. Dance through the status quo junkies. Fly above the mollycoddled crowd. Elevate yourself above the battlefield of the human condition. Sow uncertainty like seeds, knowing each crack of doubt lets in more light.

7.) Want to meet God? Shake hands with the devil:

“Don’t forget that the one who knows his devil knows his God.” ~Shams Tabrizi

Trip over your own shadow and find divinity in the tumble. You can’t know the heights of the Soul without diving into the mess of the Self. Your “devil”—that shadowy knot of fears, ego, and suppressed rage—isn’t something to banish. It’s the raw material of revelation.

A sacred clown doesn’t say, “Fix yourself.” She says, “Dance with your mess! Make it ridiculous!” In that dance, you uncover what’s holy, not by escaping your flaws but by embracing them like an old friend who’s terrible at keeping secrets.

Heyoka sneaks up and paints your ego neon pink. Suddenly, you see it—your pride, your pettiness, your need to control—lit up like a carnival sign. Most people would run from that mirror, but the sacred clown hands you a flute and says, “Make music out of it!”

Knowing your devil means facing those parts you’d rather hide—not to wallow, but to laugh. The devil isn’t evil; it’s just the part of you that’s forgotten how to laugh at absurdity. And in that laughter, something shifts. The divine peeks through.

Knowing your devil isn’t a grim inquisition; it’s a wild unmasking. Your greed, your anger, your insecurities—they’re not roadblocks to God. They’re trail markers. Each one, when faced with courage and a smile, reveals a piece of the sacred puzzle. The divine isn’t “out there” in some untouchable realm; it’s woven into the very flaws you’re tempted to curse.

This path isn’t for the faint of heart. Heyoka knows that facing your devil can sting. It’s raw, humbling, and sometimes embarrassing. But that’s the point. The divine doesn’t shine through perfection, it glows in between the cracks, where you’ve dared to be fully human. God isn’t found by running from your darkness but by turning toward it with a playful heart. The devil you know isn’t your enemy; it’s your guide, pointing to the God that’s been hiding in plain sight all along.

Image source:

Heyoka and The Skeleton Drummer by Andre Peraza

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (7 Soul-stretching Vials of Heyoka Medicine) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.