Men Plan. God Laughs.
Apparently, William Shatner had his own version of this famous observation: “If you want to get screwed, tell your plans to God.”
It’s cute, but it only captures half of the original meaning, as far as I can tell.
One of the peak experiences of my entire life happened earlier this year, on an ayahuasca dieta in the Upper Amazon. And it wasn’t (just) the ayahuasca. I was dieting a master shaman plant, piñon blanco, which is a being of and from the highest realms of light. After the last night of ceremony, back in my tambo, with the visionary aspects of the ayahuasca having largely worn off, something happened to me. I saw God, basically. In fact, as it was happening, before any sense of separate self was completely blown away, I had the awareness to pray, “Oh please don’t let me be another ayahuasca casualty. I don’t want to emerge from the jungle thinking I’m God or something. I’ve got enough problems as it is.”
This, and my initial unwillingness to let go of the notion that -sure, I’m God, but so is everyone else- was deeply funny to the being that was… descending?… all around me. Deeply funny like it was belly laughing. It sounded like Lord Buddha was playing Jabba the Hutt in a pantomime play. Deep laughter, but enlightened. It kept knocking my feeble belief that other people were also God from my mind, and every time I would try to think it again, it would knock it away and laugh.
And I get it now, after the fact. That thought is great down here in normal awareness. But if you try to go up there with it, you are definitionally holding onto an illusion of separateness. For other people to be God, other people must be other. So the feeling was more “nope, just you. You’re God.” And what was so funny to this being was that God itself had forgotten that it was God. God had come down here and forgotten literally the one and only thing in the universe.
(When I came back from my Enochian Samadhi disco ball experience, in my mind I tentatively tested the second half of the sentence again, “… and so is everyone else,” and it stuck. So I’m pleased to announce I emerged from the jungle just as sane as I was when I went in, for whatever that’s worth.)
So let’s unpack this ‘men plan, God laughs’ thing. There is, of course, the Shatner layer: All forms of planning are essentially hubris because of how small we are in relation to the Creator and the cosmos. This is always good to bear in mind.
But when God laughs, is he laughing at you or with you? In my experience, God is definitely laughing at you. But in a good-natured way. There is a tweet from maybe ten years ago that lives rent-free in my head: “If somebody broke into my apartment looking for money, I’d just laugh and help them look.”
He’s laughing at you, but he’s also laughing at the exciting possibility of co-creating with this particular dumb-dumb’s plans now. I mean to riff off the tweet, if you pray to God for money, he will certainly laugh and help you look.
So the secondary aspect of “men plan, God laughs” is closer to Jung’s definition of God or the Self as anything that gets in your way, anything that trips you up, waylays you or scuttles your plans. Because it is in those moments that something new must be born. The old thing is gone. The reliable thing is no more. There must be something new in Creation now. A birth. How delightful. No wonder he’s laughing.
I’m thinking about this now because I’m currently on a bit of a road trip around Tasmania, having finished up the six week shadow work intensive, The Shaman’s Devil. (It was a huge success and we’ll very likely do it again early next year, so sign up to be notified.)
Looks nice, right? These photos are from yesterday, before the 120km per hour winds arrived, which cancelled all trips to the Isle of the Dead. Those were my plans. God started laughing.
And speaking of shadow work, there is a time in my life where that would have quite upset me. But instead of reacting to it, I responded to it. My first thought was genuinely… You know, you could actually go back to the motor inn and write that Substack post about plans going wrong now that your plans have gone wrong.
Responding rather than reacting is at the very heart of how shadow work is such a potent force multiplier for manifestation. This is the invitation hidden underneath ‘men plan, God laughs.’
It is also why people often ask just what exactly was Gandalf’s plan. Because, from a human level, it’s kinda dumb.
As far as I can tell, Gandalf’s plan was
To head in the approximate direction of the goal, accompanied by the people and objects who seemed to be carrying some kind of fate/doom/destiny energy pertaining to his goal.
At every hiccup or challenge, always choose the Good. At every choice point, always ‘rely on God’.
This twin piston powers all successful magical campaigns. You have an outcome, rather than a plan. A plan is detailed and ‘filled in’, with lots of moving parts. God will surely laugh at that.
So you have an ultimate outcome and then lots of smaller plans or tasks. And each one of them really has only one goal: Choose the good in that specific situation, whatever it happens to be.
But you also do your best to put your finger on the scale by including magical people and objects on your ‘side’, on your ‘trajectory’.
Just as it is in our world, in Middle-earth, it’s the guys with the most detailed plans, Sauron, Saruman, and Morgoth, who always end up on the wrong side and always lose.
Because God’s comedy club is improv-only. And you’re here all week.