The Universe Is Playing Hide and Seek With You , And You Forgot the Rules

A ruthless look at detachment, illusion, and how consciousness turns thoughts into reality

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Before enlightenment, before trauma, before identity, before the first thought of “I” — there was play.

Not play as entertainment, but play as cosmic strategy: the only way the infinite could experience itself without collapsing back into silence. Ancient traditions had a precise name for this.

Līlā (also spelled Leela).

Divine play. Sacred concealment. The universe forgetting itself — on purpose.

Līlā: Cosmic Hide and Seek

My friend Joan Pancoe is an extraordinary spiritual teacher in New York, unconventional, unsentimental, and uncompromising.

Her teaching is woven across East and West, North and South: Tantric, shamanic, Taoist, Buddhist, Sufi, Kabbalistic, and occasionally something that feels almost alien. But there is no New Age anesthesia here. No poetic fog. No spiritual bypassing.

From her Lower East Side Manhattan garden apartment, Joan teaches with psychic precision and fierce clarity. Her work cuts directly through confusion about detachment while honoring the beauty of form, loving completely, unapologetically, and without withdrawal.

This is not about transcending life. It is about waking up inside it.

“The universe is not hiding from us. It is hiding as us.”

Cosmic trickster. Coyote teacher. Master of cosmic hide-and-seek.

This is the first misunderstanding.

Children Playing Hide-and-Seek: Joy rehearsing the oldest metaphysics.

As children, we loved hide and seek, not only the hiding, but the tension of it. The thrill of not being found. The terror of being forgotten. The strange desire to be both invisible and seen.

Once, my brother hid in a cupboard where my mother stored sacks of winter food — walnuts, raisins, almonds, dates. While everyone searched frantically, he snacked himself into a stupor and fell asleep. By evening, panic had set in. Even our neighbors were searching. Until my sister opened the cupboard for supplies and found him asleep, one hand clutching raisins, the other almonds.

Cosmic hide-and-seek works like that.

We hide. We forget. We snack on experience. We fall asleep inside form.

Cosmic hide-and-seek is not a trick God plays on humanity. It is the only way infinity can experience itself without collapsing back into silence. The One must forget itself in order to meet itself.

So it becomes waves.

“The One must forget itself in order to meet itself.”

Meditator in the Cosmic Landscape: Attention creates a center; the world gathers around it.

Cosmic Expansion, Collapse, and the Necessity of Forgetting

Seen this way, the great movements of the universe begin to rhyme. Modern physics describes a cosmos that bursts outward in a Big Bang, space itself expanding, differentiating, cooling, forming stars, worlds, and eventually minds. At the other extreme, black holes represent collapse so complete that distinction dissolves and information disappears from view. These are not explanations for God, but echoes of a deeper rhythm long described in myth and mysticism: differentiation and return, concealment and remembrance.

In Kabbalah, this rhythm is named Ein Sof — the infinite without limit — withdrawn through tzimtzum so that finitude can arise. In Hindu philosophy, it is Līlā, the divine play in which consciousness becomes form to experience itself from within. Read symbolically, cosmic expansion and collapse mirror the same necessity: infinity must enter limitation to be knowable, and limitation must eventually release back into unity. The universe is not “going somewhere” in a human sense; it is enacting a rhythm that allows awareness to appear, forget, encounter itself, and remember again.

“Reality is not merely perceived. It is co-created through attention, repetition, and agreement.”

From Thought to Thing: How Reality Takes Shape

This is where many spiritual teachings grow vague — or mystical in a way that explains nothing.

How do we go from thought → idea → form → world?

It happens in stages.

First, there is undifferentiated awareness — the ocean itself. Then a movement appears: a ripple, a bias, a tendency.

That movement becomes thought.

Thought is not personal at first. It is pre-verbal. A pressure. A leaning. A signal. Only later does it crystallize into language.

Repeated thoughts coagulate into ideas. Ideas gain mass through attention.

Attention organizes perception. Perception recognizes patterns. Patterns stabilize into meaning.

Meaning, shared and repeated, becomes consensus reality.

Enough humans agree on a pattern, and it hardens into:

• Institutions
• Economies
• Religions
• Technologies
• Nations
• Identities

This is how the invisible becomes visible.

Reality is not merely perceived. It is co-created through attention, repetition, and agreement.

And here is the danger:

When we forget that thoughts are movements within awareness, we mistake them for truth itself.

This is what the Indian traditions call maya, not illusion as falsehood, but the spell that arises when we mistake appearances for the source.

That is how waves forget they are water.

Wave and Woman (Ukiyo-e–inspired): Grace meets force: the human figure held inside the surge of becoming.

The Wave Rises

A wave lifts its head above the surface. Form appears. Ego coagulates. Separation occurs.

“I.” “Me.” “I am.”

Life forms. Identity forms. Individuation happens. Desire ignites: sex, power, hunger, curiosity, ambition, conquest, consumption, creation.

This is not a mistake. It is biology. It is cosmology.

Each wave rises, believing it is separate:

I am born. I will crest. I will fall.

And this belief is not an error. It is the price of experience.

A life may last a certain number of breaths — days, years, or a hundred and thirty years. For most, it passes like a dream: mechanical, distracted, sleepwalking through attachment, pain, pleasure, ambition, and avoidance. Games within games.

The senses dominate:

• Eye
• Ear
• Nose
• Tongue
• Body
• Mind (thought itself)

Without forgetting, there is no love. Without form, nothing can be tasted. Without limits, there is no story — no deliciousness, no heartbreak, no meaning.

The tragedy is not that the wave exists. The tragedy is when the wave forgets the ocean entirely.

Then — splash — it submerges again.

“Oh shit,” says the soul. “I forgot. I promised to stay awake this time.”

So it rises again. And again. And again.

Detachment: The Most Misunderstood Word in Spirituality

Detachment is attachment without amnesia.

When people hear detachment, they imagine numbness. Withdrawal. Cold transcendence. A monk floating above life, untouched. A serene smile masking avoidance, the Bliss Ninny.

That is not detachment. That is dissociation wearing spiritual clothing.

True detachment does not mean:

• Not feeling
• Not loving
• Not engaging
• Not suffering
• Not thinking

As the Heart Sutra states with surgical clarity:

No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind. No ignorance and no end of ignorance. No suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path. No wisdom and no attainment.

This is not a denial of experience. It is freedom from fixation.

True detachment means not forgetting what you are while fully experiencing what you are not.

Self-remembering. Self-observation. Seeing I.

You still love, ache, and desire.

But something fundamental has shifted:

You no longer mistake the movement for the source.

“Detachment is attachment without amnesia.”

Archetype: “The Bliss Ninny”

A Bliss Ninny is a spiritual avoider disguised as an awakened being.

They confuse transcendence with numbness, serenity with suppression, and bliss with realization. Their smile is constant, their language elevated, their insights vague, and their engagement with real life minimal.

They seek:

• Peace without penetration
• Oneness without cost
• Light without shadow
• Wisdom without incarnation.

Bliss becomes a narcotic. Detachment becomes dissociation. Spirituality becomes anesthesia.

They float above the fire and call it awakening.

If your spirituality cannot survive grief, it is not real.

True realization is not blissful neutrality. It is lucid participation.

Wave / Cosmos / Kali / Self: Four faces of one remembering: What looks like contradiction is one field learning to see itself.

“The tragedy is not that the wave exists. The tragedy is when the wave forgets the ocean.”

The Ocean of Becoming

The deepest error in spiritual teaching is the fantasy of permanence.

There is no permanently detached human being.

Because human means oscillation. Breath in, breath out. Form arising, form dissolving.

Even the awakened wave still moves.

Detachment is not a final state you reach and keep. It is a muscle of remembrance you return to — again and again.

The ocean is not static. It is an ocean of becoming.

How Remembrance Is Stabilized:

The Six Empowerments

Awakening does not survive on insight alone.

Remembrance is stabilized through the Six Empowerments:

1. The Liberated Essence Within — direct knowing; the ocean recognizing itself as the wave
2. Authentic Teachings — maps that do not flatter the ego
3. Transmission — presence awakening presence
4. Sacred Place in Nature — environments that quiet the consensus reality
5. Solitude in Nature — where masks fall, and patterns unwind
6. Spiritual Community — mirroring, correction, warmth, and humility

We develop deep trust in our own Liberated Essence while consciously leaning on these other Powers.

This is how awakening becomes habitable. This is how remembrance survives contact with life.

The Secret Teachings Rarely Say Out Loud

Illusion is not the enemy.

Forgetfulness is.

When awareness is present, illusion becomes art. When awareness is absent, pleasure hardens into bondage.

The goal is not to stop playing hide-and-seek. The goal is to play knowingly.

To be a wave that dances, knowing it is water, knowing it will fall, and loving the rising anyway.

“Lila” Script + Yab-Yum Symbol: The name of the game, written into form.

Closing Reflection

In this great game of cosmic hide-and-seek, attachment to the sensory world carries both deliciousness and suffering. The teaching does not deny the sweetness of form , it cautions against forgetfulness. When awareness is lost, pleasure becomes bondage; when remembrance is present, even illusion becomes a teacher. Energy follows intent: where attention wanders unconsciously, suffering gathers, and where attention is held with clarity, wisdom unfolds.

We are not asked to reject life’s flavors, only to taste them without forgetting who is tasting.

Perhaps awakening is not escaping the game.

Perhaps awakening is remembering that you are both the seeker and the one being sought.

Yab-Yum (Thangka-style, full color): Union without collapse, stillness and motion sharing one body.

“Illusion is not the enemy. Forgetfulness is.”

Glossary

• Līlā — Divine play; reality’s intentional self-concealment
• Maya — The spell of misidentification; mistaking form for source
• Detachment — Engagement without identification
• Self-Remembering — Awareness of being aware while acting
• Bliss Ninny — Spiritual avoidance disguised as awakening. Term coined by W. Brian Arthur
• Consensus Reality — Patterns solidified through collective agreement

Credits & Lineage.

With gratitude to Joan Pancoe, an uncompromising teacher of lived awakening whose clarity cuts through spiritual bypassing and abstraction; John P. Milton, Coyote Teacher and founder of the Way of Nature, whose articulation of the Six Empowerments grounds awakening in land, solitude, transmission, and community; the Heart Sutra of the Prajñāpāramitā tradition, whose radical negation frees experience from fixation without denying form; Fritjof Capra, whose The Tao of Physics revealed deep resonances between modern cosmology and ancient metaphysics; G. I. Gurdjieff, whose teachings on self-remembering and mechanical life exposed the cost of unconscious existence; and W. Brian Arthur, whose work on emergence — and whose coined term “Bliss Ninny” — help illuminate both the creative intelligence of complex systems and the subtle traps of spiritual avoidance.

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Photo Credit

Key visuals developed by the author using AI image generation, digital editing, and conceptual art direction, inspired by historical photographs for educational and transformative use.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa — Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), c. 1831. Color woodblock print (ukiyo-e), from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (public domain). Often regarded as the most famous wave image in art history, Hokusai’s iconic composition shows a towering, claw-like wave poised to engulf small fishing boats, while Mount Fuji appears distant, calm, and immovable in the background. The image captures a timeless tension between human vulnerability and the overwhelming power of nature, symbolizing impermanence, endurance, and Japan’s cultural relationship with the sea. Mass-produced as a woodblock print and widely circulated, The Great Wave played a pivotal role in introducing Japanese art to the West and profoundly influenced artists such as Monet and Van Gogh through its bold composition and innovative use of Prussian blue.

Untitled Wave and Woman Print — Contemporary Japanese-inspired decorative artwork. This modern image combines traditional Japanese wave motifs with the figure of a woman in a kimono, rendered in rich color and dynamic form. Drawing inspiration from the dramatic ocean imagery of Edo-period ukiyo-e and the iconic compositions of masters such as Katsushika Hokusai, the work is a contemporary decorative print rather than a documented historical woodblock. Reinterpreting the classic aesthetic of Japanese wave imagery, it balances the tension of turbulent water with a serene human presence, suggesting a poetic dialogue between nature’s power and human grace — an echo of centuries of Japanese artistic tradition translated into a modern visual language.

About the Author

Vazken Kalayjian is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and branding strategist working at the intersection of creativity, consciousness, and intelligent systems. His work focuses on coherence, helping individuals and institutions translate lived experience, values, and intelligence into finished form through art, writing, and design. Drawing on decades of practice across global branding, visual arts, spiritual traditions, and emerging technologies, his work emphasizes embodied intelligence, disciplined creativity, and the sacred made practical.