Greetings dear ones,
It’s finally Halloween. I say finally because this holiday falls right during my time of the year, 9 days before my incarnation in this body nearly 36 years ago. As a Scorpio it is my official day of reckoning, and as a Scorpio I am one that loves to wear masks and dress up anyway, most days of the year, diving into the dark corners of existence. So for your trick or treat, depending on how much you like this writing, my thoughts on the mask:
Halloween itself has come down to us from a blending of various religious holidays over the ages, most notably Samhain, the ancient Celtic celebration of “summer’s end.” The Celts felt that on the 31st of October the veils of the worlds thinned and it was more easy for spirits to pass from the land of the dead to the land of the living, and vice-versa, should one care to journey out of this our “middle world.” Hence the wearing of masks, so some say, where the living would dress up as spirits in order to trick the invading etheric beings, thus avoiding demonic possession, curses, and all that other nasty stuff that dead spirits were (and still are) believed to do to us warm-blooded mortals.
The veil between the worlds, thinning. Maya, as the Yogis call her, that tactile, tangible net that we wade through, suddenly full of holes. And I am reminded again of that Leonard Cohen lyric, “It’s the cracks that let the light through.” In this case, at this time of the year, in this eternal presen, what is peeking through the web at you?
I love this holiday. For one day a year most people in America feel comfortable enough to dress up as whatever they’ve always wanted to dress up as, and they take to the streets en masse, en blague. The freaks take over, or that’s the tag line. Of course not everyone takes part in the shenanigans and most parents end up as chaperons in their own neighborhoods, while the kids amass hoards of high fructose corn syrup-laden treats. But still, there’s something to the masquerade, isn’t there? We let go as a culture of the usual mask, the work mask, the family mask, the whatever mask, and put another one on, and sometimes the one we wear today is the closest to the real thing. And to top it off, it’s Saturday.
I am reminded of a Halloween about 4 years ago where I wore a mask to a dance party. It was a full-on masquerade so I wore a borrowed Venetian mask that hid my face behind a quixotic smile. I kept it on almost the entire night, completely hidden and “otherly.” Throughout this party I noticed that there was a deep feeling of disquietude growing in me and others, I could see and feel it in them, since the mask was so good that not even my eyes were detectable. The three friends that I was to meet there didn’t recognize me for over an hour. As time went on, other people’s costumes came loose (or off), but something about being hidden, something about that anonimity stuck with me that night, and I felt compelled to keep the game going. Then at some point, late in the game, a friend said “aren’t you hot under that thing?” I found this very funny and let the facade down, but the insights have stuck with me to this day.
Part of it was discomforting and part of it was liberating. I felt that because of the mask people were scared to come too close and mistrustful, but also reassured that I wasn’t really there-thus they could come a little closer. It varied depending on each person, of course. Some people love to wear masks and relate to others who do as well; some don’t. Yet everyone was in an in-between space with regards to me and several people shared some very strange and personal things with the mask, ones they probably would not have with a bare-faced human. A woman felt it necessary to confess a secret about her partner in the middle of the dance floor, and she couldn’t see the grimace I wore beneath the plaster. It was truly a strange space between the worlds, very appropriate for the night at hand, and I think of that often, wearing my mask to work or to yoga class-perhaps I’m feeling a bit low or confused when suddenly someone says, “hey, you look great!” What part of my mask are they seeing? Can they see beneath it, and would they want to? How safe is my mask, my smile, how comforting to others?
So these days I find two wonderful masking things happening on All Hallow’s Eve:
One, this other-self-ing-aspect, where we don alter egos, bare our skin in scandalous lingerie, throw on capes and eyepatches and generally let loose the hidden sides of ourselves that we rarely share with the world.
Two, the transitional aspect, moving from summer to winter, from long light to long night, from warm to cold, from outer to inner.
The costume and the winterizing. As fall deepens and the snows pile up on the Rockies we watch the leaves fall in the Northeast and it seems like the trees are dying. We see flower petals falling and not coming back and they too seem like they are dying. Yet this is an appearance-of course the annuals will come back and the other flowers won’t, but their cellular material and energy returns to the earth and becomes other minerals, nitrogen, etc, feeding roots and earth until spring calls it all forth again. The trees merely go on doing what they always do, sans leaves. Really all of nature is going within, remembering to conserve heat and energy for the cold months ahead, much like the bears and other animals that hibernate, donning a mask of stillness. It is the time of zazen in nature. I sometimes imagine the trees resting in Stillness, watching the inbreath and outbreath of energy as it comes, feeling that the sun, though closer than ever, is losing its power to transform them and bring them closer to itself; I feel them being okay with that. And at the same time we feel that cyclical call, deep in our DNA.
In this way Halloween can be a call to us to go within as well, to scale back some of the projects and outward energies of the warmer months, to prepare the nest and warm the hearth, inner and outer. And to be still.
Yet with the impending holiday madness upon us, this rarely happens. If anything, we turn away from the inward cycle and move into the bizarre outward cycle of projecting of our love for others into the brouhaha of gift-giving. Gift certificates and gift cards, the new way to go-that way people aren’t wasting precious time returning our presents. Halloween is, on the cultural level, the gateway to shopping season; so in that way, the veil is indeed thin today, especially as many of our wallets have grown thinner during these last two years.
For anyone familiar with Ken Wilber’s work, I offer the incredible book “Up From Eden,” in which the author parallels the movement of the human psyche from birth to adulthood to the transpersonal/ enlightenment phase with the movement of human culture through the ages. Riding the parallel lines of this epic work, we find ourselves culturally (according to Wilber, with whom I agree) mired in the High Egoic period, symbolically stuck in our late 30′s as a global community, all too concerned with amassing piles of money and possessions as a substitute for our lack of connectedness to the universe and source of our life. This time of year is a good reminder of that broken connection, or it certainly can be for many of us.
Wilber (and many great thinkers and sages before him) tell us that all this masking, all this substitute-self-ing, is an attempt to make up for our ego’s confusion about its separateness from everything around it. Somewhere along the line, at a young age, the mind begins to feel very, very alone, very, very separated from people, animals, nature, and ultimately from the Divine. Hence we train our egos to be strong, we seek to procreate, build lasting things, work hard for 401ks that we can hand down to our offspring, build up the ego as much as we can so that it feels more permanent and overall look outwardly for happiness in the material world (yes I love my computer). We can thus invent a sort of immortal self that replaces our real self, whose immortality is our birthright to begin with, but that we have all but forgotten. Forgive me Ken, for this poor synopsis, but it comes down to substitution and masking. And it feels so real, doesn’t it? Touch the computer screen, isn’t it separate from you?
I know that time is short before the fructose and other corn products need to be distributed. Hang on for a few more breaths.
Essentially I am asking you, dear reader, if you have gotten this far, to take a moment on Halloween and look within yourself. Inside each one of us the entire universe is manifested, and somewhere inside that universe is a little key that will unlock the chain that we keep on ourselves, that will open the mask. Look into the right portion of your heart, right in the center of your chest, and see if on this special day/night, when the veil is at its thinnest, there isn’t some light coming in there, or some message about the impending winter that you may need to hear. Maybe your ancestors are coming through the tiniest of the cracks in the veil and they have something to share with you. Maybe nothing is coming through at all, just silence-this is significant as well. After all, this holiday has been celebrated for thousands of years, and our times are no less fearful or magical than any other times.
Yet I urge you take five minutes today before the fun starts to simply un-mask yourself. Take five minutes of deep Stillness. Let go of the family, the work, the social life, drop the successes and failures and ownership of everything, as best you can, and just look into your heart. Somewhere, in one of the smallest of cracks in this great veil is an entry point-it is a direct line to reality, the unconditioned, unbroken unity that permeates the Cosmos, the true and infinite Self. The place of no-separation is there. Meditate on that space for five minutes, just searching for it. And if that sounds too difficult or weird then try this:
Think about your ultimate Halloween costume, the one that is closest to your image of your truest self. If this too is difficult then think back to when you were about 5 or 6 and think what you wore then for Halloween, or what you would have liked to have been in your ideal world. If you were my age, it may have been Han Solo or Luke or Spidey, if you were a boy. Maybe Fozzie Bear. Ask yourself what this true-self-costume would look like, how long it would take to put together, where you would get the things you need to make it, and where on earth you could possibly wear it? Would it just be you as you are already? Would you be a superhero?A tramp? A vampire? If you get a good answer from within then ask yourself where you’re going to spend Halloween, when the veil is at its thinnest and the spirits are breathing close. Are you going to a party where you can wear this super-outfit? Would you get arrested if you did? Are you with close friends tonight, ones that will see this you and love it, or laugh? Coming into contact with this self can be very liberating and throw some insight back at us, no matter what it looks like.
There’s a good chance that every day is Halloween and that every day we cover up this true shining Self that inhabits us. I invite you to do yourself a favor and let some portion of that truer self out of the bag just this one night, in honor of the season, and see what ends up happening. Be a shining warrior or a maven or a thundercat. But be forewarned-there is a wildness within us, one that has not been tamed by thousands of years of culture and conditioning, and if your inner self is a vampire 0r a werewolf, then please, for the sake of your friends, wear some garlic.
Blessings, love, courage,
BarBoo!
