Halloween, Costumes, & Spirit

Halloween
Although I have not celebrated Halloween much in recent years, throughout my whole life Halloween has been my favorite holiday. Yes, I like Christmas too, but there is just something I find very appealing about Halloween. Halloween is actually the most blatantly spiritual holiday in our (my) culture–not the most religious holiday though. After all, it is the only holiday where people actually dress up as spirits.

Looking Through Costumes
In our normal everyday lives, our bodies act as costumes to wear over our true spirit. Our bodies are a kind of defense we hide behind in order to protect ourselves from a world that seems different, threatening, and outside of ourselves. When we look upon people merely as bodies, we can’t help but be afraid. For bodies emphasize difference. And that for which we cannot recognize as our self is something we tend to treat as different, outside of our control, and thus suspect.

The tradition of wearing Halloween costumes revolves around the idea of using them to scare away what we fear. On Halloween, when people dress up, it is fun because we don’t take it seriously. We know that people are just wearing costumes and so we know the forms they project are not true. Now, imagine if we took that same playful Halloween approach and applied it to the costumes people wear in everyday life: to the costumes of body and personality. The costumes of body and personality are very often used in the same ways as Halloween costumes in that they are used as a defense against things we fear as outside of ourselves. Thus, they are used as tools to emphasize the idea of separateness.

We actually live in a world of roaring, scared, little mice. And the mice that roar loudest are not the scariest but in fact the most scared. And all this fear is born of a belief in difference (separation). In other words, we take costumes seriously. We tend to believe that, instead of there being one common loving spirit shared by all under those scary costumes, there are real, individual monsters—monsters that must be stopped. And we try to stop those monsters by putting on monster costumes ourselves. Thus, the world becomes a group of monsters on a big monster hunt (or witch hunt) and we lose contact with the world that rest underneath costumes. And, in fact, we often deny that there is any world at all underneath costumes (materialism, cough cough).

The Mirror behind Costumes
If we were to strip ourselves of all our costumes, we would find that we are a lot like mirrors, and what mirrors do is they reflect. When mirrors simply reflect in the company of nothing else but more mirrors, the otherness upon which reflecting is dependent dissolves into a unified oneness. However, when mirrors try to limit reflection, duality is born.

Duality is born of the idea of a mirror that doesn’t completely reflect; it is a mirror that keeps something hidden, separate, and unshared. The result of this is shadow (incomplete reflection) and shadow makes form. We essentially cover up our true mirror nature with costumes made of shadow. And when we do that, we forget that all we are really seeing out there in the world are reflections of our own projected ideas—namely the ideas of duality, separation, and thus shadow. Costumes are the things we wear that are not reflective of the truth; they reinforce the idea of otherness; they mix in the dark side (non-reflection).

Inverse Costumes
Although the idea of dressing up like a ghost is a neat idea, and in a way a kind of inverse costume, a more meaningful inverse costume would be to dress up as a mirror. Ideally, to make a mirror costume, you would want some sort of mirror-like fabric that acts like a two-way mirror so that you could see through it. You’d take the mirror fabric, drape it over yourself, and your inverse costume would be complete.

Now imagine a Halloween party that took place in a mirror room where everyone wore this same mirror costume to the party. This Halloween party would be a symbolic representation of the nature of oneness—our true nature.

Conclusion
Our bodily costumes are a given. We can use them as monster costumes or mirror costumes. Which is to say, we can use our bodies to communicate fear, death, and separation, or love, understanding, solidarity, and forgiveness. What we communicate is what we learn and what we believe. So, realize that really, every day is Halloween and we can look at everyday costumes just as lightheartedly as we look at Halloween costumes. And when we do that, we are looking beyond costumes and thus beyond illusory difference and beyond fear to where we are all one.

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