Halloween At Lakeside

Illusion? Reality? In Between?

In the very earliest of time…

a person could become an animal if he wanted to

and an animal could become a human being…

and there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers…

and what people wanted to happen could happen —

all you had to do was say it…Inuit tradition

The theme of “Illusion and Reality” is one of the classic ideas of humanity. In fact, it is one of the touchstones of spirituality, mythmaking, philosophy, literature, psychology, ethics, and science–of life itself.

Halloween symbolizes this theme. Here at Lakeside and around the world.

Ancient cultures state similar things about so-called “illusion” and so-called “reality.”

Consider the Australian Aboriginal culture and its belief in “Dream Time,” when humanity had powers of divination unknown to us moderns.

Consider Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the interplay of illusion and reality. The characters assume roles to hide who they really are. Claudius, in truth, is a murderer and usurper of the throne, but he plays the roles of grieving brother and rightful king; Gertrude is an adulteress but plays the role of a “most seeming-virtuous queen”–whereas her son Hamlet says of her that she is a “most pernicious woman.” Even Hamlet himself pretends he is a madman in an effort to reveal his uncle’s guilt.

Gertrude asks her son why he is so very upset about his father’s death: “Why seems it so particular with thee?”

Hamlet is furious being asked this and proclaims the sincerity of his grief: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’.”

How many of us can truthfully say that? That we “know not ‘seems”? Hamlet is stating reality, at least in regard to his father’s murder. But for him there is that constant interplay of “seeming” and “truth”; of “illusion” and “reality.” Is that not also true in our own lives?

A symbol of this complexity of determining what might be illusion and what might be reality is to “see” your own image in a mirror. To really “see” yourself by looking deeply into your eyes for a number of moments, and then looking more deeply–beyond your eyes into your essence. This meditative practice might very well bring you to an awareness of who you once were, currently are, and will evolve to be. It might allow you to somehow move beyond the illusion-reality construct. I personally know of what I speak!

Shakespeare uses the dramatic technique of a “play within a play” where the characters play other characters within another play, similar to the image of those Russian dolls where when the head of one of them is popped off, another smaller version appears inside, and with more head-popping, smaller and smaller versions of the prototype doll are revealed. In other words, when you casually glance at yourself in the mirror, or when you merely see that solitary doll, what you are “seeing” is not the whole of “reality” but merely “illusion.”

From the subject of murder and mayhem, and of mirrors and dolls, let us turn to love, although sometimes love, too, has attributes of a good Shakespearean tragedy.

Consider the word “charade” in regard to the concept of love. It is a word meaning pretense, farce, sham, fake, travesty, imitation, simulation, and make-believe. Some of these synonyms are nice and harmless, perhaps even fun. Others are not. Just like the “pretend” games we played as children, when we pretended we were good guys or bad guys, heroes or villains. Then we grew up and perhaps only “played” at love until, as the song Charade says:

Love left the masquerade.

Fate seemed to pull the strings

I turned and you were gone

While from the darkened wings

The music box played on.

Haunting image isn’t it? That music box playing on and on offstage in the dark, like some kind of never-ending celestial tune accompanying the love affairs of us poor mortals. Life, love…what is real, what is illusion?

I guess we could also conclude that had Hamlet and everyone else in the play continued with the illusion of things being just fine, the drama would have been a comedy instead of a tragedy. Some people live like that, you know. They maintain the charade; seemingly happy. I truly believe that each one of us has a degree of this charade-playing. If the charade were not held up by society, would it actually be a society at all?

Or would we need to celebrate Halloween?  

Of course, there are those who believe that this talk of illusion and reality–of “spirituality”–is merely make-believe, the ultimate charade. Consider these thoughts of Joseph Henry Press:

… the number of people who are able to distinguish between science and pseudoscience is diminishing. A sign seen recently in a bookstore read: New Age Section Moved to Science Section. Increased belief in pseudoscience is a global trend. It responds to the search for personal powers we long for but can’t seem to find…It promises to give people things that just don’t exist. The twenty-first century age of science is in danger of becoming the age of pseudoscience.

Oh, it is so very complex is it not? This dance between what seems to be reality and what seems to be illusion, and all that stuff between the two–the interstices of existence, the conundrum, the miasma, the panoply of possibilities!

And so the debate will go on as it has from the beginning of human consciousness. The debate between what is real, what is illusion, and what is an in-between state of human awareness.

At any rate, forget my philosophical peregrination in honor of Halloween, and just put on a costume, go trick-or-treating, and dance as a Zombie to Michael Jackson’s Thriller on Ajijic’s Malecon Basketball Courts on Saturday, Oct. 25 at 3 pm! Life is far too short not to have fun!

NOTE: Don Beaudreau has written 12 books on a variety of subjects. His latest novel, a satiric comedy, is called FIRST CHURCH: SPIRITUAL WOKISM IN THE PEWS TODAY. It is an example of “auto-fiction”–meaning that the book is based on his life’s experiences but a life that has been expanded to suit the author’s story-line, i.e. illusion versus reality!