What Halloween Can Symbolize

Beyond the Masks We Wear

Not until you have the courage to meet yourselves face to face…will you have taken the first steps along the path of wisdom. Judge Learned Hand.

Discovering the self that exists behind the mask we wear (that everyday persona we present to others) is a gift. Here in that secret chamber exists the so-called “shadow” side, a mostly undiscovered self. It is where we find the wisdom within us. Most of the time, however, the shadow is waiting for an opportune time to show itself. And it usually does during times of loss: death, betrayal, condemnation; as well as during ecstatic moments: a birth, a marriage, a deep sense of having done something right.

Still, how infrequently we remove our masks, revealing to ourselves or others who we really are by expressing what we sincerely think and feel. Most of the time we hold up our mask firmly to our face, fearing the letting down of our guard and revealing the shadow hiding behind our persona. Then again, we must ask if we can ever truly know who that person is behind the mask we wear; the true or truer self — the intimate being who for whatever safety concerns prefers to hide.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker describes what the founder of Gestalt therapy Fritz Perls has to say concerning the human psyche:

The first two layers are the everyday layers…these are the glib, empty talk, “cliché” and role-playing layers. Many people live out their lives never getting underneath them. The third layer…covers our feeling of being empty and lost — the very feeling that we try to banish in building up our character defenses. Underneath this layer is the fourth and most baffling one…the layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart. Only when we explore this…do we get to the layer of…our “authentic self”: what we really are without sham, without disguise, without defenses against fear.

Think about the origin of Halloween regarding this fourth, terrifying layer, “the terror that we carry around in our secret heart.” The holiday started because of the Celtic desire in Ireland five centuries before the birth of Christ to hide one’s true identity from the disembodied spirits of people who had passed on during the previous year.

These spirits were looking for live bodies to inhabit. So people dressed up in costumes to hide — in fact, they sought the most hideous disguises so that the spirits would be put off by less-than-beautiful bodies. That is how the idea was born of dressing up as witches, demons and hobgoblins.

Gestalt and other psychological structures, which describe the various layers of the human psyche, speak of our propensity to hide who we are. Such methods of healing tell us to tear away our masks, to discover who we really are, to know that we each have an authentic self. Now, it is a moot point as to what all this might mean.

For instance, Leo Rosten tells us:

We must know that life will always have unbearable stretches of loneliness and that we can never truly be understood, not even by those who love us; that we cannot completely understand someone else no matter how much we want to.

I then must also add that we can never truly understand ourselves!

Still, Fritz Perls and others, not just the professional counselors, tell us that most of us do not get much further than expressing the first two layers of our being. We stay stuck. Stuck talking empty, polite talk. This is necessary for the continuance of a civilized society. But if that is all we talk about, or think about, or act upon, then it is not living up to our potential as a species to advance beyond a state of superficiality.

Of course, we must be open to this gathering together of the human spirit. We must be willing to take a part in determining that we want to accept the authentic self that lives beneath the multiple incrustations of our habitual ways.

There is a story about a university professor who asked a Zen master to explain Zen. The only problem was that the professor was so full of his own importance that he kept talking on and on as he asked his question (which was really a prolonged way of making a statement and thereby giving his own explanation of Zen). Well, the Zen master kept listening, all the while pouring tea into the professor’s cup — to the point of the tea’s spilling into the saucer, onto the table, and then onto the floor. Eventually the loquacious professor noticed the situation and told the master that the cup was already full, to which the master replied:

Even so with your mind. How can I teach you when it is already so full of your own opinions?

Well, is this not what most of us do most of the time? Are we as open as we might be to the opinions of others or to those innermost yearnings within our own hearts? Are we attempting to get beneath our first two layers of personality, our masks?

Some of you have dived deeply into yourself and then surfaced newly energized, embracing life as a passion which extends out to all you meet, instead of carrying life on your back as if it were a cross that you are condemned to be with. You lovers of life are truly renewed in spirit. But to get to this new existence, you have had to let down your defense mechanisms. Carl Jung knows about defenses when, writing in the gender-exclusive language of his time he said:

There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself as fallible and human.

Getting to the core of our being so that we might know who we truly are is a confessional aspect of being human. And it can be healing.

In his work Opening Up: The Healing Power of Confiding in Others, James W. Pennebaker refers to one study of the effect of confession on the human immune system. Part of this experiment had people write about their lives. One group (the “high disclosers”) wrote about the terrible things, the traumas in their lives. The other group wrote about less troubling things. Pennebaker concludes from 21 years of these experiments:

The work of inhibition gradually undermines the body’s defenses. Like other stressors, inhibition can affect immune function, the action of the heart and vascular systems, and even the biochemical workings of the brain and nervous systems. In short, excessive holding back of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can place people at risk for both major and minor disease.

In other words, I believe that if you are not “real” or “authentic” you are not fulfilling your natural function as a living, viable creature and therefore diseases of mind, body and spirit set in. I presume that most of us know this. Still, I do not think that most of us have made an ardent attempt to “confess,” to open up, all the while believing that if we do, we are practicing a very real form of healing. Instead, we stay stuck.

Oh, but might we see our lives as works of beauty and mystery to be revered, to be hallowed at Halloween and at other times, too; rather than bemoaning our existences as empty and meaningless, as hollow.

To go down into the fourth layer of our existence, the shadowy place, our common place, the place of deep human spirit. That is not to say that any of us will ever fully understand others or ourselves. But it is a good and noble chore, is it not?

Robert Frost’s image in his poem “Gathering Leaves” is symbolic of the ongoing effort to be more fully human, more alive, more knowledgeable of self, more resplendent in human spirit. It tells us to continue our work in probing our psyche, of gaining insight. Even if the crop we reap might seem insignificant at times. Speaking of his leaves, Frost says:

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop,

And who’s to say where

The harvest shall stop.

And so we must ask ourselves: Who, indeed, is to say where the harvesting of our inner self shall stop? Once we begin the process of removing the masks we wear, the richness to our being begins to envelop our every moment. But we must start the process and never stop! Along with Plato (quoted by Socrates) may we affirm:

The unexamined life is not worth living.

NOTE: Don Beaudreau is our magazine’s Lakeside Living editor. A member of the Ajijic Writers Group, he is writing his twelfth book, a novel about CapeCod.


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Don Beaudreau
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