Did you ever wonder why Halloween celebrations and all costumed parties are so popular and how people just love becoming a different version of themselves for a night?
In our Western societies, we are taught early on to define ourselves, and how.
Family, peers and culture are all about establishing a clear frame in which we can set our pretty selves for the world to see.
As we start toddling about and still using diapers, we learn about “I”.
We start being defined. By gender and position inside the family first.
Later on, as we advance in age, we want to individualize and go further in defining ourselves with looks and behaviors. If we happen to feel a distortion between the gender we officially bear and the way we feel inside, we endure the dichotomy with very little means to navigate the grey area we fall into. Though this starts evolving.
Will eventually come other means of definition: becoming a parent, a CEO, a hippie, a republican, a spouse… and if we go into fine details, dominant traits will be used, adaptative behaviors will become feathers in our personality cap: not a suit and tie kinda guy, a rock and roll lover, an angry woman, a newborn christian… and what not.
All our experiences, our survival skills, our passively accepted social paradigms, our actively created “qualities” to fit in, everything plays a role in the elaboration of “I”.
And we become very attached to that persona.
A way to fit in or to rebel against our most usual environment.
After elaborating it, we want to stay loyal to it!
We try to stay consistent.
We cling to the personality traits we cobbled together around our early adulthood and any change (even positive change), often threatens our sense of self.
As precious as it seems to our worrisome ego, it much too often enforces our limitations, gives a rationale to our prejudices and tremendously limits us in a narrow version of what we could be… (including genuinely happy), and snuffs out our curiosity and our spontaneity.
In fact, this persona can be revised, edited, reinvented at will, and as much as we choose.
“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.” said Alan Watts.
So, might you ask… who are we? Who is “I”? Who are you? (I mean when we let go of the habitual social accoutrement.)
When asked this question, we often draw a blank at first if we try to go beyond easy answers all related to our aforementioned persona.
But then, we can’t go back to the old charade once questioned can we?
We are not our body. If I lose a limb or two, I am not less me.
So we can say that we live in our body, and that renders all the fluctuating standards of beauty completely irrelevant to the definition of “me”…
We are not our brain either, though that one is more tempting to believe. If you ever took any consciousness altering drugs, you realize the truth in this.
And we are not even the part that gets angry or sad or despondent… because there is a part of us able to witness these states, as we cycle through them in life.
I personally believe that our little wise voice, our curiosity, our playfulness, our awe and wonder in front of Nature’s magnificence, and our fundamental aptitude for growth are all soul based and coming from our universal nature, our true selves, though it might not be individual selves but given parts of a larger Consciousness, a spirit, a complex particle of light that comes to play as an energy wave while having a body…
In no way can I actually define this notion, this principle of Life, but I know what it’s not, and that it is exponentially bigger than any good old version of who I was taught I was.
So maybe, when we don the costume, the mask, the persona for a night, maybe we just want to feel free for a spell.
To feel like we could be anything, because maybe we could… that would be a treat.
Maybe it gives us a chance to see that any time, we could actually start dancing with life wearing other garments, speaking other words and daring to question all kinds of comfortable certainties…
Wait a minute, so we could also change our minds about things? Defend new ideas? Learn new tricks?
Most certainly!
More to the point, if we were born somewhere else, or at a different time, in a different culture, a different paradigm, a different climate… maybe (most probably) we would carry a different social construct, a different faith, and a different sense of individuality… and if all of these parameters are related to the place we arrive on day one… then, they are not inherent to us, but inherent to the culture.
Throughout the diversity of all cultures and eras, though, there are universal ways to BE human that are not based on society, nor ego, and that may reveal important things about us.
Art has been a human endeavor since the beginning of times, and its existence has never been dictated by race, fortune, degree of evolution nor geography. Could it be a manifestation of our true omnipresent nature?
At any rate, here I’m not trying to answer a question that encompasses so much and prompted so many bodies of philosophical work.
Just pointing at the fact that we collectively tend to mistake our persona for who we truly are and let that pale avatar define us, which is something we can outgrow, if we decide to adventure in doing so.
That requires first to not take our personas too seriously…
To your beautiful self! Keep playing …
Love and Light
💙💙💙
Emmeline