The Scariest All Hallows Eve Story Ever

Tale of a Halloween party forty-five years ago . . .

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Reposted blog from two years ago:

Happy Day of the Dead. Apologies for the click bait title. Lately everything is the everythingest thing ever. Yet this is a Halloween ghost story in a very different sense, and hopefully worth the clique.

1979, Union College, Schenectady, under the neon glare of General Electric HQ, preparations began for the evening’s annual Halloween party at one of the fraternity houses. Our friends were the dance band, playing amaranthine songs in a holiday Grateful Dead-esque mode. Heady days of post-punk post-disco; dancing was cool again. And yes, there was a lysergic element to all this.

There ensued the usual friends participating in face day-glo colorization, wigging, and sartorial gathering of elements for a costume and a character to inhabit it. I could not come up with a specific character to dress as, so just assembled whatever weirdness came: a paisley sheet refitted into a poncho, a blinking construction (or maybe deconstruction) light, can’t remember what else. Then we all took the short walk to the party.

The music started up, did a little dancing. Drank whatever was served in the plastic-lined can. People were strangely attracted to what I was wearing, and in a friendly way kept saying, “Cool costume. Who are you?”

Back then I was painfully shy, and even in the best of circumstances found discourse with humans Sisyphean, thus I was speechless in reply. This seemed to increase curiosity, and the continuous “Who are you?” mantra reverberated through my cranial caverns. (Should add here that the Who’s “Who Are You” album and song had been released a year before.) Best as I tried, could neither dredge up a character for my costume, nor find a real self within to in fact be. “Who are you?” “Who are you?”

To escape the existential fuselage I retreated to the side of the band and shifted into what could only be called a danse macabre, a dervish sprung loose from the cosmos of ritual sema. But this only exhausted the body. I had to leave and venture out into the gelid All Hallows Night and find this elusive self.

Came to a favorite spot, three intertwining white pine trees in a close equilateral triangle, such that the interior lay unseen, and bedded with an inch of long, soft needles. Rolling in, and grateful for the protective arboreal embrace, which somehow dissipated the cold, the quest for an authentic self began.

I used every item in the entheogenic toolkit, spotlighted every corner of experience, still no sign of an independently existing self. Yet there was fear, but who is there then to be afraid? Hours later, still no one there. The best I could find was an empty perspective of experience, a point of view without content. Eventually the exploration exhausted itself into sleep.

Awoke with the intrepid clarity of daybreak. It was stunningly laughable. There is no enduring self. The ego is a joke we tell ourselves over and over, never getting the punch line, in fact afraid to. Fear is only the ego-construct afraid knowing the reality of itself as a fiction. Nothing to do but comb out pine needles and take off this ridiculous outfit. And then put on another . . .

Years later, studying the Yoga-Samkhya system, found that people thousands of years back saw through this. In Yoga, there is asmita, “I-am-ness”, which is considered a hinderance to knowledge. This is more or less the ego, that which thinks it is the doer of any action it claims for it self. Then there is ahamkara, “I-maker”, which is a necessary part of experience. It is simply our point of view, so that we can navigate this experience. It is an integral part of the recurring construct of the eternal moment. You cannot cross a room without a perspective of being on one side of the room. None of that is an authentic, enduring individual or individuated self.

Lesson for the Day of the Dead: The final secret of death is that there is no death if there is no self. Put that in your pipe dream and smoke it . . .