I love Halloween, not because I have to stand at my door for two hours handing out $20 worth of candy, but its the ritual, our own American morality play. We watch these often Catholic festivals in South America and Europe from our perch in our ritual clean Protestant America with enlightened amusement. We have our Christmas and Easter, to be sure, but its only Halloween that we get down to play the dark side of human nature. To me Halloween is the practice of meditation dressed up as ritual.
Meditation is sitting at our door to the mind and watching the thought demons parade by. Both Buddha and Jesus weathered the futile attacks of Satan and his crowd of demons without being shaken from their seat of equanimity. So Halloween is like that. All the children try to get the scariest demon costume, the best usually have some death and dismemberment as its theme, and we just love them all and give each their allotment of candy so they will be satisfied and leave us alone. It’s like a sacrifice where the gods must be fed. But what do the gods of our dark side want? Candy.
Candy is the sweetness of non-judgmental awareness. Candy is the act of forgiveness and acceptance. Candy is the act of saying I’m okay, no matter what fear pops up in my mind. “Here fear of death, or guilt, or doubt, here, take this piece of awareness,” and like chocolate on the back of the tongue our fear dissolves.
Halloween is the ritual of turning the darkness of fear and the unknown into the light of consciousness. And when the evening is over, we check our empty minds to see if there is anything left. We look up and down the street and there are no more monsters coming out of the night. Meditation is over.
Posted under current events, meditation help
This post was written by ed on October 31, 2008
In these last crazy days of the campaign McCain has found another “demon” to lash Obama to: ” a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi.” (read post in 
Last night watching the Obama infomercial I realizes how important stories are in human communication. Stories can be either positive or negative or both at the same time. The campaigns both try to sell their story of what’s positive about their candidate while writing negative stories about their opponent. Come election day the stronger story wins. What was interesting about the Obama story last night was that is would appear to be extremely difficult, certainly at the risk of splitting the brain, to believe that this likeable guy is a commie terrorist. Stories are like spider webs; you have to have enough real twigs to hang your threads on.
This last week two people in Blackstone told my wife they wished they could put an Obama sign in their yard like we did (we have a house sign), but their neighbors wouldn’t like it. Actually, one was a minister and it was his congregation that wouldn’t like it. There may be more closeted Obama supporters out there in rural America then we think.
The Palin phenomena came in with a metaphor, The Bridge to Nowhere, and it may serve a double purpose, standing for the whole conservative party as we finally cross the waters it promised to carry us over. All political parties promise some salvation of sorts. A better metaphor might be a Ferry to Nowhere. What has happened is that we as a people are realizing that the conservative movement has been just that, a ferry that never docked. We’ve just been going back and forth over the river of time tooting the same horn, listening to the same pundits entertain us, and watching reruns of how good it’s going to be when we arrive.
Now that the Peace House sign is up I need to explain what peace means to me. Contrary to popular thought, peace does not mean the cessation of violence or even, on a more subtle level, the end of upsetting circumstances. Just being upset with my wife wanting me to leave my cozy recliner for a chore can be a non-peaceful event and a loss of one’s peace. Peace is like a still pond, and our choice is whether to perceive events as ripples or reflections. Ripples disturb the pond’s peace, reflections don’t.
Made from 2 inch pressed sign foam, our new Peace House sign, a creation of Jimmy Hargrave, was hung today, and it felt like I was seeing the sun break through an overcast of clouds. What the sign means or will bring to our house I don’t know, but I do know that it represents what we are building here, a place where there is no aggression, either in mind or body.