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The idea that 'real' life’ lurks elsewhere and that the life we are living is just, in
fact, a shadow of it, is as old as mankind itself.
The 'Hereafter', Hell and Paradise are all about it.
But there are smaller scale implications of that universal concept in
our everyday lives.

During my time living in the Soviet Union I used to believe that
those 'double-lives' are a Soviet phenomenon: you live as the Party and
the Motherland requires on the surface, but deep inside - as your human
nature requires. Having since moved around the world a fair bit, I
started to notice the same in many other places and cultures.

Afghans, loyal during the daytime to the Soviet forces, turning into
mujahideens when the night fell; French ouvriers, meeting me as a
representative of the proletarian country with their internationalistic
embrace 30 years ago, who recently embarrassingly hid their
newly-nationalistic eyes; my peaceable mates from a local gym, from time
to time turning into football hooligans, and so on.

It's not just about doom and gloom. There's the office worker or a
salesman from a neighbouring street who queues for hours and hours for
The X-factor, The Voice or Britain’s Got Talent; a single mum, who sits in a town
park writing the next Harry Potter - they are all about the same
dichotomy.
So does a lion-tamer live in every chartered accountant as it was
famously shown in Monty Python?

Composers try to show the essence of that 'real' life through sounds,
whereas poets like Tyutchev say: 'The expressed thought is a lie',
referring us either to the silence or a mystery of the primordial, or
pre-verbal world.

Scientists are changing DNA and cloning alternatives, people are
changing their gender and the search for the better life which exists
elsewhere or for the Holy Grail is continuing.

The pastures are greener somewhere else says an old proverb in the book
I read and the young Swedish rock-band playing on my teenage son’s CD player
echoes  this: 'Somewhere else... Somewhere else...'
This intrinsic quest, this inbuilt search engine, this inner Google sits
so deep in us that even the most conventionally successful of
human-beings are also prone to it.

Recently I watched an interview of a world-famous Russian conductor, who
was regretful of his pianist career that never happened.
There is an anecdote about a world-renowned chemist, Dmitriy Mendeleev, who
had invented the Periodic Table of chemical elements. When he came to
his native town at the height of his fame, his school design teacher
said: 'How could he have wasted his wonderful talent of a carpenter?' -
and he wasn't joking!

The shadows and the ghosts of another life, another reality are
following us, but sometimes it seems to me that just like the folkloric
hero Mullah Nasreddin, sat on his donkey and dangled a long stick with a
bunch of hay in front of the stubborn animal to make it move,
they do the same for us...