'All The World's A Stage, And All The Men And Women Merely Players'
Is there a more apposite parable than that implied by the Maharshi comparing man and actor?
'All the actions that the body is to perform are already decided upon at the time it comes into existence: the only freedom you have is whether or not to identify yourself with the body.'
David Garrick plays Othello or Romeo, Falstaff or Bottom, and identifies himself with his part; he loves and hates, saves and slays, laughs and weeps, but his part was decreed by Shakespeare; he plays it again and again, a hundred, a thousand times, and can only vary his interpretation without departing from the text. But he is David Garrick all the time; David Garrick is his reality, Othello or Falstaff is his role. Perhaps waiting in the wings between acts he remembers that he is really David Garrick, then when his cue comes he identifies himself again with his personage.
Man's role as an actor is cast when he comes onto the stage of manifestation and he has to play it out as it is written (by karma if you will) but he remains a man even while he is being an actor. His only freedom lies in whether he chooses to remember that he is also a man (Reality) in which case he is free and plays his part dispassionately by means of his acquired technique.
The analogy may apply even to the repetition of the part, for a hundred performances of a role by an actor may correspond to a hundred reincarnations of a man - 'reincarnations' as popular religion would have it - 'recurrences' as meta-physchologists may conceive it.
Does a man play his part in life better when he ceases to identify himself with his psycho-somatic apparatus and what that apparatus thinks, feels, and does - that is his role in life - and identifies himself instead with his I-Reality? We have been told that a man who has realised his state of satori is thereby a better coachman, chimney-sweep, lawyer, or ruler, and those who observed the Maharshi reported that everything he did was meticulously and accurately done, and that everything he said was simple, lucid, and impeccably expressed.
Does not an actor play his part better when he relies on his technique, retaining his self-identification and not identifying with his imaginary personage? Great actors are such, the others are what the French call cabotins.
