Integral Drama: Culture, Consciousness and Identity Introduction
Drama and The Natyashastra The seven plays examined in this book focus on the difference between the experience of pure consciousness and our socially constructed identities and suggest how these two aspects of identity can coexist. In analyzing these plays, I apply theories of consciousness developed in Advaita (nondual) Vedanta (the sixth system of Indian philosophy) and the Indian philosophical treatise The Natyashastra, which deals with theatre aesthetics, as well as theories developed in the context of consciousness studies, a thriving interdisciplinary field that includes philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, physics and biology and increasingly focuses on the phenomenology of first- person experience. The seven plays analyzed here include Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Charac- ters in Search of an Author, Jean Genet’s The Balcony and Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. As these plays demonstrate, performance has the effect of taking the characters and audience from an awareness of something toward awareness per se, and then toward having awareness per se simultaneously with the intentional content of the mind, thereby providing a glimpse of higher states of conscious- ness. The three ordinary states of consciousness are waking, dreaming and sleep, and the higher states include the fourth state of pure con- sciousness (Atman or turiya, the fourth), cosmic consciousness and unity consciousness. As Eliot Deutsch says in Advaita Vedanta, pure consciousness or
8 Integral Drama
Atman (or paramatman, the highest Self), for Advaita Vedanta, is that pure, undifferentiated self-shining consciousness, timeless, spaceless, and unthinkable, that is not different from Brahman and that underlies and supports the individual human person. (1973: 48)
When one has stabilized Atman, the fourth state of consciousness, then one can observe mental content without being overshadowed by it, thus entering the fifth state or cosmic consciousness. Robert Keith Wallace notes in The Physiology of Consciousness that
In cosmic consciousness the individual realizes his essential identity as transcendental or pure consciousness as an all-time reality. In this fifth state, transcendental consciousness coexists with waking, dreaming and sleep. For example, in cosmic consciousness, even in the most dynamic waking-state activity, one has an inner quality of consciousness that is restful and absolutely clear. (1993: 27, original emphasis)
Anna Bonshek illustrates this through the analogy from the Vedic tradition of a Lamp at the Door that “describes the bidirectional func- tion of awareness that illuminates inside and outside simultaneously” (2007: 45). As Robert Boyer explains,
Experience of unbounded awareness along with mental activity are natural experiences that typically develop over time. Increasingly, the deepest inner sense of who one is gets permeated by nonlocality and fewer restrictions, and eventually complete, unchanging unboundedness. The individual ego or sense of self merges with the universal Self, as the unbounded, unchanging background of daily living. (2006a, 440).
Ken Wilber also describes this coexistence of transcendental and wak- ing consciousness:
Mahayana Buddhism maintained that while the realization of nirvana or emptiness is important, there is a deeper realization, where nirvana and samsara, or Emptiness and the entire world of Form, are one, or more technically, Emptiness and Form are ‘not-two.’ As the most important sutra on this topic—The Heart Sutra—puts it: ‘That which is Emptiness is not other than Form, that which is Form is not other than Emptiness.’ (2006: 108)
As Advaita Vedanta puts it, “We find that pure existence which is the common cause of the entire world is itself formless, though appearing