The “drama of life” refers to that illusory interplay connecting individual emotions, experiences, and entanglements we all enact in our personal lives to create a name and fame to project our persona in life. The world is a stage, and we all play a unique role in becoming something while awake and alive. Each of us plays our part in a universal set-up that cuts across cultures, castes, and creeds in a limited space and time, often knowingly and sometimes not consciously or subconsciously aware. This experiential life may be a journey, dance, theatre, or random events. Still, you will agree it is undeniably exquisite, versatile, and deeply human, where from nothing, you become something to go back into nothing when the drama ends.

In this drama, there is always uncertainty. However confident or learned you may be, events and incidents are never the same and lasting. You must adjust and adapt to perform differently as per every circumstance. The play continues in a dichotomy with dualities, where you must choose and balance between the good and the evil, plus and minus, positive and negative, and the material with the spiritual. It all depends upon how your mind intelligently takes you on a roller-coaster ride between the dual forms of this and that for your likes and dislikes, determining how good a player you are in this dance or drama of life. 

The mind and the world we perceive are illusory since science and philosophy admit that we are only vacant in space. All that exists is energy, which can change virtually into particles possessing specific significance and activity in the universe’s nothingness. Love, reality, and truth are illusory because they change with space, time, and circumstances. It means our concept of reality, which we perceive through our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, merely interprets what we feel as tangible, which is not. Actual reality needs to be unchanging, uninterrupted, and permanent, like the sky and not the clouds that cover the sky. The philosophy of Advaita Vedanta considers only the ultimate reality. The absolute non-dual energy from which all subset interchangeable energies in matter and consciousness emerge and return to superimpose on the ultimate reality. It tells us that illusions occur in the drama we play in life, presuming permanence to temporal desires and emotions, identifying and attaching, and suggesting that what we believe as actual and permanent is not tangible in how we think, believe, and feel.  

A lot depends in this drama on the control over our random and reckless mind, with ever-changing, unmethodical thoughts interfering and distracting from your focused course of action, and whether you can mindfully awaken your soul to check and guide the mind. Also, a lot depends on how unforeseen changes by chance play their role, depending on your choices within the scope of your temporal reality. No path, journey, or play is smooth for any hero or a commoner. How you maneuver and steadily continue with adaptability and resilience defines whether you are a hero, coward, villain, or loser.

There will always be stress and strain in this play between our wants and achievements, between the highs and lows in our desires and emotions, the triumphs and the unwanted tragedies, and the pleasure and pains differing in each actor or player performing on an individual’s level of intelligence and knowledge. In this drama, if you wish to be a star champion, you must be highly alert, attentive, and aware of everything, enhancing your consciousness to excel in your ambitious performances. However, despite your best efforts, you may need to realize the output you expect. With uncertainty and an ever-changing script, no one can accurately predict the results of every individual’s life.

Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players,” also shows that we have to play multiple roles in childhood, youth, middle age, and when we are old. Maturing while playing our roles, comparing with another with envy, lust, and greed, wanting more and more out of our actions, and not content, calm, or consistent, is what the ignorant subconscious mind in lower consciousness undertakes in illusions of its ‘me and mine.’ 

Further, in the web of relationships, we weave our roles in twists and turns with family, friends, and foes plotting and planning dynamic roles of romance, love, loyalty, and affection or in jealousy, betrayal, and suspicion, revealing how righteous you are or what you have become in a constantly changing life. All because during this life drama, we must make choices in every step, good or bad, for our likes and dislikes remain afloat with our heads held high. Our lives have different roles and responsibilities, and getting caught up in always wanting more can be easy. But if we learn to be content, clear, and consistent in our actions, we find inner peace and move on a virtuous spiritual journey.

In this drama, we often wonder about the meaning and purpose of life or, for that matter, what our identity is beyond our body and mind—are we supposed to create something meaningful or go with the flow of what others dictate, like we see most people merely following what they are told or have learned from their past knowledge? Over 99% of us are followers of past knowledge provided by parents, books, the media, teachers, masters, politicians, religions, and gurus, simply enacting our mundane roles aimlessly, progressing while copying each other with no distinct individuality. Knowledge is more of a recollection of the past derived from the memory and intellect of what you have gained from multiple sources unless you are intuitive, creative, and innovative.

For this reason, Spiritualism asserts you are neither the mind nor the body since you claim both these facades to be yours, meaning both are instruments for you to use and not to be used by them. Body, mind, and soul are the quantitative individualized self of what you are, and the universal spirit is that qualitative self of ‘who you are,’ settled in the soul (super conscious section) as absolute awareness. It means the mind first needs to become aware and then conscious to conceive what it perceives from its sensory organs. The mind within the brain becomes alive from the level of its metaphysical, aware-conscious energy. Therefore, we are spiritual beings going through human experiences engaged through our cognitive minds in the relative dualities of life, functioning in this and that for those emotional desires for the minds’ likes and dislikes that appear to disappear in a designated space and time. The three prime sections of the mind—superconscious, conscious, and subconscious—individually identify and attach to all its emotional desires in lust and greed for its ‘me and mine.’ Therefore, as we continue to play the drama of life, our personalities (false masks) keep changing from our selfish behavior, experiences, morals, and relationships.

Shakespeare said, “Life is a play, and the world is a stage.” It suggests that we are born to play our unique finite role, with no fixed script; it keeps changing per our desires and circumstances as we grow, enter, play, and finally exit. In this play, we are all interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent in unity and continuity, being a part of one complete form of absolute energy from which everything emerges and goes back into the same. We are a composite unit of physical, mental, and spiritual energy, where all individual souls connect with a single source of absolute awareness—the universal spirit, which Spiritualism recognizes as the highest energy ability and the divine essence.

This drama stresses the meaning and purpose of life. Each player plays their existential role, determined to become something while alive—physically, mentally, financially, and spiritually in different directions for each player in pursuing personal goals. Every conscious and subconscious choice, direction, decision, and result reveals each storyline’s difficulties. The divine spirit plays life’s drama through the soul’s consciousness, taking part and playing through body and mind from moment to moment, enjoying what we call life. The body, mind, and soul are supposed to embrace the joys and the sorrows with grace and respect, navigate the complexities of life, and celebrate to discover the secrets of the divine universal spirit in search of fulfillment.

The prehistoric Vedic science of Hinduism portrays the drama of life as a divine cosmic play between the absolute non-dual energy (Brahman) to exhibit and express its nature of duality, where all existences temporarily emerge in randomness to give birth and death as matter and consciousness in the universe. Advaita Vedanta’s philosophy of nonduality suggests that everything emanates for the time being from a state of completeness, and when you take away from that completeness, what remains on both ends is also complete in its unity and continuity within the infinitude system of the cosmos. Similarly, quantum physics states in the Law of Conservation of Energy that energy is indivisible and is neither created nor destroyed; it is interchangeable from one form to another in varying abilities, with the total power remaining constant over time in an isolated system. In both subjects, all that exists is one and only Brahman, or absolute energy. Both have the same meaning—the highest ability or power refers to the divine spirit of aware energy. In contrast, all other transient subset energies appear to play their drama of existence in dualities, eventually disappearing from where they emerged. 

The theatre of the mind is an imaginative and illustrative play upon which the drama of consciousness unfolds. Therefore, in this imaginary and illusory world in which we live within restricted space and time, presuming all we identify and attach to as real is but transitory and fleeting. Hinduism refers to that as “Maya,” which creates a world through our perceptions, concealing through consciousness the unreal as accurate; what seems existent is a drama for the mind to play and exit. Similarly, quantum physics proclaims what we presume as matter and consciousness are nothing but abilities of energy, whereas matter is an illusion of light energy. It means that human reality is merely a persistent drama. 

To conclude, life combines drama, games, and play. The drama blends choices, chances, changes, and circumstances, full of desires and decisions. Next, it enters a game like chess—circumventing challenges and conflicts depending on your skill and success. After that, if you are existentially present, you must be alert, attentive, and aware to cleverly balance life’s dualities—a play of pleasures and pain unfolding your creativity and uniqueness to explore, endure, and experience to embrace your life story through your knowledge, which, as mentioned earlier, is but a recollection of borrowed data settled in your memory, which you egoistically refer to as yours. 

NAMASTE