“Dramatised Dramalessness” by Paul Dekker

“Dramatised Dramalessness”

Mind Dramatises, Life is Dramalessness

Life is an evolutionary and sophisticating process. No thinking accompanies life’s evolution and sophistication, although man thinks it does. And yet, life provided man with an illusory mind, to enable him to realise he is life, and not mind.

Everything in life is life’s expression, and nothing in life is separated from life. Whatever is separated, independent or individual is an expression of life’s illusory nature of separation, independence and individuality.

Life happens to man, man does not make life happen. But life made man think he can make life happen, by the words he uses. Man experiences a world of thoughts.

It is thinking that creates an illusory duality in the mind. The mind is dual and antagonises, which enables it to dramatise. Mind is a myth.

With an illusory mind, life provides man with illusory words, illusory meanings, illusory language, illusory beliefs, illusory feelings, illusory emotions and illusory memory.

Thinking is dreaming in the waking state and dreaming is thinking in the sleeping state. Indeed, mind is an inbuilt television.

Thinking is synonymous with imagining and fantasising. The capacity of the mind to imagine is unimaginable. The power of illusion!

An illusion is an imagination. Man’s mind has the capacity to imagine a fiction. What is imagined is fictitious, and creates a drama in the mind.

When life evolved and sophisticated, man’s mind started to imagine a word from sound. Words are fictitious, and therefore create a dramatised world.

Identification with an image causes an illusory experience, for all man’s experiences exist only as thoughts in the mind, and not as an actuality.

The mind, off stage as well as on stage, lives in imaginary circumstances, of which it thinks them to be real.

Life made mind first invent religion, to ‘conquer’ his fear for the unknown. Religion with its rituals and ceremonies, became the first appearance of drama acting.

The theatre was f.e. a temple or a church, and the audience were the people who believed in the respective religion.

The words action, character and situation appeared to be the mean vocabulary, that made man believe he could make life happen. All three words form the basic conditions to create a drama, off stage as well as on stage.

To stage acting, imagination is a play writer’s and an actor’s main tool, however illusory, for it is life that writes a drama play through the play writer and makes an actor enact it.

Like a spider spins his web with secretion from his own body, also a play writer spins his drama play and an actor spins his acting, with images from his own mind.

All stage acting, illusory though, begins in the mind of the play writer and the drama actor.

To write a drama play, the play writer has to know each minute detail of the illusion he depicts.

To enact a drama play, the actor has to know each minute detail of the illusion he enacts.

To enact a character, an actor emigrates to the mind of the character, and fills himself with the character’s thoughts. An actor brings himself to the character, and not the character to himself.

An actor thinks, believes and does what the character thinks, believes and does. This way the actor transforms into the character.

An actor’s biggest obstacle is the need to be needed by the audience. This need needs all his attention that pulls him away from acting.

Aiming for success is the highway to untruthful acting. The truthful actor instead, exists on stage only as the character, and it is the character that is needed by an audience.

Acting is in the doing what the character does. The actor’s behaviour reflects the actions he does as the character.
On stage thoughts aren’t sensed unless they are thought, words aren’t heard unless they are spoken, and actions aren’t seen unless they are enacted – thoughts, words and actions are the hallmark of behaviour on the stage.
An actor is identified with all the images he enacts, including the image of a thought, a word, an action, a character and the given circumstances of a drama play.

Because the actor transforms into the character, it is the tears of the character the actor cries on stage.

Acting to an actor is, the ability to do truthful in the given imaginary circumstances of a drama play, of course as an illusion.

In actioning the text, the actor transforms a drama script on the table into dramatic behaviour on stage. Therefore, the foundation of acting is the reality of doing, illusory of course.

Words in a drama dialogue don’t act, they only bare suggestions for actions to be abstracted by the actor from the text.

It is not words but actions that are enacted by the actor, and to do so the actor uses the words to execute his actions.

An actor is believed not on his words but on his actions, for it is actions that speak, including words.

Stage acting is the art of dramatising, imagining, identifying and transforming, clearly all illusory.
A stage is empty, with the actor appears an imaginary world, to disappear with the actor.
On stage, knowing becomes behaviour by doing illusory actions. An actors performance is based upon illusory actions, which are programmed and conditioned during rehearsal, and reproduced while performing the show.

An actor operates like a computer, for he is programmed with images, text, actions and behaviour, all illusory, so that he is able to reproduces the same show every night.

Every moment on stage, though illusory, is triggered by the previous moment, so that what is programmed within the actor, pops-up as the next moment. This phenomenon is known to be the Pavlov-effect, of course as illusion.

The nature of acting is its moment-to-moment illusory reality. The through line of moments makes life on stage, although programmed and conditioned, appear to happen spontaneous.

Man off stage lives where his feet touch the ground. In the same way an actor on stage also lives where his feet touch the stage. Stage acting is a reminder that daily life happens much the same way in the momentary ‘here’ and ‘now’ in life.
Words do not make the body move off stage and neither do they on stage, for life moves itself wordless, off stage as well as on stage.
Behind a character is an actor and behind an actor is life. An actor can know his text, but he can never understand how acting comes about, for acting is a happening in life’s happening. Therefore, actor’s graduation is just as illusory as is any graduation in life.

Never ever can acting be duplicated, for an actor as an expression of life which is not a copy machine, but instead, an actor is a life being.

The moment an actor thinks he is in, which is the present to him, is actually the past and not the actual moment. The moment, which is the ‘now’, cannot be known by the actor’s mind or any man’s mind.
Man is born without a manual how to live life, for life is lived for him. Also an actor is born without a manual how to act, for acting is acted through him, by life.
More playacting takes place in a foyer then on a stage of a theatre. In a foyer the conditioned mind try’s to keep up with so called social behaviour. On stage an actor expresses any kind of behaviour.

Behaviour on stage is regardless of any social morals, for it is appropriate to the given imaginary circumstances of the drama play, and they could be of any kind.

Like neutral weather performs all kinds of weather conditions: rain, sunshine, thunder, hurricane, snow, hail or a soft breeze –an actor also performs all kinds of circumstantial and emotional conditions, while he himself remains neutral.

Nothing of what the actor does on stage effects him, for he is aware his acting to be illusory, and not real.

An actor has no attachment to the character he performs, for he knows the character to be illusory. A character to an actor is considered to be a mask, put on by the actor each time he performs and put off when the show is over.

While acting the actor as an artist, a craftsman, remains the watcher or witnesser of his acting.

Life off stage as well as on stage is ‘amoral’, for anything can happen regardless what the mind wants or does not want to happen. No morals condition an actor on stage, for any character or circumstance might appear in the given imaginary circumstances of a drama play.

The only ‘moral’ off stage as well as on stage, is the moral of an illusion, its moral is an illusion for an illusion itself is illusory. The illusory nature of an illusion is its amoral morality.

Amongst actors, stage acting is considered to be a form of ‘self-enquiry’ and ‘self-realisation’, of course not in absolute way, but in relative way. An actor has to enquire his own mind in order to watch and witness himself playacting a character.

Man loves to go to the theatre, for on stage he likes to see life as true lies, while in daily life he playacts according to the conditioned mind.

From a relative point of view, what separates life off stage from life on stage, is the agreement in between actors and between actors and the audience, that everything on stage is known to be illusory.

Through acting life presents man a wonderful illustration of its intelligence: to appear real but to be illusory.

When a character on stage says ‘I love you’, it is believed to be a true lie. When the same words are spoken off stage, they are believed to be real.

But, how could any word be real at all, when the real can only happen and not be thought or spoken. For a word to be thought or spoken time is needed and time does not exist in life. Therefore, all words, be it thought, spoken, song or enacted, are illusory.

What then, could be the distinguished difference, between thinking in the sleeping state, thinking in the waking state, and thinking in the acting state, the last one to be an appearance in the waking state itself? No difference at all occurs, for all states are as illusory an illusion can be.

Theatre is ‘laughter’ and ‘tears’. It is told that ‘medical doctors’ in Ancient Greek, before giving a prescription, they proposed a ‘patient’ first to visit the theatre, to see if watching a drama play might lead to some understanding.

Man lives in duality of what is real and what is merely an appearance: what is and what seems to be. Life is eternal and unchanging, and its appearance is temporary and changing. Therefore, mind is impatient and life is patience.

On stage a character appears and disappears, but the actor remains a watcher or witnesser. On stage a drama play appears and disappears, but an audience remains a watcher or a witnesser.

On worlds stage everything appears and disappears, but a man who has become a watcher or a witnesser remains, while aging, till physical death switches him off.

Mind dramatises, antagonises and playacts off stage as well as on stage. Life, instead, is a singular flow in which mind and therefore action is absent.

Life is a singular movement. But to the mind life’s ‘monologue’ appears to be a dialogue, wherein a protagonist and antagonist duel with each other. Both try to get what they want or to prove each of them to be right. But, who could be right or wrong, if life is one and not two!?

Wrong in life is nothing but the right which one couldn’t understand, and the right is the wrong which one could understand.

No man is the doer, nor is life the doer, for everything in life is happening in the moment, and the moment is limitless as the ‘cosmos’, timeless as the ‘now’ and thoughtless as ‘life’.

It needs life to understand life. Life does not need to proclaim to be life, for all there is is life. To whom would life proclaim to be life, for life can only understand itself, to be life and not the mind.

If life lives and life is all there is, what else then could anything appearing in life be, but life!?

Its life which gives birth to the illusion of life, and man is an illusion in this illusion. Life is an unknown phenomena, it gives birth to a phenomenal illusion and life is included in it.

This phenomena life can not be understood by the mind. All that can be known comes with the phenomena of illusion.

Limitlessness, timelessness and thoughtlessness is enlightenment, which is life, and life is all there is, including the illusion of the dramatised dramalessness.

Copyright: Paul Dekker 2011