Do you ever find yourself acting to get through life?
Maybe you’re so good at it your dream is to do it professionally. In the late 1890’s, Moscow’s famous actor and theater director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, staged his productions of Chekov’s plays to be as true to life as possible. Stanislavsky demanded authentic performances from his actors, inspiring generations of them around the globe to play it real. But we can only enjoy a Shakespeare tragedy if the swords and blood on stage are fake.
We watch romance movies to feel vicarious love, and action films to find vicarious thrills. We strap virtual headsets on for total immersion in someone else’s imagination and get so lost in it that our brains and bodies think the experience is, in fact, happening.
We fantasize about the ideal world we want to live in and give our all to make it manifest, often getting dramatically entangled in it. Our days can appear like a dream within a dream within a dream—Russian nesting dolls of illusion.
So, what is real? This episode explores that limitless dimension. We can get the most out of life by staying connected to that reality… and have fun playing our roles to the hilt.
“Sometimes things go well in my life; sometimes things don’t go well in my life. But you know something? I do understand one thing that I have to do—is I have to keep the acting part separate from the reality that I am, that reality that is inside of me, that divine that is inside of me that was, is, and will be.”
—Prem Rawat