I recently discovered that as I have become more aware of my own unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behavior, that all the drama in my life has begun to disappear, EVERYWHERE!
It first began to happen with my partner for the last twenty-nine years, my wife and perfect mirror, Carol. Then it began to happen with my customers and co-workers, with brothers in my Mankind Project community and then it began to happen in my spiritual community, The Celebration, first on Sunday mornings, then at choir practice, and finally at our monthly council meetings, where decisions sometimes have to be quickly resolved that affect everyone in the community but where we also value listening and setting aside our thoughts and feelings to a higher goal of what we call “a union of hearts”, without the need for someone to lose in order for another to win.
So what is this Shadow of Drama and how do we keep it going, even when we are aware that we are in the drama? The answer is that we keep the drama going when we can tell ourselves that we know that we are in a drama, yet we remain unconscious to the fact that the drama is as much in us as we are in it, and probably more so the former as the latter. This is the shadow of drama.
How do we get out of the drama and become just the audience, the watcher or better yet, how can we make the drama disappear altogether? The answer has several steps involved.
After we have noticed that we are in a drama, we need to look to see where we have seen this drama played out before and what role we are currently playing, because as we grow into any role in life, our roles are bound to shift to keep the drama fresh and new.
Some may think that what we want to do is to become the director, so that we can take control of how the drama unfolds, but this still keeps us stuck in a role instead of putting us out in the audience to watch because even the director has an interest in the actors and how the drama is acted out, whereas the audience is, generally speaking, only interested in the acting.
The next step, after we have noticed what our current role is in the drama, is to be able to step out our role long enough to remember that we are the actor who made the role our own and that we are acting, although this can be particularly difficult for “method actors” who "try to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to develop lifelike performances" rather than classical actors who "simulate thoughts and emotions through external means, such as vocal intonation or facial expression." By taking on the thoughts and feelings of the role, the motivations of the character, as it were, we are no longer acting, we become the role.
So when we recognize that we are actors instead of the role we are playing, it is only a single step more to leave the stage where we can watch from the other side of the curtain. From that point of view, we can stay and watch or walk away.
And how do we disappear the drama altogether? That takes a little more work once we become practiced in being able to step out of our role easily and quickly to become the watcher and not the actor in a role. To switch analogies from the world of the performing arts to the world of balloons, if we were to take a balloon and began inflating it until it burst, the balloon, for all intents and purposes, would simply disappear. Our identity with our role in the drama is like that balloon and each time we step off the stage is like the air we use to inflate the balloon. We keep stepping off different stages in different theaters like we keep adding air to the balloon, until, for all intents and purposes, the roles and the drama, simply disappears, all in a single “pop”.
