Any great play or movie includes a cast of thespians who temporarily cause us to suspend what we know to be an act and convince us that the plot we are watching is real. During the performance, we often forget that what we are seeing is an act. It is only when the curtains close and the actors and actresses take their bows that we return to reality, clap, and say “What a wonderful performance!”
To me, Hinduism or Sanatana Dhamra is like the play. Everything is not only God’s creation but is a part of God. God created a system to be able to have experiences, but how boring would it be if it was always known that it was all an act?
So here comes the creation of maya, the grand illusion. The fog of maya blinds us from realizing we are the Atman who is within each of us, causing us to believe we are all separate. Our ego runs amok with thoughts of me and mine. We build a giant ego and will hurt our other forms (the other actors and actresses) to protect it.
Even through deep meditation or spiritual experience, we might get a glimpse of the Atman (the God within), only to have the illusion of life reappear and before we know it, we have forgotten it was an illusion and are back acting in the play of life. This cycle repeats over and over again.
The difference between us going to a theater to watch a play and what we experience in life is that we are the performers in the play of our lives. Not only are we so good that we have convinced everyone else in the cast that we are more than just actors, but we have also convinced ourselves that we aren’t even part of a performance.
Through these experiences we create in our acting (Samskaras), we form Vasanas or tendencies that create our personalities and attract people and situations in this life and future lives. Life after life our bodies die, our names change, and we enter the play as a new character, never the wiser, and the longest-running soap opera in history goes on.
At some point during the performance, we have an experience. We meet that wise satguru who shows us the truth. He or she may explain the way, but we aren’t done with the play yet. We still operate a great deal of the time under the illusion that the play is all real. We forget what we have learned and are often alternating between being an audience member and a cast member.
After the experience, we begin to see the benefits of doing daily spiritual performances such as puja or abhishekam. We learn how to control our minds. We live in the now and not the future or the past. We become good at meditation. We follow the Yamas and Niyamas and stop hurting ourselves and others through thought, action, and word. We begin to incinerate the karmas not yet active and mitigate or live consciously through the ones we are presently facing.
We might even start to help other cast members discover the play they are unaware that they are in. At some point, perhaps after many lifetimes, we start to merge back into the lord. The curtains close and we clap and say “What a wonderful performance!”