THE THREE ACTORS
JAYADEVA YOGENDRA
THE MONTHLY JOURNAL OF THE YOGA INSTITUTE OF SANTACRUZ,
INDIAVO. XXIII, 3 OCTOBER 1977
Have you ever heard a member of the audience getting worked up during a dramatic sequence, running up to the stage and stopping a mock fight going on, on the stage? Well, this is exactly what many of us do every moment of our life. We remain too involved in this drama, that is life. We are unclear about who is the actor, and who is the member of the audience most of the time in the drama of life. According to the yogic thinking, these two are totally separate, the so-called material world is the actor, and the spiritual world is the audience.
The ultimate constituents of this world of ours are the guņas, which are changeful, and make for a variety of situations and experiences. We should not get confused by the variety. We should seek out the basic factors in the midst of the variety. The basic factors are three - known as gunas. While the material world is changeful, the witnessing spiritual principle of pure consciousness itself is unchanging. The unchanging spiritual principle is the justification for the existence of these gunas. This material world of ours, and the gunas that make it up, are like actors in a drama which are there to entertain us, the audience. These three actors provide us a lot of entertainment and recreation, but we should constantly tell ourselves that we are the audience. We are not the actors. The drama of this world is for our benefit. It is a mistake, if we take the acting on the stage to be real, and run up to the stage, to stop an actor from acting. In fact, our emotional involvement in such a situation, deprives us of the pleasure of witnessing the drama.
Who are the actors in this drama of life? The guna called Sattva is the intelligence stuff. It is the "plasticity or fluidity of thought almost lost and submerged in mass of materiality". It is also the Beingness. Tamas is the mass of the materiality and is irreducible ultimate of experience. Rajas is energy.
The three gunas work together, sometimes one being dominating and the other two being subordinates. The manifest world is like the kaleidoscope where a few pieces of coloured glasses give us a variety of images. Behind the diversity of the material reality there lies a certain fixity of the basic constituents.
Now, the sattva itself is generally named after millions of minor objects - atoms that have these common characteristics of intelligence, pleasantness, purity, etc. As the substance and its quality are regarded the same, the gunas are as much material objects as they are our feelings about the material world. In fact, feelings are a dominating aspect of the gunas. We have to remember that gunas include both the external material world, as well the internal mental world. Feelings seem to be the stuff that is the basic constituents of both.
Of course, the Sämkhya thinkers realise the difficulty of describing the gunas in their final form and it is said that the true form of gunas can never be known. What we see as the material world, is just an insignificant fraction of the reality of the gunas.
If we were to cultivate such an attitude whereby, we can analyse our experience into the material and non-material, and realise that the material manifestation is but a play of the gunas; and always remember that this play, this entertainment of the gunas is for the benefit of the viewer who is non-material, we should have enjoyed the entertainment provided to us by these eternal actors.