DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The dramatis personae is the list of characters in a play. The Latin word personae is from "per" meaning "through" and "sonare" meaning "to sound," i.e. that through which sound is produced. Early Greek and Roman actors wore masks representing various characters which contained a built-in megaphone so that the audience could hear what they were saying. From personae is derived the modern words person and persona. Persona has come to mean the social self, experienced as a kind of mask, not the true self.

But the true self so-called, is a mask too. It is a conditioned phenomenon based upon one's memory of the past, one's anticipation of the future, and one's present consciousness. Thinking and communicating using symbols is also part of it. There is nothing reliable about this true self since it is time bound and constantly changing. Vedanta views it as a mask of the Atman, or soul.

Dramatis personae has another meaning in Vedanta, however. There are, to begin with, three models of the universe. The view of western religions is that the universe is an artifact, something that is made, like a pot. In this model, man, for example, is fashioned from a ball of clay into which the divine plows the breath of life. In China, there is the organic model where the universe is seen as a living organism. What affects one part of it affects the whole of it. In India, the universe is conceived as a drama which is being acted out by Brahman, the Ground of Being. Brahman plays all the parts and all the elements, and is so convincing at it that even it forgets that it is doing so. Eventually, though, Brahman awakens, whereupon the universe ends. A new drama, cycle, begins again in time, with a new dramatis personae.