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.  These masks contained a built-in megaphone so the audience could hear what the actors were saying.  From personae is derived the modern words person and persona.  Persona has now 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, his anticipation of the future, and his 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 changing constantly.

Dramatis personae has another meaning in Vedanta.  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 instance, is fashioned from a ball of clay, into which the divine blows 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 played out by Brahman.  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 and a new cycle, a new drama, begins, with an all new dramatis personae.