COSMIC DRAMA

In his play As You Like It, William Shakespeare writes,  All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.

This is a feeling we all share, the sense that we are living in a play, or in a movie, where it is all make-believe, and we are all just playing parts.  We are just acting out roles and, furthermore, are forced to act them out, in the same way that everyone around us is acting them out, and must act them out whether they want to or not.

But why do we feel this way?  The fact is, we can only know about the world by what our senses tell us.  Our senses, however, are limited.  They can only give us lower knowledge, so-called.  They cannot give us the big picture.

The big picture, in the view of Vedanta, is that the world is a manifestation of the One Reality that is Brahman. This manifestation is a drama, or a sport, so described, in which the Brahman plays all the parts.  We feel that we are merely performing roles in this life because this indeed is what we are doing, as the Brahman.