Mindfulness In Our Moment-To-Moment Acting In Life ‒ The Actors We Are
- Feb 11, 2023
- 7 min read
Written by: Maria Olon Tsaroucha, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Why the science of acting is flirting with the "equation" of consciousness. "Who am I?" or "What constitutes 'existence'? Supra conscious You – The innovative breakthrough research and study of human experience.
The Breakthrough
What does acting mean? Acting is becoming. Acting is moving beyond the module of survival into wholeness.
In acting, there is just one thing. Being present in the moment. That is the actors' basic training. Actors become the characters they synchronize to be, diving in and out of different identities that live in different worlds. Actors become anything and everything they need to be for the sake of the character. That is multiple transformations of infinite possibilities of who we are. Acting is not our Ego desire, our societal imprint, religion, or miseducation, it is not of becoming more, it is of becoming whole.
Actors need to be human beings to act in a humanlike fashion and to act in a humanlike fashion to be human beings, but no one can teach anyone else how to be a human being. The way of simply being human is a given. There has never been an answer to the primary question that human beings have forever been eager to have answered, "Who am I?" or "What constitutes 'existence'?" The same questions are posed unconsciously repeatedly, which are and have always been Who am I? Unconsciously, this question haunts the human/actor. In every new show, the same process of questing unconsciously starts again, in repeat. Every performance adds a little bit of self-knowledge in the disclosure of WHO AM I, since it unfolds new aspects, the latest information about the possibility of finally succeeding in synchronizing with a new frame of your own, on a new role. Through the transformations, the cognitive and yet unconscious leaps the actor does to synchronize with the character make him unconsciously aware of the infinity of his/her nature beyond the three-dimensional understanding.
The Mystic
The actor is a mystic. He experiences the union of the mind and the psyche. Then life meets theater, the place where the space of the spirit joins with the space of dreams, where you know that you are the creator of your world and your character's world is also your creation. At that moment on stage, the actor experiences a parallel universe. He/she is synchronized with it and lifts the audience to that energy. As, in the space of dreams, all the dream characters are you and your projections, the significant others, and the stories you want to tell, in an intermediate and transitional space.
Many of the Method acting elements are what I may be allowed to call the quantum process of understanding human beings through acting, which is to say, the attempt to interpret quantum physics in relation to humans for the sake of the art of acting and for offering the scientific world new interpretations for studying human experience.
To live is to act and vs. Actors are working on being alert with emotional memories, the five senses, and beyond, expanding consciousness to the universal truth of nonlinear perception of what it means to be human since actors "live and die" every moment as the characters that are synchronized to be in each play.
An excellent example of personal psychic reality is the well-known story of Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most talented actors of his generation, who, in 1989, decided to retire from the stage when, while playing Hamlet, he saw the spirit of his dead father. If he had tried to think through the part of Hamlet, he would not have managed to experience the unconscious part of the character, which contains the information of the fifth wall, as a new form of the actor's cellular memory. Daniel Day-Lewis through method acting manages to synchronize completely with the frames he chooses so that the fifth wall emerges before him without strain, which in this case was his father's spirit. He characteristically said "Where do the roles go when they finish? They retreat inside of me, I hold onto them, and sometimes I see them in my dreams."
What does this experience just have proven? Might there be a mathematical equation that would reveal human experience? And if there is a mathematical equation that would reveal human experience, could it ever adequately explain consciousness?
Pure Consciousness
The fourth wall in Method acting is a theatrical convention according to which an invisible, imaginary wall separates the actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this wall, the convention dictates that the actors act as if they cannot. The fourth wall is a theatrical convention, not a matter of design. The actors focus their attention exclusively on the dramatic universe, and remain absorbed in its fiction, in a state that the theatrical gatekeeper Stanislavski named "public isolation." With the repetition of the performances, something is revealed of its own accord, a revelation for the sake of solving the equation of what human experience is. That is the experience of a sensation of sinking into the fourth wall. The actor is losing space and time, losing his material substance, has no weight or bulk but only a notional shape, larger in outline than the actual size, so large that it could expand and become one with the universe and simultaneously, with the other version/soul frame, the character with whom the actor is synchronizing. The actor can exist simultaneously as matter but also as the observer, as if the mind were existing independently, outside the body, and could communicate and share information effortlessly. The fifth wall is not something that the actor creates with imagination. It is revealed during the performances. It is an inner intuition that takes form while the actor is on stage, synchronizing with the character's frame. It is the energy space where his soul coexists, synchronized with other possibilities of his existence. It is pure consciousness.
Who Am I
The ancient Greeks very wisely had placed in the middle of the theater stage the "Thymeli", the spot which the actor was never to step on, which according to the ancients, was the place of the psyche itself. It is the place where there are no roles; it is where the unconscious resides, the total of things, the truth, the whole. It is the point where every human being exists apart from his physical state and form, social identity, the roles assumed on and, especially, off stage, the departure point of all passionate questing after identity, the search for an answer to the question of "Who am I?" as part of the drive for completion.
Searching for that which we already know, the book "SUPRACONSCIOUS ‒ The genius within You" deepens and enriches the theory of parallel universes of the quantum interrelation between observer and observed, adapting it to the actor's scale, introducing the theory of frames as the actor's synchronicity with the characters waiting to emerge through proper synchronization. The theory addressed in the book comes to bridge the theories of quantum psychology and mindfulness and the method of the famous Actors' Studio in new harmony. It lays no new foundations but builds new levels of understanding beyond "analyze and meditate" to "experience and exist.
Art and science, spirit and psyche, logic and imagination, proof and lived experience—these are two sides of the same coin. Those sacred moments on stage, when you experience something, you had no idea was there with you and that something is you, leave you unable to put into words what you just lived through and make you, for hours after the performance, feel an elation, a strange calmness, a fulfillment, and an ecstatic void. Those are the times when something follows you, lives with you, and connects you through an invisible thread to your divine being. That realization was what made me understand that art is our path to a multidimensional existence.
I am asking the reader to view the world through the lenses of the actor you are and consider how you are a vital part of the following quote.
We are all actors in a play that is called Life.
After all, acting – beyond being a profession – is an energetic verb we all put into action in our everyday life.
Maria Olon Tsaroucha, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Maria Olon Tsaroucha, is a pioneer in researching philosophical systems that study human nature, personal development and consciousness. She is the originator of Supraconscious You theory, which explores answers to the pananthropic quest “Who am I” and Perceptual Acting and Directing theory and method, a self actualization breakthrough for actors. Her programs introduce the use of quantum physics, new trends of psychology, neurolinguistics programming, meditation, empathy, Ethos value system based on Homer, and method acting as tools for a substantial difference and evolution in human consciousness. During her years as an artist and researcher she developed her philosophical and practical approach to a new interpretation of what it means to be an actor in life and on stage. She is prolific in original creative processes of human thought. She wrote her first book at the age of thirteen and is acclaimed to be the youngest Greek author ever. She participated in TEDXAUEB, presenting her work through the performance “Knowing Thyself: The Eternal Process.” She works on helping the vulnerable groups of women and children at war. She is a founding member of the Actor’s Society of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, an honorary member of the Hellenic Physics Association, member of the International Society of Female Professional Women, member of the board of Green Eyes Productions, member of the Advisory Futurist Media and Arts Board of Lifeboat foundation. Her research and study on the supraconscious human began eighteen years ago and is in progress. She gives master classes and workshops globally to university students, parents, CEO’s and educators for the Supraconscious You concept based on Amazon’s best seller “Supraconscious, the Genius within you”. www.supraconscious.co
