Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 1 Number 2, July 2000

_______________________________________________________________

The Pashyanti Project

 by

 Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow

 

Drama is direct experience.  Drama is or can be liberating, as the rising of the sun liberates after the dark and cold of night.  It can liberate by transmuting being, what we are in ourselves, prior to our ideas of ourselves and other associated ideas, our mental furniture, prior even to our ground states of feeling.  In the silent and magic moments of theatre we are “taken out of ourselves” not merely merged in a collective, but experiencing the emergence of our awareness devoid, momentarily or for longer, of the limitations of the image we take upon us as “ourselves” in the charade of ordinary life.  The make-believe world of drama can transmute consciousness, which is the ground of perception, feeling and understanding, and the ground of changing self-images.  We say “I” before we add name and form and gender and the other appurtenances of our lives (though since our “self-image” comes from outside us, it is rather society and environment that live us, “our” life, and in part own it).  We can move into a moment in which “I” is in abeyance, when there is awareness innocent of categories, including those that might apply to the drama we have witnessed.  The drama is there as a cloud might be there to the innocence of the sky, and so is the theatre and audience, but in the absence of “I/we” they are just there, unowned, unpossessed, there being none to possess them.

 

            The “I/we” that is predicated and suspended here is that of an audience. But in stepping out of everyday mode and role, there remains the potentiality for reinstating them. In other words, “audience” is here located as being plus a capacity for action. Since actor-trainers from many traditions have also sought to locate this suspense-before-animation, it looks as though it can be common to both production and reception in performance. What follows will explore both vectors.

 

This non-manipulative state is the nearest we come in ordinary life to a ground state of consciousness. It is a “ground” because conception and activity are based on it, though it also gives some inkling of the freedom of ungrounded, non-contingent consciousness (“pure consciousness” in the terminology of Stace and Forman; “consciousness without an object” in the terminology of Wolff; ecstasy in the terminology of Whicher).  That is why it is liberating, and refreshing.  Non-manipulative, it is also devoid of meaning, except in so far as being is its own meaning (meaning is manipulative and codal).  From it we can recreate our own lives and create meanings for the drama in which we have participated.  Meaning is secondary, to being and in time.  Out of consciousness emerges mind, operative, restless and fidgety, the coloniser of life that constitutes our ego.  In the world of ego we are, or we appear to be, what we are not.  The ego is also just there, neither necessary nor unnecessary, simply a given, and its relational web makes up what in everyday terms we call our life, but we can benefit from even a moment outside its sphere of influence, unbounded by it, untrapped.  This, theatre can, sometimes, give us.

 

Theatre is not an affair of a moment, or moments, alone.  But the moment as we have described it is important to theatre.  As Peter Brook pointed out (echoing Blake), the moment contains all time (Brook 81).  As Shakespeare pointed out (resonating  with Blake and Juliana of Norwich) the stage is all space.  In the fullness of the moment is the potentiality of time, but in the moment of fullness time drops away.  Fullness precludes sequence as there is nothing more to attain and the moment becomes momentless.  Since expressed words are tied to time, our expression of this becomes complicated.  The experience itself is simple.  The moment does not abolish time, the sequence of drama and action, but it opens up within it a different dimension.  The moment is a lapse into freedom, and that freedom changes the action, for dramatic action, time and freedom are all experienced in consciousness through our minds, and our minds have gone out of themselves towards that ground/groundless consciousness, towards a liberation, towards freedom. If such a freeing moment is experienced in a play, then dramatic time ceases to be self-enclosed, self-defining, whether or not there is narrative or emotional closure.  It is often said that we experience only “now”, but what we in fact experience is nearer immediate presence.  We invent “now” from the colouring of memory and anticipation, and isolate the “now” as a moment – but it only becomes “moment” in retrospect, just as, from the temporal point of view, long periods in the timelessness of samadhi only become “long periods” in retrospect.  The same is true also of the inertia of deep sleep.  “How long  have I been asleep?” is a question that can only be answered on awaking (those who fell asleep in the twenties of a viral sleeping sickness had to be denied mirrors when dopamine awakened them, for their world view did not accommodate a sleep of decades and their self-image was that of the young).  It is nearness to what we have called “the moment” that gives young children the agonisingly slow sense of a time that stands still, agonising since time and the experiences “in” it in this world are often distress or agony.  Time is flexible and the key to it is not the metronome but consciousness.

 

This account suggests that an underlying freedom, beyond egoic and category-bound experience, is available through theatre. As an aesthetic proposition (and also at least implicitly, therefore, a psycho-political practice) this is neither new nor restricted to theatre, as we have attempted to show in detail in our books (Malekin & Yarrow 1997; Yarrow 2000); others have made similar claims for the effects of theatre forms from ritual to the absurd, from Noh to Shakespeare.  But in order for it to be more than a proposition or an interesting idea, it has to be both experienceable in and through bodies and minds, and repeatable. Empirical research on audiences poses problems of scale and availability of appropriate equipment (since things like analysis of brain and body functioning are involved) and it also raises questions of the correlation between physiology and consciousness that cannot be unequivocally settled.  It is therefore more practical to investigate the other bodies involved in theatre-making, namely actors and directors.

 

The Pashyanti project therefore aims to progress from the descriptive (as outlined in this essay) to experimental application.  It has already taken some initial steps in that direction.  In addition, many theatre practitioners from different traditions have articulated similar aims and attempted by a variety of methods to realise them with performers.  Some of these endeavours and our own intentions will be outlined below.  First we need to explain the title more fully.

 

Behind outer physical and inner mental speech Vedic tradition posits two stages, pashyanti, and before that, para.  Pashyanti is pre-verbal, marked by unity of subject and object, non-discursive, immediate, devoid of any sense of spacetime, a holistic cognition.  Para is prior even to pashyanti, a first stirring towards speech, a sense of “something to be said”, and arises out of unconditioned mind (non-contingent consciousness).

 

The full experience of para and pashyanti entails a clear and settled mind and wakefulness on the subtle levels of consciousness, but most of us have at least some experience of them.  We have the experience of knowing what we want to say, not having words to put it in, searching for words, rejecting trial formulations as “not what I want to say” and eventually hitting on a satisfactory formulation, or even wrenching language into new shapes and modes so that formulation shall be satisfactory.  What we want to say is certainly conscious, otherwise we could not use it to judge articulation, but at that stage it is non-verbal, words are lacking.  This is not the fullest or clearest experience of pashyanti, but it verges on pashyanti.  In its fullness pashyanti is nearer the eureka experience, the “got it” of a whole new conceptualisation instantaneously present, the sort of thing that for instance composers can experience, when a whole work or movement is instantaneously present to their minds, becoming sequential when written down (see Malekin and Yarrow 45). 

 

The para stage is also most commonly found in creative work, and not only in the arts.  Strindberg seems to have been aware of it, to judge by his saying, “Quiet, I hear a poem coming!”

 

These experiences are relatively common.  They are likely to be particularly clear for those who have training in the mental disciplines of yoga, though they are not themselves yogic conditions or techniques.  It is simply that yoga tends to produce greater clarity and peace in the mind, less “noise”, and greater awareness of the states of consciousness that transcend the limitations of individual and discursive mind.

 

The pashyanti and para experiences also raise intriguing questions, both about the nature of spacetime, and the commonly available models of the mind.  Spacetime may be much nearer the quantum level in the way it emerges in the ordinary operations of the human mind than is commonly thought (if this surmise is correct then those playing with the idea of consciousness as a field would be on the right track).  Also the relations between subject and object appear to be plural rather than singular.

 

For theatrical praxis such theoretical speculations are not immediately relevant, but the issue of rhythm and breath is.  As a practitioner of yoga moves mentally into the still clarity of samadhi, whether cognitive  samadhi  (samprajnata samadhi, the mind with an object) or non-cognitive samadhi (pure consciousness devoid of any empirical content), then physical breathing slows and apparently comes to a total halt.  On emerging from samadhi the breath returns to whatever level is normal in surface activity for that practitioner (ordinary everyday breathing in fact also begins to function differently after years of yogic practice).  Pashyanti, not being a specifically yogic condition, has either no such effect, or such an effect in a far milder form.  However, since pashyanti is ontologically prior to everyday spacetime, and since it in part shares with cognitive samadhi an apprehension of its mental object in total cognitive immediacy, it does have fully present in it the potential and potency for completely integrated rhythm in external space and time.  In other words it contains the potential for perfect co-ordination, except that the co-ordination is a whole working out into detail, not detail organized into unity.

 

Rhythm consists in polarity in spatial disposition and temporal sequence.  If such polarity in theatrical practice emerges from pashyanti, then it emerges from unity, and the unity, in the form of coherent co-ordination, will be retained if there is no distortion between pashyanti and outer speech/action.  This unity should inform movement, posture, affective flow and speech rhythm.  Most important it should inform the speaking of Shakespearean verse, where the base rhythm in the “score” from which the actor speaks is at one with the flow of thought-feeling in the role and the overall situation. 

 

If we are right in this hypothesis, and only practice can test it, then it will also have implications for the dynamics of relationships in space, and for the projection of plot and action, since plot and action cease to be merely sequential, merely a matter of lull and climax, something nearer Peter Brook’s all time in a moment. 

 

Overall, theatrical practice emanating from pashyanti emphasizes the integrative functioning of drama for actor and audience alike - not what the drama, speech and action is about, but what it does.  And what it does is not confined to changing the emotions and ideas of an audience, but can also change their coherence in being, in unity of mind, feeling, consciousness and potentially action.  As noted by yoga philosophy in the East and the Platonists in the West, there is a double movement within human consciousness, the one outwards towards action, the other inwards towards integrity of being.  Plotinus indeed saw human action as failure of vision, the inability to grasp the fullness of contentment at the heart of their own natures leading humans to seek an external realization of what lay within them (3.8.4.237) – from this point of view the magic moment of silence in the theatre, of suspended action and suspended identity with role and persona, is not a preparation for action, action is a preparation for silence.  In great performance, however, these two combine.  Action flows out from pashyanti bringing silence with it, and silence carries action back into integrity of being.  The intermediate stage is pashyanti, which is the beginning of action on the edge of silence. Through realization from pashyanti the sequentiality of action is transformed.

 

The aim of this project is to build , where appropriate, on the moves referred to above, and to add specific understandings of physiological and mental functioning at generative or originary levels, in order through practice to enable actors and directors to access the pashyanti level more fully and to integrate discursive understanding  back into it.  As noted, this should lead to holistic rhythm not only in gesture, movement, speech and overall stage Gestalt, but also in the way drama is thought, in the first instance by the director. If rhythm grows out of underlying wholeness it carries that wholeness into its divisions (differentiation is not fragmentation). The overall aims are to make available, to realise, all latent signification in a play - in other words, to capitalise fully on theatre’s greatest advantages, the simultaneous manifestation of an enormous richness of signifying codes – and also to awaken the source of meaning in the awareness of audience and actor, to enliven their native creativity.

 

Applied to verse-speaking, the aim is to get the subtle energy-flow of actor and actress, the outer breath, and therefore the speech rhythm, to be more than successive, to have the whole speech (even play) arise spontaneously out of immediate cognition, out of the pashyanti level of mind.

 

This is not just about keeping “in play” a multiplicity of potential meanings, though the interplay of paradox and layering across verbal, gestural and other codes is what gives theatre its density and qualifies it as an effective medium to initiate maximum co-creativity from its receivers. What we are after is rather not losing the “allness” in the particular significance; about holding the total construct of meaning, the Gestalt if you like, within and beneath each utterance and its embodiment.  Impossible demand, of course, in that it requires both performers and receivers to be alert at that x-ray level of intuited wholeness “prior” to speech and form; yet although we can’t be “there” all the time, there are ways (and theatre, among other disciplines, knows them) of tuning in from time to time.

 

What is the fullest level of resource for a play? It is its ability, through geste, metaphor, register, rhythm, network of relationships, visual and aural codes, to generate a dynamic of meanings.

 

`What is the most powerful resource of the actor? It is to be many people, many shapes; and in each of these forms to tap the flow of energy, to embody the processes of their articulation.

 

What is the key modality of an audience? It is the capacity to intuit a “play”, to sense an organicity and to derive a coherence, from the multiple signs, sights and sounds it receives.

 

These analyses imply the possibility of functioning at a level from which forms arise: at the inception of Schiller’s Formtrieb, perhaps. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the more familiar activity of sifting or compiling meaning from a diversity of information. We are not talking about adding up and arriving at a product; we are instead proposing accessing a wholeness from which diversity arises. The proposition runs: the “play”, the “character” and the “meaning” emerge as the articulated forms; they do so because they can be inhabited in a condition of latency. The wholeness is (as Rilke says about the nature of objects and as the phenomenon of holographic reproduction suggests) present in every part.

 

So: how can the “all” of a play be available? How can all the participants in the event express and experience it? And, going even further, how can the play be or incorporate or lead its receivers into “allness” - which might suggest something beyond the apparent concerns of the individual work and impinge on transpersonal zones of awareness?

 

Where mind and body meet, before action, before speech, where knowing is a condition of being leading to feeling, thought, words, deeds, the quality of action is untrammelled, coming from a wholeness within which you are situated.  Start with body, start with words, start with analysis of implicit subtext, start with characteral relations and power games, and much is achieved.  From the level of pashyanti, prior, ontologically prior to this differentiated, all is achievable.  From this level, whole in potentiality, speech is spontaneous, feeling is spontaneous, act is spontaneous.  There is an easy flow, like a river that knows its own beginning, its own end, whose identity is not that of rapids or dam or cataract, or even as river, since river is only a manifestation of untrammelled possibility.  Identity is thus not destroyed.  It is transmuted.

 

The quality of time also changes.  Other times, other modes of time, are glimpsed, possibly slipped into; leaving the theatre, time is needed to readjust to time, to recreate time in our everyday image.

 

To train the body so that it is transfused with this knowledge is difficult, to train the breath into spontaneous being well-nigh impossible outside certain vocational spiritual traditions.  The risk is strain, the imposition of direction imposed with partiality.  Breath, thought, feeling, body - one;  body, mind - one;  affect one factor and you affect all.  Work from the level where they are different, however, and the effect is partial, because sympathy is not living.  Work out of pashyanti and you affect all, as one organism.  Potentially you affect all others engaged in a production also; on the pashyanti level sympathy approaches identity.  The sympathy that exists, and can be denied, in the differentiated, is always at the mercy of the ego identity.  On the pashyanti level the ego is identified with perception in a nontemporal apprehension (immediate, nondiscursive).  Retain the quality of that level in action/acting and ego is lost in art.  A kind of negative capability.

 

How are performers to get to this level of pashyanti?  We have noted that some experience of it is common enough, especially in a situation where you have something to say but cannot find the words for it.  Usually this arises when we are touched to the depths or are seeking a change in mode of apprehension or understanding.  What we want to say is already known to us; it is conscious, but it is not verbalised, and not being verbalised it is difficult to use in everyday life.  For much of the time such preverbal comprehension registers as “feeling”, but it is feeling in the sense of intuition, not emotion, for when it is operating the mind ingathers in quietness.  Major crises can produce it, such as the approach of death, and that is probably why the Elizabethans attributed to the dying the power to prophecy.  That level of mind is not necessarily universal, but it is free from the detached separateness of the ego of surface mind.  Nor is “feeling” the only way of experiencing it, as we have pointed out.

 

When actors  work on a role, they often have an unexpressed idea of what they want to do with it, of “where I want to go”.  This is not the same as an intellectual understanding, nor as an affective subtext based on Stanislavskian emotion-memory exploration, nor as a physical “score” of movements, gestures, glances, rhythms; nor as a way of phrasing lines or pointing words. All of these will be affected by the underlying idea and will interact with it, but they are not the same as it.  It is probably never articulated, except maybe in the triumphant sense that “tonight”, I “got it”.  All rehearsal practices, director’s comments, personal observations are, largely unconsciously, checked against this blueprint, which is not static but evolves as conscious mental, physical and emotional patterning fills out: it is an ever-present intuition of the possibility that is the role.  As such, it grows within the performer, and development in its light becomes self-motivated: motivated from a part of the self that knows its fullest capacity with reference both to the performer’s resources and to the perception of the role.  The drive to realise this may have a lot to do with why actors go on trying, just as a sculptor goes on trying to release the form of his or her vision from the raw material.

 

The performer, then, can be led on by his or her own sense that s/he can be “more”; and that “moreness” is a property both of performer and of the role; it operates across the boundary between “I” and “not I”; it is properly both a moreness and a lessness.  As Richard Schechner points out, performers inhabit this border territory; they also, in so doing, draw on a quality or capacity which he designates as “not not I”.  I am not my differentiated egoic everyday self; nor am I, say, Romeo, Willy Loman or Elizabeth I.  I am something which  is and is not both of these.  My “self” is not entirely co-existent with either of these differentiated structures; nor is it uniquely operating in a Stanislavskian (identified with the role) or Brechtian (separate from and controlling the role) mode.  I am all these modalities and I am the zone across which their transference and transmutation occurs.

 

In a similar way, a director may have an “organic” sense of the shape of the play to be realised, which underlies work on individual components without ever being articulated, except - to whatever degree is possible - in the resultant performance.  Communicating with this level is less a question of driving through a self-willed project than of listening to a sort of sensed heartbeat, of dilating one’s “directing” mode in conjunction with a kind of receptivity.  Such levels of operation then, can be and are accessed.  Any director knows that the disadvantage of performance (as opposed to rehearsal) is the need to enter into the particular, to make definite choices: stand up now, not then; say it (only) this way, not that; look at her, not at him.  It’s a relief of course, not least for the actors: at least/at last, they think, we know where we are.  Skilled directing is the art of giving way to this temptation as late and as little as possible.  Once we know where we are, we are, as Beckett elegantly puts it in Fin de Partie, “baisés”.  There is nowhere else to go.

 

What we are after here then is to enable access to this virtual or numinous intuition of wholeness, to develop or exercise some channels by which it can be most readily approached, and then not lost in the subsequent unravelling into form which is the play.  The operation will need first to take the form of a process of negative capability, a shifting through and beyond egoic involvement and particular significance.

 

Approached from the other side, from the universal aspects of mind and beyond, pashyanti can register with total clarity as a complete realisation that can then be experienced as differentiating into words and logical sequences, into the discursive and temporal.  We have noted that, thus experienced,  pashyanti is near to the inspiration of those composers or artists whose work comes as an instantaneous whole, and to the eureka experience.  The freshness and revitalisation of experiences verging on this level come not solely from the breaking of the mould of mental habit, but from the extension of mental life off its mere superficies towards integration of all levels of consciousness (which in fact exceeds mere mind), and towards fullness of mental power, even though pashyanti is relatively a surface experience.

 

What is needed then, is to bring performers, individually and collectively, firstly to access a state of “neutrality”, where habit and familiar patterns are suspended, where both the everyday self and its forms and roles, and any easily adopted “actorly” personae, are put aside. A sort of waiting without expectation. Where the performer is not the everyday I, not the character s/he may adopt, only the possibility of being neither and both.  Where the play, both as interaction of personae and as interweaving of text, is still unknown.  It's not irrelevant then that the levels accessed here are what conventional categories of identity and meaning leave out: participants meet themselves in another guise, not as they are in everyday situations or familiar training or performance modes; they are asked to engage with what in these situations they do not know.  Jacques Lecoq claimed that the most urgent need for the performer is permission to fail: to be able to become what (you think) you cannot do.  Others have used terms like “sacrifice” or “abandonment” to describe passing  through this “failure”.  What it involves is, more precisely, a temporary encounter, perhaps initially vertiginous or scary, with something like the sense that “I can’t do that; I have absolutely no idea how to do/be that; I cannot imagine what doing that would be like; I do not extend that far; if I am asked to do that I will be lost”.  It is absolutely necessary to enter that loss, that absence.  To rest here.  To unfind oneself.  To be only a readiness, a blank screen.

 

This stage (neutral waiting) can be approached many ways.  They could include the use of neutral mask work, kinds of visualisation and relaxation.  They need to lead to a state which is both relaxed and attentive, without specific content to awareness.  Accessing this means in the first instance, starting from everyday conscious awareness and refining or reducing the degree of activity via any of the five senses.  Once encountered, the resultant temporary condition needs to be returned to frequently, in order ultimately to make access to it more readily available, or to establish it as an underlying stratum of awareness (a probably lengthy task).

 

This “inward stroke” can progress by taking an image (sight), or a sound (hearing), or a sensation (touch), or a rhythm, or the breath. We have found in initial experiments that  pranayama (breathing exercise), carefully guided towards easy and unforced passage of an ever-reduced volume of air, begins to induce a physiological condition approaching neutral awareness; that other participants find the visualisation of the juxtaposition of sea, sky and sand (as in the neutral mask “waking up” exercise used by Copeau) helpful.  Other possibilities include standard drama exercises like progressive relaxation or Spolin’s “circles of attention”; yoga asanas, appropriately selected and directed  (i.e. towards balance, flexibility and relaxed focus);. rhythmic movement and chanting; and shamanic chanting or other similar vocal work.

 

It is important to develop first some familiarity with this condition, because it is one which allows forms, formulations, patterns of perception and behaviour, to be suspended.  There is no attempt to pretend they do not or should not exist; they are not devalued, just bracketed out  temporarily.  This withdrawing from activity is a withdrawing from intention, including the intention to signify or to grasp significance.  If, as a performer, it is thought useful to “go out of your (everyday) self”, then it is important to go as far as possible.  Zeami indicates this direction when he says that the actor should “forget the voice and understand…the melody.  Forget the melody and understand the pitch.  Forget the pitch and understand the rhythm” (Rimer 102).  Indian actress Alaknanda Samarth, working in collaboration with a visual artist in Bombay on Heiner Müller’s Medea, needed to explore a “state of mind/body” in some way located in a kind of Beckettian process of “pause” between words (“Line…cut off memorization…blank out…2nd line”): an “understanding of the non-psychological, non-individual” (Seagull 64).  Barba’s quest for “pre-expressivity”, Grotowski’s request for “disarmament” or “sacrifice” on the part of the actor, Indian director Kavalam Panikkar’s definition of a goal of performance as “the extreme point of the imagination”, all suggest something similar.  The aim of retiring to this imagined “dying” is precisely to be born again from here: that is the next phase, where embryonic signification begins anew.  If the particularity of individual conception is first “washed clean”, there is a chance that a different kind of entry or intuition of the work may be allowed to form.  In working in this way, each performance is a reemergence from origin.

 

The next stage is to begin to inhabit not a structure, not a text, not a plot or a story, but the tracing out of its possible nexus of relationship.  Don't go too fast.  Hold back from detail.  This stage requires an intuitive merging with the whole field of the project in hand (play, scene etc.), but not as idea.  As image, perhaps; or colour, pattern, sound; as any nascent sensory construct, but at its initial, unelaborated stage.  This needs to be felt/shared/inhabited rather than seized as an object: a fully imaginative entry into and being with what will become material.  From the relaxed focus of stage 1, it is possible to allow a sense of the project to form.  Allow the non-specific awareness of the project to be present without concentration or forcing; from it, a sensation, a rhythm, a pattern, a mood, a tone may emerge.  Remain with this.  Neither try to develop it nor to hold on to it.  If it either begins to crystallise into details, or disappears, start again.  Keep going back and forth in this initiatory zone until the fragile sensory outline is relatively familiar.  From there, the next stage (a collective sharing and sensing prior to any further development towards form) can begin.  The sensing of the play as a whole follows, moving from “feeling” (intuition) to idea, not the other way round (theories, ideas, preset attitudes, should be abandoned for the time being to leave the intuitive mind free to operate).  Role and situational analysis should only come last, on the basis of total intuitive comprehension.

 

Training methods to get actors, or ideally an entire company, including back-stage members, on to the pashyanti level have already been outlined.  They can be developed further.  Selected methods need to increase the flexibility of mind, so that there is no impediment to the flow from pashyanti outwards.  They therefore need to avoid emotionally charged stimuli or partisan ideas (since these excite the surface mind and emphasize difference).  The visualisations already suggested could be extended.  For instance a churning sea could be visualised subsiding into a state of rest.  Or some object in nature could be selected, an object that is appealing, a mountain or ocean.  Visualisation of the object could be followed by a merging with it in imagination, by entering into it, becoming one with it, sensing through it and its life, leaving behind your human identity.  Sounds could also be tried out, dissonances resolving into chords, growing into pure notes with harmonic resonances.  Some of the sound exercises developed for use with Thanos Vovolis's Greek masks, mostly vowel cries resonating through the masks, could also be tried out.  Primary colours or a primary colour could be faded back mentally into their gentle soft root colours (Cézanne said “Colours rise up from the roots of the world”) and could then be merged into pure white.  Traditional symbols such as the shri yantra could be placed physically before a troupe and the actors could be asked to enter into the diagram mentally and pass beyond it; after a while they should be able to hold it mentally while in a relaxed state.  Where appropriate these techniques could be tried in conjunction with the use of aroma therapy oils.  Soft touch could be taken mentally, faded into gentleness and expanded to include the touch-sensing of surrounding objects, including more and more distant ones, until the mind lets go and the objects fall into the mind rather than the mind becoming dissipated in objects.  Possibly mental exercises could be developed on the lines of the traditional Platonic ascent to Beauty.  Best of all, however, would be prolonged training in yoga, the mental techniques especially, which should enable the mind to slip into or approach the pashyanti level effortlessly at will.

 

As already stated, these techniques are complementary to other training techniques already in use, but they should precede or be interwoven with them. If this procedure is followed, and if it is successful, and if it involves all associated with the production, then it will take in design, music and sound effects, etc.  All should project a state of being primarily and serve a sequentially dramatic function secondarily, not the other way round. 

 

To enable actors, or ideally an entire company, including back-stage members,  to start to work from the pashyanti level, they need - as with much performance training - to increase the flexibility of both mind and body, so that there is no impediment either to the withdrawal through subtler and subtler stages of perception to stillness, or to the flow from pashyanti outwards.  For this, ideally, both time and seclusion are required.  Such company structures have existed, not only in the East but also in Europe.  Copeau's retreats in Burgundy, Gardzienice's Polish village base, some of Grotowski's “paratheatrical” work have been of this kind and have moved towards not entirely dissimilar goals.  It is difficult, but  even in such cultural settings not impossible to think of working for relatively extended periods in this way.  Both radical performance training and practical theatre research are involved, as an extension of the work of those practitioners mentioned above.  We hope that it will be possible to run at least one- or two-week residential workshops of this kind.

 

While the company should ideally be yogic, this does not exclude any subject matter or political or other concerns in the drama or performance forms which it practices and/or investigates.  Thought, including the thought in a work of art, starts from external stimulus, which affects the mind, and prompts the ideation that then moves out from the pashyanti level.  That ideation will retain the conditioning of time, place, assumption.  The non-discursiveness of pashyanti and its union of subject and object will, however, give thought on that level maximum available coherence and the broadest available range of living sympathy, as well as the greatest available energy.  If that level is brought out on to the surface these qualities will tend to be retained. 

 

The effects of such retention will include breathing, the quality of movement, the quality of speech, and, in a writer, the quality of the words or language.  The texts in English where these qualities should be most obvious are the plays of Shakespeare, for there is something in those texts that escapes surface analysis.  Historical considerations, psychological considerations, political and social considerations can be analyzed out and presented as the “significance” of the play, yet if these factors were retained and the poetry alone removed the plays would be wretchedly diminished, indeed totally changed.  Codified criticism is inevitably reductive, and subtle modern variants do no more than was done in earlier periods by moralistic reduction that posited some “message”.  If the play only added up to the “message”, we would not need the play; the play is what the “message” and the “significance” leave out.

 

To find the play is to experience it, and to experience it is, among other things, to experience its language, however much language may be looked down upon in some forms of modern theatrical practice, where it may become a subtext of the body.  That which experiences pashyanti is the mind, and the mind is more flexible than the body, so that it is easier to move the mind to pashyanti by using the mind itself through language, thus affecting the body also, than to work primarily on body awareness to induce a mental state of pashyanti.  Since the two factors, while not identical, are closely identified, it is not a question of one or the other, both are needed.  But mind should not be overshadowed in the process by body.  Indeed one effect of proper body training is that the body should present no impediment to the mind, the two should move as one, as in Clive Barker’s “body/think”.  If the language in a play lacks vitality, power, the question is immaterial, but for most of Shakespeare it is central.

 

Shakespeare is distinguished among English poets by the “ease” of his language.  It is a quality that has often been noted - Ben Jonson remarked on it, so did Dryden.  The quality is not easy to analyze, and most have not tried.  From our point of view it is simply that the surface language is very near to pashyanti; the resistance of the surface to what we wish to say but have as yet no words for, a resistance experienced precisely when we are looking for the right words, usually is not there.  This leads to a number of qualities that are analysable and range from obvious qualities of physiological mouth movement to perhaps less obvious qualities of rhythmic coherence and holistic imagery.  Rhythmic coherence is retained even when the syntax and metrical patterning appear irregular.  The breathed rhythm of the sentences tends to enact the breath rhythm of the state projected.  The result is not a statement in the manner say of Dryden or Racine or Corneille, but something wilder and less formal, language as organism, for it embodies the breath of the organism, and the breath subtly registers mental-emotional condition and degree of consciousness.  Imagery and syntax can equally function holistically, combining logically contradictory tendencies in a way not open to discursive linear analytical rationality.

 

The physiological enactment of feeling and action in a line of verse is fairly common in seventeenth and to a lesser extent eighteenth-century English poetry (a point made by John Bailey, who mentioned it in discussion many years ago).  Milton’s account of the devils’ chewing dust and ashes in Paradise Lost is one instance.  They

 

Chewed bitter ashes, which th’offended taste

Wih spattering noise rejected.  Oft they…

With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws

With soot and cinders filled.

10.566-70

 

The mouth movements in reading are similar to the presumed mouth movements of someone chewing ashes.  Yet the language is nonetheless heavy, it has a contrived or arranged feel to it, it sounds constructed, not natural (the disruption of the most common word order because of the syntax, and the consequent variants of intonational and pausal patterning necessary to convey the sense, are factors in this, though there are also others).  Hamlet’s language can have a similar physiological quality, but with much greater ease.  An instance is Hamlet’s comment on his mother’s sexual appetites and hasty remarriage in the lines:

 

                       O most wicked speed, to post

            With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

                                    1.2.156-7

 

The lines spit, and hissing and spitting are instinctive expressions of disgust, anger and hostility that are not confined to human beings (cats exhibit them, for instance, and there is at least one kind of cobra that will hiss in warning before spitting venom).  If the mouth movement is enacted, feeling follows, and given the instinctive sympathy to sound in speech, and audience will respond with feeling.  The audience probably in fact responds with some residual or incipient mouth movement that might be detectable in the brain. 

 

The mouth movement can also actually mime the meaning of the lines.  When Hamlet asks his father’s ghost why

 

                                                The sepulchre

            Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned

            Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws

            To cast thee up again

                                    1.4.48-51

 

the image is metonymic for death  itself, as swallowing the dead, but in this case vomiting them up again.  In line 50 the mouth hollows over the “o” of “oped” and the “a” of “marble” (and to some extent the “o” in “ponderous”), while the mouth is open for “aw” of “jaws” and remains partly open for the final “s”, while the closure of the endings of “oped” and “marble” give virtually the mouth movements of the preliminary and abortive heaves of a fit of vomiting.  “Cast”, starting from the throat and ending at the front of the mouth, gives the final heave, leaving “thee” vomited “up again”.  Yet in spite of all this the lines have an easy mastery, they flow beautifully, arising spontaneously as perfection.  They live the meaning without strain.

 

This distinctive holism and ease is found almost microcosmically in passages of the plays, for instance in King Lear:

 

            Regan                                              What need one?

            Lear            O, reason not the need!  Our basest beggars

                        Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

                        Allow not nature more than nature needs,

                        Man's life's as cheap as beast's.  Thou art a lady;

                        If only to go warm were gorgeous,

                        Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wearst

                        Which scarcely keeps thee warm.  But, for true need -

                        You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!

                                                            2.4.256-263

 

The passage obviously expresses conflicting impulses, ideas, definitions of need.  They can be teased out and a discursive statement given of the “meaning” of the passage in the manner of editorial notes, yet if this is done the “meaning” of the passage changes radically.  What is missed is the wholeness of conflict, the way in which one idea not only interlocks with the other, but the conflicting ideas and feelings are part of one another.  Separated out the ideas change.  So do the feelings.  In other words the impulse of the verse has organic unity.  If in performance the delivery is “pointed” in order to “clarify” a particular interpretation, not only is the wholeness truncated, but the underlying dynamic, which here is rooted in conflict, may be glossed over. Both the actor and the audience need to feel this rather than have it “explained”.

 

The organic quality of the verse comes out in sound, rhythm and syntax.  The caesura after the opening cry of Lear's speech is one of pent-up exasperation.  The following “basest beggars”, with its explosive “b”s, is the bursting out of breath and energy, while the falling spoken rhythm of the words together with the spitting and hissing sounds of the “s”s and “t” give the contempt (of both the beggars and the proposed idea of need).  The next line, with its double caesura before “in” and after “thing”, gives a kind of double ended line with an emphasis on “Are” (in its metrically inverted foot) and “superfluous” (again the word hisses).  The preliminary explosion out of the way, the next line has a deliberate plod with no caesura, the effect of frustration becoming tight conscious control, and this quality is highlighted by the alliterative “n”s.  The short polysyllables and easily elided monosyllables (“more than”) are followed in the opening of the next line by monosyllables leading up to the caesura after “beast's”.  The caesura marks the shift to the alternative to the “cheap as beast's” idea that is being rejected.  Most naturally therefore the “Thou” would be stressed and the emphatic statement ending in “lady” demands a pause at the end of the line.  The next nearly three lines have obvious plays on “warm” and “gorgeous” backed up by other initial “g”s and “w”s, while the lines also pick up the earlier refrain of “nature needs”.  Logically and rhythmically the lines collapse in on themselves, combining two contradictory ideas and lines of argument: first, if you only needed clothes to keep you warm, you would not need the excessive clothing that makes you gorgeous; secondly, your gorgeous clothing makes you gorgeous but it doesn't even keep you warm.  The contradictions could be removed by careful distinctions between socio-sexual needs and need for bare physical survival, but then the wholeness of the driving need disappears. 

 

This contradictory passage on nature's needs comes out of the caesura, the pause after “Thou art a lady”.  It is part of the contradictory, the artificial notion of what it is to be a lady.  But if being a lady is this artificial and contradictory, then is man's life after all really “as cheap as beast's”, an idea rejected in earlier lines?  The initial exasperation caused by the rejection of Lear's need for symbolic social status in the form of his knights is here an exasperation at the whole idea of need.  Lear rouses himself to grasp the central nexus of the question, and the caesura after warm is succeeded by “But for true need”, a move towards resolution which breaks down with the end pause of the line and the anacoluthon as he addresses the heavens. 

 

The clash of opposing drives continues in “give me that patience, patience I need”.  A simple appeal for help from the heavens would take the form, “You heavens, give me the patience that I need”, but patience is instead pointed at by the “that” in “that patience”, the first construction is abandoned after the first “patience”, the caesura that follows is again a fulcrum on which the line and thought turn, and Lear's mind turns inwards with the repeating of “patience” and the recognition in “I need”.   Need thus becomes need for a quality in Lear himself, it is internal, as opposed to the external versions of need at the opening (“nature needs”).  This presents a partial answer to the question, unanswered, about the nature of true need, but it does not dispose of the external difficulties that gave rise to it in the first place.  What emerges from this is obviously not some syllogistic consideration of the concept of need, or even the series of contradictory ideas suggested by taking the lines sequentially, rather it is a self-contradictory state, the validity of opposites pulling apart, which is the explosion of Lear into madness, and into sanity.  The patterning of the sounds and the pent-up breaths as lines and phrases swing round in direction, is the state of life energy in Lear expressed in terms of sequences.  From this point of view it is pashyanti as physiological mind giving rise to discursive expression.  Not “reason the need” but “feel the need” is Lear’s cry; or “reason isn’t the need, I am, and my need is of you/everyone/everything”: Lear here is the need for need.  Need is a condition of Lear’s being, of the character and of the dynamic of interaction which make up the play; it is also the structure of understanding by which the audience may enter the Lear world.  It bodies out to condition all action within that world.  To enter (for performer and audience) means engaging not with a definition, not with a characteristic, not with a single act of desiring or even a single acknowledgement of lack, but with a motive force, a groundswell which impels complexities, oppositions and multiple reflections of plot and action.  To make these fully operational, performers need to be able to access the generic.  That means working out from a kind of understanding that is not yet language. So the preceding analysis is not a set of instructions to performers, but an assessment of some possible outcomes. Each performance has to reactivate the dynamic.

 

Lear’s state of life energy is not one which can be simply explained or grasped; it is the state of the play as a whole, which presents no way out, allows no resolution.  The play forces, or tends to force a change in the state of being of the audience, driving them to rise above the predicaments within it, not proceed through them to some “solution”.  Without the pashyanti effect this quality of the play would be impossible.  It is a characteristic of theatre which (as script or as performance) derives from the pashyanti level that the part contains the whole within it, for pashyanti is preverbal and prespatial in that it does not have discursivity - discursivity, time and space are latent within it. The audience is not here offered the simplistic or exorcistic version of catharsis Brecht feared (“he’s done it, so I don’t have to bother”). Rather, it is invited to experience a complexity which pushes comprehension beyond familiar paradigms and the knower beyond recognisable modes of knowing.

 

This extended (and illustrative) analysis is intended to indicate ways in which Shakespearean verse is dynamic and performative because it emerges from a unitive and organic sense of the total existential situation (Lear’s “take” on the world) which impels everything he says and does. The extract and the play exemplify the contradictory mental and physical drives which determine his (Stanislavskian) “intentions”, and which the performer therefore has to “play”. But how can one play this degree of contradiction?

 

We are suggesting that to access the pashyanti level prior to linguistic and semiotic operation in a systematic way, is to enable actors to develop familiarity with a point of origin for such work. Barba’s suggested route to a “pre-expressive (sub)score” moves back from movement to the impulse to move, from language or vocalisation to shaping of breath or sensing of pitch. Cicely Berry explores text as movement by requiring actors to walk and change direction at each punctuation mark. Mask training (e.g. Commedia) may demand the adoption of different postures or body shapes. These and other methodologies indicate a direction towards the identification of modes of organicity; many of the raids by twentieth-century European actor-trainers (Artaud, Grotowski, Brook and Mnouchkine among them) on Eastern performance practice can be understood as a quest for states of psychophysiological balance and energised potential. Our project seeks to take this work further.

 

Given a company either intimately suited, appropriately trained or long established, the whole should also be present in the part in the sense of individual role.  As we sense the mind and feeling of those we know well, or sense the feeling of people who have left a room we enter, so many artists sense the feeling and mind of fellow performers.  Pashyanti is free from ego, not personalised.  On the level of pashyanti minds can meet.  It is not necessarily a universal level of mind, but it is nearer the universal level than is discursive mind.  There should therefore be instinctive cohesion, if not total coherence between the actors, increasing as they approach the pashyanti level and begin to act out of it.  Thus the quality of a whole production should change and given the sympathy of minds, it should include the mind of the audience also.

 

The internal contradictions within Shakespearean imagery and thought have, like the ease of the language, been previously noted by English poets and critics.  Dryden was aware of them (they provided part of his motivation for rewriting Antony and Cleopatra), and Dr. Johnson was similarly irritated by their presence in Macbeth and in Shakespeare’s work in general.  In our view Shakespeare’s holistic images are not half finished versions of surface thought.  Rather the contradictory combinations enverb a different quality and a different meaning from anything attainable in discursive suface language.  Surface statement analyzes or explains, talks about something; poetry used as Shakespeare uses it is the experience itself.  This is why poetry is nearer to the language of the soul than discursive prose, and why in the present age, when we are alienated from ourselves, prose is the dominant medium and poetry has become increasingly discursive and prosaic.  This judgement of course presupposes a model of the mind different from the ones that form the basis for current establishment discourse.  It is precisely this quality of Shakespeare's language that makes him stand above other English poets and most of the poets in other languages that we have encountered.  That is also why the traditional canon was right to accord centrality to Shakespeare, and why those who regard canons as solely political constructs are wrong.

 

The passages of verse that we have considered come from the middle plays of Shakespeare, because the verse there is most easily accessible to analysis.  The verse in the plays changed in the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime.  In earlier plays like Richard II and Romeo and Juliet the verse is more discursive and ornate, playing largely on the auditory form of rhythmical, syntactic and rhyme structures, which is one reason why these plays “tell a story” in the sense of having a pageant effect, albeit a very moving one, that we view from a vantage point outside the action.  In the middle period, especially in the great tragedies, the involvement tends to be more direct.  There too a distance is not lacking, but we gain it by going through the experience in the play, not standing, however moved, outside the central action.  In the final plays, especially The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, something much subtler is going on, and much more difficult to analyze.  The verse reverts to something approaching the early technique, and the plays regain something of the spectacle element, but the vantage point of the viewer has changed and the verse is subtler than the early verse. The audience-stage relation is complex and paradoxical, influenced, for instance, by the shifting viewpoints and juxtaposed realities of The Tempest, by the narrative break and chorus in The Winter's Tale.  Through the awakening speech of Paulina and the revels speech of Prospero the audience, and possibly the actors, move from witness of the whole external action to witness of their own minds, yet with a kind of detachment that was not there in the early plays.  Melody in these great speeches is noticeable, but they are not just pretty, they have strength.  The conflict of the tragedies is there, in action and verse, but there is also detached serenity, so that the conflicts are dominated by stillness.  The structure of the plays and the structure of the verse are closely aligned because they arise from the same level and enact the same design.

 

Prospero lets go of his magic, perhaps because he realises that power resides not in external tricks but in a state which can encompass a conjunction of opposites. He also asks the audience to let him go (“let your indulgence set me free”), for unless they do he cannot  change. Our project seeks to move performers through such a letting go and to reconfigure performance outwards from that wholeness which is more than all the parts.

 

What we are dealing with is a kind of magic unrealism.

 

Works Cited

 

 

Brook, Peter. There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre.  London: Methuen, 993.

 

Forman, Robert K.C. (ed).  The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. NY: OUP,1990.

 

Malekin, Peter and Yarrow, Ralph.  Consciousness, Literature and Theatre: Theory and Beyond.  London: Macmillan, 1997.

 

Plotinus.  The Enneads.  Trans Stephen MacKenna.  Ed John Dillon.  London: Penguin, 1991.

 

Rimer and Masakazu.  On the Art of the No Drama.  Princeton UP, 1984.

 

Seagull Theatre Quarterly. 6 (1995). ‘Medea in Bombay: A Collaboration’ – Alaknanda Samarth, pp. 56-64

 

Stace, W.T.  Mysticism and Philosophy.  London: Macmillan, 1960.

 

Whicher, Ian.  The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana: A Reconsideration of Classical  Yoga.  NY: SUNY, 1998.

 

Wolff, Franklin Merrell.  The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. NY, 1973.

 

Yarrow, Ralph.  Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom. London: Curzon, 2000.