I remember the first time it happened. It was in an acting class in grad school. We’d been given short scenes to memorize and assigned a scene partner. Ours was an emotional scene about a divorced husband meeting his ex-wife to return a typewriter (I don’t remember why. I just remember having to use a block of Styrofoam packaging as the typewriter). It involved unpleasant confrontation. I wasn’t looking forward to it. After a brief discussion of the circumstances of the scene, the instructor called action…
And halfway through my first line, it happened. Without warning, all knowledge of my lines was gone. Awareness of the class was gone. Thoughts about where and why to move or what to do next were gone. Part of me knew that I was still in class and reacting to my scene partner, and that somehow, effortlessly, the lines were coming out in order and on cue. But I wasn’t doing any of it. It was as if my body and emotions had been hijacked and were being remote controlled. I was just along for the ride…
Then suddenly, it was over. There weren’t any more lines. Just emptiness. My face was flushed, but I felt incredibly calm. And everyone in the class was applauding. What the hell had just happened…?
Sure, I’d done the reading. I’d heard stories about actors getting lost in performance. I could give you an academic, jargon-laden description of how my preparation enabled me to forget my preparation and just be. But nothing I’d studied or done before explained the sheer incredible magic of what happened in that class. And it never happened again in quite that same way. There were moments, of course, but I was never again so completely swept away.
I hadn’t thought about that moment for years. But when I started reading Eckart Tolle’s 2004 book The Power of Now, something clicked. His concepts of consciousness and being and their opposition to mind reminded me of the opposition between head and heart I’d struggled with as an actor. Here’s how Eckart Tolle described being:
Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life...But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind. Don’t try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and Tolle spends the rest of his book focusing on defining (and showing the relationships between) the concepts of being, now, and mind. In short, he says the only way to access your true self (which he equates with an awareness of the being [or universal unconscious] within each of us), is to quiet the mind. Quieting the mind (and cultivating an awareness that there is a consciousness beyond mind) is the only way to enter the now (where being resides). Tolle gives this ability to enter the now many names (presence, being, enlightenment), and he regards dwelling in this state as the pinnacle of human spiritual development.
As I splashed around in the concepts of being, now, and mind, I became acutely aware of the similarity those words and concepts bear to the terms that actors (both in movies and on stage) use to describe their craft. Good acting is often praised for “being in the moment,” and the surest way to derail a theatrical moment is by “being in your head.” Why the similarity of terms and descriptions? Is good acting a connection with the divine? The personal trials and tribulations many actors experience (as least as reflected in tabloid headlines) seems to argue against the assertion that they’ve attained enlightenment through their work. And that brings up another question: Just what is an actor’s work? Acting is sometimes thought of as “pretending to be someone else.” On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a path to finding your true self (as defined by Tolle, not Winnicott. Tolle calls the true self, “the essence of who you are”). It seems obvious that before we can look at the possible link between acting and presence with any precision, we need a working definition of acting (at least for the purposes of this paper. In execution, acting [like any art form] is a highly individual, nuanced process that will have as many different expressions as it does practitioners).
Sanford Meisner (one of the most influential acting coaches of the twentieth century [who was heavily influenced by Konstantin Stanislavski]) defined acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” With a phrase like “imaginary circumstances” as half the definition, it’s easy to see how acting might be equated with pretending (indeed, Meisner’s focus on the imagination is what set him apart from Lee Strasberg [the father of method acting] who emphasized emotional recall as a way of attaining true emotions in performance). But an equally important part of Meisner’s definition is his insistence that acting is living truthfully. And this emphasis on truth runs through every definition of good acting (James Cagney famously said all an actor had to do was “look the other fellow in the eye and tell the truth”). The yardstick for measuring any performance is then the degree to which an actor embodies and presents the truth of the character being portrayed. Bad acting, by this measure, is pretending to feel something you aren’t actually experiencing. This is commonly called indicating by acting teachers, since you are putting on an outward show (or indication) of an emotion in lieu of truly feeling it. Bad acting is essentially lying.
But how does an actor access this truth? If it’s true, by definition it isn’t make-believe or imaginary (or merely indicated). Only the circumstances are imaginary in Meisner’s definition. The felt experience must be truthful in order to qualify as good acting. And where does this felt experience come from? As Meisner describes it in his 1987 book Sanford Meisner on Acting, it arises spontaneously in the moment as an impulse. “The emotion comes with how you’re doing what you’re doing,” says Meisner. “If you go from moment to moment, and each moment has a meaning for you, the emotion keeps flowing.” And equally important is where true emotion does NOT come from, which is the mind. “It is not intellectual” Meisner insists, “it is emotional and impulsive, and…comes not from the head but truthfully from the impulses.” Meisner spent much of his career as a teacher devising exercises which enable an actor to get in touch with these impulses without analyzing or thinking about the results. His goal was to create a state “where there is no intellectuality. I wanted to eliminate all that ‘head’ work, to take away all the mental manipulation and get to where the impulses come from.”
So according to Meisner, an actor has to be “in the moment” to access true emotion. And thinking about results (or being “in your head”) will short-circuit any attempt to connect with an emotional center. This conflict between the moment and thinking echoes the dynamic Tolle describes as existing between the now and “the stream of involuntary and incessant thinking” which he calls mind or the “mind-identified egoic state of consciousness.” And it’s this egoic consciousness (or mind) that keeps most people from being able to fully perceive and connect with the present (or now). According to Tolle, “most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind.”
Only when the mind can be stilled (or distracted, or transcended), can the true self (and an awareness of the now) arise. But in most people, those connections with the present are transitory, and the moment is lost,
unless you are able to stay present enough to keep out the mind and its old patterns. As soon as the mind and mind identification return, you are no longer yourself but a mental image of yourself, and you start playing games and roles again to get your ego needs met. You are a human mind again, pretending to be a human being.
It's clear that both Tolle and Meisner see the now (or the moment) as the place where true connection with a universal experience resides. And both see the mind (and ego) as a barrier that disconnects us from our true selves (and from each other). Granted there are differences in emphasis. Tolle sees the quest for the now as an end in itself (indeed as the ultimate goal in the human journey). Meisner’s aims are more modest. He wants an actor to connect with the moment in order to access emotional truth for presentation to an audience. But as someone who has had brief experiences with both the now and moment-to-moment emotional connections in performance, I contend that the subjective state is the same. They are both moments which transcend space and time, and through which an infinite and profound connection to a universal commons is felt.
And it’s interesting to note the similarities between “being in the moment,” and the ultimate states of human development described in many other theories. Maslow’s transcendence, spiral dynamics’ second tier, Kegan’s inter-individual, and action-logics’ alchemist (and later ironic) stages all emphasize a broader state of consciousness in which individual, mind-based concerns are de-emphasized. Does this mean that good acting is yet another path to enlightenment (or possibly that transcended individuals would make the best actors)? Maybe so. But for the most part, acting isn’t concerned with humankind’s advancement to a transcendent state of consciousness. All an actor wants is a connection to truth in the present moment. And maybe that’s enough.