“Life is a dream” – 1
Shakespeare (1564-1616) y Gandhi (1869-1948) did not live in the same period of time, of course… but the other day I found a quote in which they both came together.
This is the famous quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
– Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5
This is the quote by Gandhi that I found:
“I do not know any religion separated from human activity. Religion is the moral foundation of all activities, without which they would not make any moral sense and life would be reduced to ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.”
– Harijan, 24 December 1936
The Spanish poet and playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), Shakespeare’s contemporary, in his play “Life is a Dream”, says:
‘Tis a dream that I in sadness
Here am bound, the scorn of fate;
‘Twas a dream that once a state
I enjoyed of light and gladness.
What is life? ‘Tis but a madness.
What is life? A thing that seems,
A mirage that falsely gleams,
Phantom joy, delusive rest,
Since is life a dream at best,
And even dreams themselves are dreams”
-Life is a Dream (Final Act II)
In my opinion, both Shakespeare and Calderón quotes emphasise the importance of becoming aware that our life is a tale, a theatre, a dream… This awareness is key to take some distance from our daily struggles, things that we consider ‘life or death’ issues, but in reality are not that important. Becoming aware of Life –with capital L– is more important than the things going on in our lives. In other words, becoming aware that we are just actors in our own life is more important than the play itself…
Gandhi takes that consciousness and it equals it to Religion. In my opinion, he puts together Life and Religion through that Consciousness. Maybe the concept of God is that of Pure Consciousness and we become part of God when we are aware of our participation in that Consciousness. In ‘Harijan’, a weekly magazine, edited by Gandhi among others and published in Ahmedabad, Gandhi wrote on the 23 of January 1937:
“Of course, God resides in each of the human forms; in fact, in each one of the particles of the Creation, in everything above the Earth.”
It is a form of pantheism…
Now that many – not all of us – are starting a new year, I wish you to try to be fully aware of what we are doing at all times.
Happy 2023!!
