Self Consciousness Theater

My neurotic awareness meets Hindu philosophy

I recently quit my job of 6 years. With just a week off before starting the new gig, I booked a last-minute flight to the remote beach town of Uvita in Costa Rica to visit my best friend. Our mornings were spent waking up to the sunrise peeking over the mountains behind us, followed by long, slow beach walks–the waves crashing like a metronome keeping time, reminding me I’m not beholden to the customary temporal master dictating my daily schedule. During the days, we’d take immersive hikes through the lush jungle with its cacophony of buzzing insects, ending up at edenic waterfalls that would make Adam and Eve jealous.

It was truly idyllic.

You’d think this would lead to a week of pure presence–an elevated state of blissful connection to myself and those around me. And yet, there I found myself, at a local farmers market full of artisans, artists, and merchants selling their goods made with love, trapped in my head, focused on this me-centered existence. While I should have been enjoying the moment, conversing about the array of exotic fresh fruits and raw cacao, I became fixated on this insane notion of how I’m being perceived. And with it came a notable state change. I could feel the life force being sucked out of me, whats normally a cheery disposition becoming a mask, doubt creeping in, my social capabilities deteriorating.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been plagued by this type of self-consciousness. Not in the “does this dress make me look fat” kind of way but a literal consciousness-of-self, where attention turns inwards and I become hyper-aware of my existence as something separate from all around me. Every word spoken or action taken becomes criticized in relation to how it could be judged. By whom, you ask?

That’s the worst part. I’m thoroughly and painfully aware that I don’t actually care about the opinions or judgments of anyone in this market that I will likely never see again in my life. I’m also fully aware that no one is thinking about me because most people are trapped in their own me-centered existence. And the ones that aren’t, those privy to the ridiculousness of the hallucinated distortion of separateness, sure as hell aren’t casting judgment.

It’s maddening. Tortuous even. Why why why can’t I just be?

It feels as though I was thrown on stage, performing in front of a packed crowd at The Broadway Theater, the eyes of the Universe on me like a NYT critic scrutinizing everything I do or say, holding it up to an arbitrary standard of how this performance should go and yet I’ve never read the script so I’m forced to gauge reactions in real-time to somehow assess if I’m doing things right. One misstep and I’ll be jeered at.

Despite knowing that this is most definitely not the case and no one is observing me, popcorn in hand, ready to write a scathing review, and that situations like this are completely and utterly inconsequential, I can’t help but feel deep down on a cellular level that there’s this stagelike quality to my reality.

Maybe it’s because there is and I’m just misrepresenting it?

The Hindus have this concept known as lila, or Cosmic Play, which assumes this theatrical analogy. It maintains that we are all acting out our lives in this theater of the material world. Except there is no audience. Everyone and everything is an actor playing their role in divine unison. There is no explicit purpose. There is no goal. Life unfolds spontaneously and the aim is simply to play, to create, to perform for performance’s sake rather than to get anything out of it.

Therefore, there can be no critics. No one is sitting outside the play, looking in, able to cast judgment on the performance. There can be no expectations because no one is there to expect. There can be no critique because there is no script to follow, no objective measure of how things should go.

Rather, the beauty of existence lies in its sheer spontaneity—an endless unfolding without the burden of success or failure. Each moment is complete in and of itself, needing no justification beyond its own expression.

And so perhaps this neurotic, self-conscious inward focus I experience is a product of a misinterpretation of the nature of this theater called life.

Who’s to say. But I do feel a bit better now.