The meaning of spirituality, which is interpreted much broader than the religious meaning in modern times, is widely known by Huxley s 『The Perennial Philosophy』. The perennial philosophy pursues the desire for humans to escape from imperfect and separate consciousness and to find the essential Self as a unified unity with totality. The encounter with the ‘essential Self’ requires a higher-order transformation of consciousness. The perennial philosophy of converting imperfect consciousness into higher-order consciousness through reflection, practice, and training has had a great influence on artists such as Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Peter Brook, and Grotowski.
Japanese director and playwright, Ota Shogo, could be considered as a perennial philosopher. Ota Shogo puts in a play what the beauty of the positivity existing in now and here is. In his plays, Ota Shogo sought to transcend the content of consciousness through the philosophy of ‘renunciation’, expressing “I m going to get rid of all the ground.” This article focuses on examining the meaning of Ota Shogo’s aesthetics of presence presented in , which aims to make actors and audiences meet the essential Self through the elaborate composition of silence, slow motion, sound of water, and music.