The television, a relatively recent 20th century invention, is a powerful form of entertainment and escape from the travails of life. By identifying with someone else’s life, we momentarily forget the ennui of our own life. TV also provides excitement in the form of sports programs or crime dramas (not to mention the absurd reality shows). But watching TV also has some subtle negative consequences on the consciousness of the spiritual aspirant which are seldom mentioned. In his poem Savitri (all of which was composed before 1950), Sri Aurobindo seems to have anticipated what the advent of television would bring to humanity. He wrote in his poem…
On the dark background of a soulless world
She staged between a lurid light and shade
Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths
Written on the agonised nerves of living things:
Epics of horror and grim majesty,
Wry statues spat and stiffened in life’s mud,
A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds
Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.
In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
Styled infamies of the body’s concupiscence
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
Turned lust into a decorative art:
Abusing Nature’s gift her pervert skill
Immortalised the sown grain of living death,
In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,
To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.
Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book 2, Canto 7)
The reasons for the ill-effects of TV on our consciousness are grounded in our perception process and our subconscious. In the Upanishads, it is said that the “one part of the mind takes the form of the object it concentrates on” – referred to as determinate apprehension (See Epistemology of Perception) . The images beamed forth from the television tend to be so enthralling that they hold the mind captive. They swamp our brain and also invade our subconscious. The images which invade the brain lead to loss of memory (the same phenomenon is observed temporarily after we exit a movie theatre) and once these images descend into our subconscious, they begin to rise up in sleep producing all kinds of horrific incoherent dreams.
Secondly, the sensory overload drowns out the action of the Purusha (executive power or spirit within) and consequently we experience listlessness, depression and lack of will-power coupled with a reflexive desire to emulate the behavior seen on TV. Once the will has been weakened, we begin to unconsciously and thoughtlessly emulate the mannerisms of the actors and actresses that we observe on television. We internalize their behaviour and delude ourselves in hoping that our life will fit the same narrative that we have observed on screen.
There is also a third ill-effect (which will certainly make a positivist incredulous) and this is related to the fact that every room, home, city, country sustains its own vital atmosphere. Have you ever noticed the difference between the atmosphere in a place of worship, a library and a bar?. This vital atmosphere becomes tainted or poisoned when gory scenes from the TV are beamed into the room. It is difficult to concentrate or meditate in a room which has retains such an atmosphere.
Watch less TV!
For the spiritual aspirant, the short-term solution is really to live as much as possible without watching television. In the long-term, the consciousness needs to be cleansed completely of all past images and this can only occur after various spiritual experiences. As Sri Aurobindo states, (see here) “The descent of Peace (Sat), the descent of Force or Power(Chit), the descent of Light, the descent of Ananda, these are the four things that transform the nature.“ The result of constant spiritual practice is the cleansing of the Chitta. As Patanjali states “tatha klesha karma nivritti” (Yoga Sutras 4.30) – the colorings (kleshas) in the mind (chitta) are purged once the inner being is awakened.
See Also: Article on People who live without TV
Related Posts
- All thoughts come from outside
- Triple movement of Integral Yoga (Witness, Consenter, Enjoyer)
- Subtle forms of the ego – (transcending suffocation)
- Ethical, logical and aesthetic mind
- Gita Chapter 18, Verse 60-61: The illusion of free-will
- Aspects of Karma-Yoga
- Self-control over speech
- How to cultivate the state of witness consciousness(Saksi-bhava)
- Types of meditation
- Illustrating Integral Psychology using the Gita
Web browsing leads to some of the same problems
From http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/707/excessive_internet_use_is_linked_to_depression
“People who spend a lot of time browsing the net are more likely to show depressive symptoms, according to the first large-scale study of its kind in the West by University of Leeds psychologists…Lead author Dr Catriona Morrison, from the University of Leeds, said: “The internet now plays a huge part in modern life, but its benefits are accompanied by a darker side. ”
“On the dark background of a soulless world
She staged between a lurid light and shade
Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths
Written on the agonised nerves of living things:
Epics of horror and grim majesty,
Wry statues spat and stiffened in life’s mud,
A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds
Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.
In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
Styled infamies of the body’s concupiscence
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
Turned lust into a decorative art:
Abusing Nature’s gift her pervert skill
Immortalised the sown grain of living death,
In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,
To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.
Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.”
I believe “televisioned” carries an Inner symbolic sense here. For example as though transmitted or projected upon a screen from a lower astral divide. Interestingly, it also happens to (simultaneously) presage our disconnected or disembodied bodily sense. In other words, our spending countless hours as stony-eyed figures filling our heads with images upon images (e.g., chattering within our head upon the screens of calamitous images without empathic response) analogous to somnambulist bodies voyaging through a sea of images..in a perpetual mode of disembodiment as it, if you will, “comes televisioned from the gulfs of Night.”
Also take for example, on the other “positive” end of it, and here no analogy to the “television set” permissible!
Burning they swam in a vague lucent haze
An everlasting refuge of dream-light,
A nebula of the splendours of the gods
Made from the musings of eternity.
Almost unbelievable by human faith,
Hardly they seemed the stuff of things that are.
As though a magic television’s glass
Outlined to some magnifying inner eye
They shone like image thrown from a far scene
Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize…
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I don’t know how conclusive it is but here is another study identifying sleeping problems due to use of electronic media.
From http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/parenting-family/teen-ya/2010-11-01-sleeptexting01_st_N.htm
“More than half of children who use electronic media before bedtime may have mood or learning problems during the day, a preliminary study of 40 young people suggests.
The kids in the study, average age 14½, were all treated at the JFK Medical Center Sleep Laboratory in Edison, N.J. About 77% had trouble falling asleep; others had daytime sleepiness.
And it’s no wonder: Turns out they sent an average 34 text messages or e-mails a night, according to the study, to be presented today at the meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians in Vancouver, British Columbia. Texts were sent anywhere from 10 minutes to four hours after bedtime.
Kids texted an average of four people a night. Electronic media woke them up once a night, when they were texted or called by a friend.
Young people who used the most bedtime media — from cellphones to video games — were more likely to have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, depression and learning problems during the day.
Polos notes that the study has limitations: It can’t prove that late-night media use caused problems such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders. He adds that results may not represent all kids; everyone in the study came to the clinic with a problem.”
This is a hilarious video from a TV show “Portlandia” which demonstrates how we get stuck in a “technology loop”, constantly checking various gadgets.
Check on Hulu : http://www.hulu.com/portlandia
Warren Buffet never had a computer until recently. Bill Gates tried to convince him to get one but could not. Then his friend who is a banker and who also created online banking for Wells Fargo or some bank convinced him to get one just recently. So things can be done, and technology gadgets help when used properly.
True, but here we are discussing addiction to the new media.
Addiction to the new media is happening because we do not spend time in nature or in following our real passion in life, as well as due to the fragmentation of the family in daily activities. This is just my personal perception which may not be true.
Study: Multitasking hinders youth social skills
Tween girls who spend much of their waking hours switching frantically between YouTube, Facebook, television and text messaging are more likely to develop social problems, says a Stanford University study published in a scientific journal on Wednesday.
Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses.
The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys’ emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said.
Read more @
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/25/tech/social-media/multitasking-kids/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9
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‘TV brings eating disorders to Fiji’
Thursday, May 20, 1999
Fiji, a nation that has traditionally cherished the fuller figure, has been struck by an outbreak of eating disorders since the arrival of television in 1995, a study has shown.
Researchers from Harvard say the western images and values transmitted via the medium has led to an increase in disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.
Anne Becker, an anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, has studied Fijian eating habits since 1988. She compared the arrival of television with the arrival of British explorers in the last century.
“What I hope is that this isn’t like the 19th century, when the British came to Fiji and brought the measles with them. It was a tremendous plague,” she said.
“One could speculate that in the 20th century, television is another pathogen exporting Western images and values,” she said.
Read the full article at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/347637.stm
Fast forward into trouble : television in Bhutan
Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan’s first crime wave – murder, fraud, drug offences. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from a country crash-landing in the 21st century.
… Since the April 2002 crime wave, the national newspaper, Kuensel, has called for the censoring of television (some have even suggested that foreign broadcasters, such as Star TV, be banned altogether). An editorial warns: “We are seeing for the first time broken families, school dropouts and other negative youth crimes. We are beginning to see crime associated with drug users all over the world – shoplifting, burglary and violence.”
Read more at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2003/jun/14/weekend7.weekend2
Has TV changed Bhutan? from the BBC:
Rinzi Dorji, the head of the Sigma cable company, told BBC World Service’s TV Invasion programme that the programmes most likely to be required to be taken off air would include pornography and the staged US wrestling series WWE. …The students are becoming more and more violent when they are at school,” he explained. …”[Young people] want and need what they see on television – the fashion, the clothes, the whole changing lifestyle, going to bars, drinking,” Kinley Dorji said.
“A lot of these ideas have come from television. And they want more now.”
He argued that many of the criminals came from low-income families, and that much of the crime involved the theft of tape recorders, TV sets and clothes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3812275.stm
And here is a PBS Frontline documentary which explores the impact of television on a remote Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas. @ http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhutan/
In this conversation, Pranab Bhattacharya, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is asked about his television usage:
From the Buddhist Tricycle magazine, an article on the “Ten Mindful ways to use Social Media”
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/ten-mindful-ways-use-social-media
On a related note, Social networking’s good and bad impacts on kids from a presentation at the 119th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Assocation.
Read more: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-08/apa-sng072711.php
What if your job requires sitting in front of the computer from morning to evening.!
Does this process retard a person’s growth?
Yes. So we are all F***. (lol). However, keep in mind “once upon a time” there was the art of the Belles lettres. I think probably around or shortly after WWII something began to die, cybernetics, the practicality of time (originally conceived in terms of assembly-line efficiency) began to come into its own.. and now in our “advanced era” we rather alarmingly and nonchalantly take communication either online or betwixt and between human mouths as means to extract the facts; the information; the raw data rather than the aesthetics and flow and joie d’vivre of being; its divine essence, if you will, its dance and flow and densification or energization of consciousness or Sat-chit-Ananda.
The once upon time poetics of prose and reflective muse from a deeper source has now for the last several generations of humanity has gone the way of the dinosaur. Needless to say it would have Romantic poets and Aurobindo included rolling over in their graves. However,there are still seeds or pockets of light here and there where a deeper yearning for engagement and reflection beyond the static entrancement of the “screen” is still sought.
I strongly believe, though, this tendency towards lack of sought human-hearted and empathic engagement leads also to many a fictitious diagnoses, e.g., ADD and ADHD. In other words, attention deficit and hyperactive disorders are in part triggered by these mind-sifting interactive non-interactive activities, where the loveliness and effulgent richness of the mellifluous and rhythmic cadence and fiber of voice becomes lost… Our bodies become out of whack if we make love to the screen too long. The simple creature pleasures of rich intellectual and intuitive engagement leading to the wider vistas of reflection, dare we say, an integrated and poetic muse, needs desperately to be
re-kindled by a wider population of humanity!
Thats quite true. It recalls to mind a recent article in the New York Times, which points out how reading has morphed from intensive (concentrated) to extensive (more books but diffused reading). The following passage is from Secrets of a Mind-Gamer by Joshua Foer:
“In his essay “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as printed books began to proliferate. Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” Darnton says. “They had only a few books — the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two — and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.” Today we read books “extensively,” often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. I always find looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, to be a dispiriting experience. There are books up there that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.”
I have found a few things that can at least alleviate the “retardation”
1) take frequent breaks so as to break the deleterious habit of continuous browsing. (use an alarm or auto-logoff)
2) think offline of what you plan to do on the computer before you start typing away.
If you meditate and are able to maintain mental silence for half an hour everyday, you begin to build up a reserve of mental strength which stops you from getting sucked up in this attention-draining vortex. Long term, that’s the best solution.
“If you meditate and are able to maintain mental silence for half an hour everyday, you begin to build up a reserve of mental strength which stops you from getting sucked up in this attention-draining vortex. Long term, that’s the best solution.”
I absolutely agree, particularly if one lives in a crowded urbanized area to do so at the first light of dawn before everything gets going generates psychic cushioning and deepening silence…
[We’re already living in Blogopolis, so let’s enjoy it– with all its rivalries, fights, cafes, alliances, trends, feuds, rumors, and so forth. We may already be living in the primordial soup of the new philosophy. At present, I would agree that this is not where the best philosophical work is taking place, but once again, that claim misses the point. The main point is that living in Blogopolis can stimulate your best work no matter where you live, and the further point is that many of the new publishing venues for the “best” work have been directly generated or heavily enhanced by the blogosphere.] [Sartwell on SR/OOO - Object-Oriented Philosophy
by doctorzamalek on Sep 5, 2011 9:41 AM]
For the Onion’s satirical take on this topic, see the article : “Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own A Television”
For more, see http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/
Lauren Zalaznick: The conscience of television.
A TED talk which studies the historical changes that have occurred in American TV ratings
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children under two don’t benefit from TV either!
See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kids-under-2-should-not-watch-television
A contrarian Waldorf school in Silicon Valley (of all places!) eschews use of computers and high-tech devices in the classroom until eight grade (i.e.age 13).
Read more at the New York Times : A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
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Really as far as l’m concerned it all depends on the state of consciousness we’re in . So, l think we might be intellectualising a bit to much here. Walking around a big city can have the same deleterious effect as sitting in front of a tv IMO – or just sitting in a busy restaurant. We are assailed constantly by adverse forces but if we take the right attitude [l know how difficult it is] it can be seen as a test or a kind of spiritual training.
A lot depends on what we watch too. There is a lot of grubby. mundane garbage on tv, but you could say that about literature too. Why would we go near that anyway?? We have to be selective, and the internet can be far worse than tv, l’d say – much more of a distraction and much more of an assault on the senses.
Apparently, 3D tv is going to be worse in the sense that it can enter the subconscious more directly – according to what l heard on the tv recently.
l was watching the christmas version of Dr who recently and surprisingly there is a very Spiritual ending to it. l don’t know if anyone saw that, but there were actually some very symbolic things happening [like the main character taking a World of Souls into Herself - does that remind you of anyone] that seemed to point directly to Yoga and there was even a tower that looked like the Matrimandir. Perhaps it’s just my viewpoint, though.
““Look, from the age of seven I’ve been involved with exercise and sports. Today I am 76. During my whole life I’ve been continuing my work with sports and exercise. And even today I do regular exercises. For me sports and exercise are valuable in so far as they are useful in our ideal of physical transformation and integral yoga. I cannot see the difference between spectators in a match and the brokers in a stock exchange getting all jumpy and excited. In truth, all these different activities in man’s life, literature, sculpture, handicraft, engineering, if they do not help in the Integral Yoga then all these are meaningless and futile labour.”
l totally agree with Pranab on that – especially the last sentence. The obsession with sport in ordinary life seems disgusting to me, when there isn’t a Spiritual Aspiration behind it.
Mike: Really as far as l’m concerned it all depends on the state of consciousness we’re in . So, l think we might be intellectualising a bit to much here.
True. The purpose of this post was to present ONLY the negative side
Mike: A lot depends on what we watch too. There is a lot of grubby. mundane garbage on tv, but you could say that about literature too. Why would we go near that anyway?? We have to be selective, and the internet can be far worse than tv, l’d say – much more of a distraction and much more of an assault on the senses.
Yes again, but electronic media is worse than books because your eyes literally get hooked to the screen. It is an addictive and insidious medium which destroys willpower.
Yes, sandeep your right about it being insidious. We are in a very passive, suggestible state, while watching tv. lt very close to the hypnotic state, l’d say. And who knows how far they’ve gone with subliminal messaging these days. But, like in hypnosis, there are those who are highly suggestible and those who aren’t. Children of course, are very impressionable and should be monitored closely.
TV reminds me of NLP [neuro-linguistic programming] which is very popular these days amoung the beurocrats. They send all sorts off on NLP training courses – police, teachers, civil servants. They tend to use visual techniques, which might be similar to watching tv images – but even more intrusive from what l understand. Police come back from these courses more aggressive than ever. NLP can be used in a postive way, but certain groups like Common Purpose are using it in a very negative, controlling way. Researchers have even said that teachers are using it with students in the form of’ creative visualisation’, and apparently, it’s affected these kids in such a way that there have been a spate of suicides [they all seem to favour hanging themselves for some reason].
Anyway, not to stray to far from the point, l think TV and NLP might have some strong links.