What reality TV tells us about reality
[Talk at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada]
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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
on the theme of how reality TV points to reality. I took three main points, that is it just a TV show? So reality, when we entertain ourselves in something, whatever catches our attention catches us.
Entertainment doesn’t just entertain. When something is entertaining, means in the sense of stimulating, titillating, we start entertaining it more and more. We start accepting it, our level of credibility goes up, and our level of skepticism goes down.
And the blurring of the lines between the fictional and the real, that can have serious problems. As when people start believing whatever they are seeing on TV, say children cannot distinguish what is advertisement and what is reality being told. But adults also may have difficulty in distinguishing that.
So what we observe in reality, TV shapes our values. Entertainment has always been a part of human society. But in the past, entertainment was about uplifting values, where people who did something inspiring, dramas or books or something like that were written about them, so that we could be uplifted.
But in reality TV, the only qualification is not some artistic ability, not any expertise, it is just the ability to be unlimitedly shameless and do shocking things, which will catch people’s attentions. And by that, they distort the values of the observers. So a reality TV star can become a real life superpower politician, very powerful politician.
And so reality TV has real effects on our psychology and on our life at large. And I talked about why is it that we want to entertain ourselves with something which we know is not real. That longing, why is it there? We are connected with the bigger longing, that we all long to live forever and to love forever.
But nothing around us lasts forever. So where does our longing for eternity come from? It’s like a remote tribal child suddenly asking about a pizza, or we finding gold in a place where there’s no gold all around. When it’s out of place, we ask where it comes from.
So our longing for lasting life, it doesn’t come from the externals, because externally nothing is lasting. It comes from the internal, where there is a spiritual spark, there is a soul which is lasting. Talk about three level reality as described in the yoga text, body, mind and soul, like the hardware, software and user.
And then we did a thought experiment to illustrate this point that there is an outer scene, inner screen and inner seer. So we are the inner seers. And the inner screen is the mind, the physical reality is outwards.
When this inner screen, instead of depicting what is in the outer scene, starts depicting other things and starts depicting a horror movie about all the bad things that have happened to us in the past, we get depression. When it is a horror movie starts depicting everything that may happen in the future, we get anxiety, fear, worry. So this inner screen often keeps depicting so much negativity that we find life with it unbearable and we want to escape from it.
Most entertainment is escapist and people have always wanted escapism from physical reality. But now the over dependence on entertainment, the obsession with entertainment, because of which people are ready to spend phenomenal amounts of money on entertainment, that is because the mind is unbearable. So we could say that we are here as seers, there is a screen, the scene and then there is a further reality TV scene which is in the further outer reality.
So we use this to run away or to escape from physical as well as mental reality. But this doesn’t work because we are going into a deeper illusion. So entertainment is not bad if it’s simply as a break, it’s like a painkiller, which may help a patient to bear the pain while they are taking the curative medicine.
But when the painkiller replaces the curative medicine, then the patient is going to become worse and worse and worse. Similarly, in today’s world, entertainment is so obsessively sought because people have forgotten about the enlightenment, about going inwards to realize oneself as spiritual. And therefore, the obsession with entertainment is an escape way from the unpalatable physical and especially mental reality.
And if we go inwards, we do that, we can get security and we can go inwards or we can rise upwards to the spiritual level by meditation, by yoga, by breathing, by sonic meditation, by mantra meditation. I talked about this friend who discovered the attic in the hurricane and the flood and that’s how he survived. So for all of us, our physical and mental realities may get flooded.
But if you rise to the spiritual reality, then we can find security. Whatever life may get us to, our spirituality can get us through. Thank you very much.
So any questions or comments? Yes, please.