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Ages ago you would listen to stories and be transported to other worlds. Using your imagination you could create an experience beyond your own place and time. You depended on these renderings to understand and appreciate traditions and history. For you rarely if ever traveled far from where you were born. Today finger clicks can zoom you into virtually every human experience. The amount of information and entertainment accessible to you is phenomenal. And it has become an important part of your life. Hours are spent in front of the television. Movies, video games, the internet also captivate your mind. It might be rather unsettling to know what percentage of your waking hours are devoted to these ‘mind entrancements’. Most are passive: No response is necessary … just pay attention and you are in another world. You do become more actively involved with games and the internet however. So is there anything wrong with this deluge? With these electronic offerings vying for your attention? They are attractive and captivating. They alleviate boredom and stress. But you can become habituated to them … spending countless hours watching …listening. You are an audience to the ideas and values of strangers. This can only impede your resolve to be YOU … the you are striving to be. ALL EXPERIENCES influence you. What you take in has an impact. You cannot help it. If you are constantly escaping into a world or sex and violence, you are strengthening tendencies toward self-gratification and self-absorption. You are also yielding to primitive power and retribution fantasies. If you take in thousands of advertisements for products and services, you are giving them a prominence that eschews altruism. It becomes increasingly more difficult to be ‘other’ oriented. Be careful always to limit your ‘escapism’. Exercise caution when giving your mind over to the monetary driven media. Television will easily entice you, ‘mould’ you into a ‘passive receptor’ filling with arbitrary images. You will become a ‘vacuous sponge’ filling and spilling all matter of drivel. “Get a life!!”
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