CYCLE FORTY-TWO

1. Although, being electronic, television is fundamentally of the World, rather than (like cinema) of the alpha Heaven and/or Hell, there is a sense in which black-and-white TV is/was less genuinely of the World than quasi-purgatorial in its monochromatic constitution, thereby standing to colour TV as black-and-white film to colour film in the higher context of cinema.

2. I have often found it helpful to meditate while watching television, thereby refreshing the mind and simultaneously rising above the spirit-destroying context in question. For it cannot be denied that a consciousness well-stocked, as it were, with air is less likely to be dominated by television ... than one which is barely conscious of itself because all but deadened by the mesmerizing spectacles which issue from the screen in hyperbolic disarray and vacuously seduce one's optical attention.

3. My favourite meditation technique for countering the yawn-inducing attraction of television (doubtless something of an enforced retort to the medium in question) is to breathe-in silently through my left nostril and then breathe-out audibly through my right nostril, so that there is a continuous distinction between the two breaths - the former spiritual and the latter chemical. In such fashion, alternating between silence and sound, calmness and combativeness, one can build to and maintain a fairly high spiritual plateau which is comparatively immune to the baneful effects of television, enabling one to partially transcend it while still nominally paying due optical attention to its superficial appearances, the often negative context of which would otherwise depress and/or disgust one.

4. Certainly I am now more aware than ever before as to the extent to which the generally low moral tone of twentieth-century life was due, in no small measure, to the influence of film and television on most people's lives, and not simply with regard to the content - more usually negative, given the superficial, or appearance-based, nature of the medium as such - but, no less significantly, with regard to the vacuously-biased conditioning to persistent optical appreciation, which had (and still has) the effect of turning people outwards and thus rendering them an insipid reflection of the on-screen vacuity which rules their lives. Small wonder if, after years of passive conditioning to such media, most people become morally blind and incapable of that insightfulness which is the hallmark of true wisdom! They become as moronic pawns in the money-spinning moves of powerful men, men without the slightest degree of respect for the inner life, whose only motive is to go financially from strength to strength through the production of ever-more negative and superficial films!

5. To me, the Catholic tendency to accept the placement of ash on the brow at Ash Wednesday signifies a rejection of the 'Third Eye' and implicit denial of 'Cosmic Consciousness', with its light-worshipping basis. It is as though the person concerned has died to the Cosmos in order to be reborn into the Life Eternal which follows from the Christic Resurrection. Such a life, centred in the spirit, is at the opposite pole to the anti-life which affirms cosmic conditioning. And yet, it is the latter which modern civilization encourages ... as the lights are sent out from cameras, films, TV screens, light shows at rock concerts, garish magazines, videos, neon signs, electronic advertisements, fairgrounds, etc. to do their damnedest and effectively undermine true spirituality, creating moral vacuums into which negative forces can step ... to the greater glory of all that is life-denying and destructive!