Would You Invite A Thief Into Your House?

The average American has an addiction: television. We love to watch gorgeous celebrities, reality show personalities, gourmet chefs and athletes.

Like an obedient dog being given treats we salivate over flickering images. Clips of action, tenderness, conflict and sex fill the screen and rapidly affect our body and mind.

The power of these images is rarely examined by the average individual. However, due to its mind-altering nature we must make a rigorous assessment concerning the power of television.

Television is a thief. It robs the human spirit of creativity, achievement, originality and motivation. The brain becomes passive and the intellect dull.

According to scientists, after 30 seconds of watching television the brain produces Alpha waves are associated with a comatose state, whereby the brain suppresses mental activity.


The barrage of flickering lights puts the mind in this trance-like state. An excellent example of this was proven by Dr. T. Berry Brazelton by using a disturbing light stimulus.

After hooking babies up to electroencephalographs, Dr. Brazelton turned a bright operating room light on and off. During the fifteenth stimulus, sleep patterns appeared on the EEG, but the babies were not sleeping and their eyes were still taking in light. As a result of these disturbing stimuli the babies’ minds literally shut down, but this is not the only way the mind is affected by television.

The constant shifting of visual frames and the rapid changes in camera focus make the viewer’s reference shift every few seconds. This alters perceptual orientation so that the mind is programmed with a short attention span. If we apply this knowledge to the world around us we can see the effects of TV everywhere.

It must also be pointed out that our short attention spans alter our perception of how we perceive life. Leisure activities that were enjoyed in the past, such as reading and taking walks, are now considered boring and not worth pursuing.

According to Nielsen Media Research the average American home now has more television sets than people, while the average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day. All this time spent in front of a television has translated into a sharp decline in the quality of life for the average American.

We are sleepwalking through life in a repetitive way, like passive machines, and in the process we have forfeited our humanity. The rabid TV viewer leads an existence that is lacking in the human contact that our higher nature thrives on. This has resulted in the
death of community life.

Franz Kafka, a Prague-born writer and author of The Metamorphosis, knew well in advance the mind-deadening properties of America’s favorite addiction. Kafka states, “Cinema disturbs one’s vision. The speed of the movements and the rapid change of images force you to look continuously from one to the next. Your sight does not master the pictures; it is the pictures that master your sight.”

Kafka was right! The images have indeed mastered us. Observe the average American and you will discover a person with a passive mind.

We watch so much television that we have become lazy physically, intellectually and spiritually. This laziness is diabolical because it has produced a mentality whereby we perceive ourselves as powerless.

We have made ourselves weak by the poor choices we have made. TV delirium is killing our souls.

Most people falsely believe that passivity and powerlessness are new phenomena that have been brought about by the conveniences and luxury of the modern age. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Henry David Thoreau wrote over 150 years ago, “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say they do not know what to do, and do nothing.”

Just like previous generations we have rationalized away the notion that we can change ourselves and the world around us. This is a false deduction.

What then is needed in order to correct this errant belief? The answer is the knowledge that we have been endowed with the power of self-determination. Armed with this knowledge we should commit ourselves to managing and balancing our needs against our desires.

For many of us, the ever-seductive world of television is a lure too hard to resist. What is lacking now more than ever is an individual commitment to pursue activities of a higher nature. To that end, the individual who is oriented toward watching television will always live in a lower state.

Civilizations are built by cognizant individuals and they must be carefully cultivated like a garden if they are to flourish. TV watching does not foster the kind of deep thinking needed to keep a civilization functioning much less flourishing.

We are in an abysmal state and we must awake from our stupor. There is much freedom and empowerment to be gained if we choose a life of higher purpose and reject the path of least resistance.

When we become enlightened with the power of our own self-determination and apply this enlightenment to our free will, we are capable of creating a mature, progressive society that can leap past the selfishness, pride and illusions that are the enemies of
truth.

Annell Fontenot is the Assistant Editor and Publicity Coordinator at Harbor House in Augusta, Georgia. A graduate of Louisiana Tech University with a BA in English, Annell edits manuscripts, promotes Harbor House and its authors, and assists in overall book production.

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Less Than Satisfying Encounters With Humanity

God has given man somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 years to make a statement on this earth, to show each other what they could make and how great they could become. The term "evolution" comes to mind, another term to try to push God out of the world and magnify man. Here's a hearty congratulations for what you've become without God:

2 Timothy 3:2People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3:3without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 3:4treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God-- 3:5having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them

Sounds like a great bunch of people to live with does'nt it? Drive into work each morning and these are the people around you. What has apostate christianity done to stem this tidal wave of walking human misery? Not much considering that in every measurable statistical category, apostate christianity tracks with the world, because...well....they ARE the world. The only thing keeping the place from collapsing in on itself is the salt and light of the Holy Spirit in the world within true believers, who of course are VERY FEW. Wake up people, come out from among them.

Good Article-Enjoy

“We Americans are the product of free market ideologues, religious zealots, and vulgar experiments in social engineering. We are being led to slaughter, and to be slaughtered, by dark and foreboding forces bent on the destruction of all that is decent, just, and beautiful.”

By Charles Sullivan

11/6/07

It seems inexplicable that so many of the American people can be so dazed and confused, while moral degenerates ransack our nation, piss and defecate upon the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and brazenly loot the public domain, making a mockery of the rule of law and societal norms; whatever they may be.

Incredible lies are routinely passed as truth and the world as we know it is unraveling, as we prepare to invade and occupy yet another country, perhaps igniting World War Three. We go on with the insipid routine of our dull lives: we go shopping, and bombard our senses with mind numbing entertainment, telling ourselves that it–fascism–can’t happen here, even as its poisoned blossoms unfold before our astonished eyes and fill our lungs with their noxious fumes.

We refuse to believe what we are seeing and we dismiss it as too preposterous to be real. We no longer wholly trust our own senses or follow our most innate instincts, failing to recognize that they are all that is true; all that allow us to survive the wretched madness that pursues us like rabid dogs, and relentlessly nips at our fleeing heels.


Increasing numbers of us move through this world with a sense of impending doom but we do not fully comprehend its origins or the breadth of the disaster it portends. We sense not only that something is wrong–something is terribly, irreconcilably, sickeningly, wrong. We do our utmost to repress those feelings, telling ourselves that our worst fears, our darkest nightmares, are irrational, unfounded phantoms of the imagination; so many ghosts lurking under our beds.

We have been programmed to believe that we are the greatest nation to ever emerge from the mists of history, that everything about us as a people is exceptional and exemplary. Despite a history of endless provocation and war and countless other forms of self mutilation, we claim that we are a peace loving people–god’s own children, animated by divine stirrings.

But perhaps our state of confusion, our disorientation, and our shock at what the government is doing in our name–all of which seems to be occurring at the blinding speed of light–and our refusal to believe that which is so blatantly obvious to all but those who wear mental blindfolds, or the criminally insane, is a form of psychological shock and awe that has been deliberately imposed upon us not only by depraved politicians vying for wealth and power, but by our every societal institution.

We have arrived at our place as a result of an educational system that does not teach us how to think, but to follow rules and obey authority; to bow to self policing peer pressure and group think: a system that prepares us to pass math tests but not those of citizen and neighbor. We dutifully recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag but we hold no allegiance to the world’s people, or its stunning biological and cultural diversity, or to truth. We were led to the precipice by religious institutions that operate by the same principles as “for profit” corporations, encouraged by Zionist and Christian fundamentalists with visions of Armageddon dancing in their crazed, bigoted heads. We are here because we pay attention to a media monoculture that does not inform, but lies and deceives for money.

We are here because we are morally lazy, uninterested, distracted, overworked, over burdened with debt, and apathetic to a fault. We confused the symbols of democracy with democracy itself; and we foolishly thought that democracy could somehow magically move of its own accord, without our participation as citizens. Too many of us believed that all that was required of us was to vote in elections in which the outcomes were preordained by the candidate’s access to wealth. We told ourselves this is democracy, but we were tragically mistaken. And now it is too late.

The rush to Armageddon will occur quickly; it must happen, like the passage of the Patriot Act, before the people have time to digest what is being done to them, before they can concoct an intelligent and rational response to shock and awe; before the people can organize against the premeditated murder and mayhem that awaits them.

We Americans are the product of free market ideologues, religious zealots, and vulgar experiments in social engineering. We are being led to slaughter, and to be slaughtered, by dark and foreboding forces bent on the destruction of all that is decent, just, and beautiful.

Yet many will continue to believe that the president and his henchmen are sane and just people. Some will even ordain them devout Christians and extol their dark virtues as enlightenment and courage. Others will continue to believe that the sycophants in Congress will awaken at the eleventh hour to save us from our own delusions and excesses, not recognizing that we are alone and have only one another. It has always been so; but rather than uniting against our tormentors–we fight amongst ourselves.

Events may already be in motion that have acquired an unstoppable momentum, like a hulking meteor streaking in deadly silence toward the earth in precise accordance with the laws of motion. But like all tempests, they too will eventually blow themselves out and, better people than us will someday attempt to rebuild the world anew. I wish them luck and amazing grace, the kind of grace that is so conspicuously absent in us. In the words of labor organizer, Joe Hill, murdered by the state before a Utah firing squad: “Good luck to all of you.”

No more can we enjoy the sight of soft summer sunsets in tranquil settings, accompanied by the singing of the wood thrush, and choirs of chanting insects embracing the darkling twilight; but forever more the rocket’s perpetual red glare and silent, distant death. We are nearing road’s end. The time is fast approaching to mount the nearest hillside, to hold our loved ones close; to sip some vintage wine, and watch the fireworks that are even now hurtling their way toward Armageddon. The time is nigh to watch the world as we knew it wink out of existence, and to say goodbye. It’s been good to know you.

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