Expand Your Mind

Top 5 rules I think people should live by:

1. Be honest.
2. Regret nothing.
3. Worry about nothing.
4. Focus on what you want more than on what you don’t want. Let your desire for success be stronger than your fear of failure.
5. Always be willing to observe and try new things. Every action, even every object, has significant lessons to teach.

[As an introduction to this post, I’d like you (whoever you are) to watch a relatively short video. I don’t know what exactly the rules are for this blog, so I will give you fair warning about the strong language. I hereby forewarn you that there is some strong language in this video!!! And God’s name is used in vain (for those of you who might be offended).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDSTfPSITGI

I’m placing emphasis on the section about entertainment (especially television) in the lives of modern-day U.S. citizens.

Now, moving onward…]

Where would we be if not for the commonplace items and habits of everyday life? How would we feel if we could not see anything the same way we did yesterday? Are we more interested in stability and entertainment or passion and understanding?

Months ago, I tossed my television into the garbage can. It was not disappointment, but satisfaction, that accompanied this act of American sacrilege. What was the point? It was symbolic. By this time, I had stopped watching television anyway, but to get rid of the thing was the final blow in a series of assaults on mindless entertainment. I realized that life was about far more than just the things I had heretofore contained in the “box” of my individual life; there was more to see and to engage my thoughts and interest than what I could extract from such sources as a television set. (The power briefly went out just now, as if the storm is reminding me of the fragility of electronic entertainment. Lose your electricity, lose your equipment, and suddenly you have nothing with which to entertain yourself but your own imagination.)

Human nature – even nature itself, in the most general sense imaginable – is incompatible with the stability of the modern American lifestyle. We continue to move toward senseless entertainment and the sterility of precision, confining ourselves within a graceless, dispassionate atmosphere of TV shows, video games, and the dependence upon sensation rather than real art to capture our attention. One can see the effects of this confinement in America’s children and teenagers. In this world of stability and precision, they express their frustrations with the pointlessness and monotony of it all through watching and creating an abundance of extremely violent and cuss-word-saturated homemade cartoons on Youtube (just to name one small example). There is never a point in these videos; they’re created merely because these kids feel as if there is nothing worth doing except creating them.

I will provide an example of one of these videos. (This one depicts violence and gore that could be disturbing. And there’s very strong language. Again, you are forewarned.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ4j-MBnLQo Note the number of views and the ratings. Apparently intended to be a comedy, yet failing miserably in that regard, this video reflects the purposeless wandering of today’s American youth. Despite the utter lack of real comic value, elementary and middle school kids, possibly even some high school kids, thrive on this kind of useless entertainment as a reinforcement of their ambiguous desire for the destruction of stability.

Violent fantasies and “dark” creativity are just a couple of the results of confinement to a pre-established way of life that does not encourage (and sometimes does not even allow) full freedom of expression and individual identity.

We need to push into new areas, surpass our limits, find the ideas and emotions within ourselves that are truly worth expressing. In the words of the Chemical Brothers: “This culture’s fallen off it’s feet / I’ve got to find a brand new beat” (taken from http://www.lyricstime.com/the-chemical-brothers-battle-scars-lyrics.html). If we maintain an awareness of our surroundings, rather than sticking ourselves in “boxes” that contain only the common affairs of our everyday lives, we will see that there are bigger things happening. Catch onto the patterns in those larger events, and you will find yourself bursting with boundless passion and creativity. Look at your current circumstances and realize that there is always, always more – all you need to do to see it is open the doors of your mind and heart.