Entertainment

We reached a stage where we cannot think of our life without heavy dosage of entertainment. One of the dictionary meanings of entertainment is “agreeable occupation for the mind”. Our mind doesn’t likes to die away. It has to always have some occupation. With out occupation, it will cease to exist. But we never asked the question, what is mind? What are its functions? How the functions of minds are initiated? We never bothered for such questions. With out even attempted for knowing how we are functioning, we find great pride on calling ourselves as educated.

Entertainment is a major business. Even if we can live without entertainment, our economy may not be able to sustain without the business of entertainment and its supplements at its current way of functioning. If we can look a bit deeply, we see the major component of our life requirement which overuse the resources of earth is the entertainment component. When we make enormous noise about global warming, deforestation, etc, we must also understand how far we are responsible for such things by the name of our own entertainment. Due to the way we lived our life until now, it is very natural that we see only a fragment of any problem, especially when we are also a cause of that problem.

If we look into our life, almost 99% of our available time is spent on either work or entertainment. We call this as living. Even for the work, probably more than 30% of the population works for entertainment and related industry. On the other hand work is for entertainment and then remaining time spent on entertainment. What a contradiction (??).

One of the functions of brain which keeps us engaged is the function of perception. The entire creation is available within us to be perceived. But unfortunately, due to our inattention, we lost the capability of such perception. On the other hand, the quality of perception of our brain is dampened by our inattention to happenings within us. Hence we are forced to keep our brain active with respect to perception with external activities. We have made all our essential activities of our life as routine activities. When the brain performs routine activities, we lose our attention and hence the perception of activity being performed. Now we need some other activity, which is not routine, hence entertainment – We are badly in need of entertainment due to our complete inattention. Our need for entertainment is just due to our inattention to happenings within us and around us. We are over consuming the resources of earth just for our entertainment and then make noise for global warming, deforestation, etc. Are we culprits or victims? We are the culprits for our inattention and we are victims of our own inattention. When we ourselves are the culprits, are there any sense in making such noises as global warming and deforestation? Without making any attempt to eliminate the inattention which is the root cause of all these global warming and trying to plant few trees here and there make any real sense? Are we hiding our responsibility of being attentive by making some noise about global warming and planning some trees here and there and still continue to overuse the resources of earth for our own entertainment?

The above discussion does not suggest that one should not look for any entertainment or against taking mitigation activities such as planting trees. If one does such mistake, the mind will become totally dump and dull – we need entertainment at our current level of maturity and current way of living. But entertainment alone is not living – the purpose of living is not just entertainment. One should transcend entertainment, if looking for truth or the real nature of existence or even the purpose of our life. It is possible only if we understand our urge for entertainment and its real function in our life.