Seeing into the Box.

As part of an exercise in our shamanic group a few nights ago I found myself looking into the beautiful blue eyes of a young woman, an experienced therapist. Eyes are of course the portal to the soul especially in someone practiced in opening it; a delightfully captivating experience. Cut to a Joan Collins comment on the radio this morning about kids saying, “I want the one on TV.” The TV is a portal too, but to what? We can easily believe it’s just a picture box for our entertainment. We laugh at sitcoms, are excited by sport and inseminated with desires by ads but we are discerning arbiters of content, we can decide which insurance or hair products to use, which programs to watch, it’s just a convenient entertainment pipe. It would surely be a flight of fancy to consider that we are looking into a soul of some sort, wouldn’t it? Many years ago my oldest friend wouldn’t have a TV because he didn’t want to be exposed to the matrix of intentions of program makers, which amounts to the same thing. He felt that unlike theatre, where the production is eye to eye with its audience every night, the makers of TV’s entertainment do their work behind closed doors, in offices, at meetings, free to toil and trouble, froth and bubble their concoctions under the influence of their own intents, more profit, more success, more control and manipulation of their audience. If you look deeply into the screen past the images and performers as I did those beautiful blue eyes you begin to see in many programs the manipulation of a darker, more sordid soul, a Svengali saying, “You will want what we have.” And children will say, “I want the one on TV.”