THE IMAGES AND SOUNDS WE put into our brains will never leave. They just get filed deeper, to influence us forever.
Every moment we spend on Earth is important. Every 60-second TV commercial we watch is 60 seconds of our lives never to be recaptured. It is 60 seconds we could have spent sending a long-lost friend a postcard. It might have been the postcard that saved their sanity.
I scroll through the movies on my TV that are available to watch. I’m about to make a choice. The choice I make is between a movie that makes me laugh and one that makes me shake my head in disgust. It is a choice that will change my life forever. I pretend it’s no big deal.
Pausing after phone calls, I see I have time to make one last call before returning home. My work is finished, so I can call anyone. One friend always cheers me up and shows me life’s funniest side. My decision to call him is one of the most important decisions I’ll make. Laughter heals and gives added life.
Norman Cousins’s book about the literal healing power of laughter, Anatomy of an Illness, proved once and for all the powerful effect of laughter and humor on the living cells of the body. We play to an audience of cells.
There are things that make me laugh. There are things that make me sing. There are things that make me get up and dance with happiness. These are the things I want to be most aware of in my life. I want to always have them around me and know where to go to get more.
There is music that makes me shout, “Yes!” and clap my hands as I drive to work. That’s the music I want at my fingertips at all times.
I want to pay attention to what feeds my spirit. I want to have my spirit be so important to me that any increase in its activity gets noticed, and noted and remembered for future reference. I want to really get it that I can only reinvent myself by accessing this spirit and letting it stretch me from within.
Watching the movie Jerry Maguire, I felt my spirit lift as the soundtrack played an old Paul McCartney song from his first solo album, McCartney. The song was called “Momma Miss America” and it had raw energy and beauty, and was mercifully free of McCartney’s depressingly silly post-Lennon lyrics. After I saw the movie, I bought the soundtrack and played that same track during a break at one of my larger seminars. I watched as the music lifted 400 people the same way it lifted me in the theater. I was glad I paid attention. Some things touch the spirit, and I want to keep knowing exactly what they are.
In my experience, nothing kills the spirit faster than the evening news. The local evening news is worse than national evening news, but not by much. One reason the local TV news is worse is because, these days, the anchors are models, not journalists, and their intelligence reflects that difference. In addition to that, they joke with each other in insincere ways that make the viewer reconsider the whole idea of human life. Sandwiched between the insincere joking is a mission to bring us the most sickening and spirit-killing news they can find. Their entire goal is to make us gasp in horror. It’s a proven ratings-booster each time we do.
It is little wonder that Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona has gotten great results treating his patients with a “news fast.” His patients’ physical symptoms actually get better if they go for three weeks without watching the evening news. They sleep better, and by doing so, restore health and energy to their cells. The brain doesn’t have so many grotesque pictures of mutilation and violence to deal with throughout the night.
Victims gape credulously night after night at the so-called “news” and falsely conclude that the world is getting worse and worse. They increase their fear and secret longing to hide.
Despite the horrible events of 9/11, it is a fact that overall air safety continues to improve. And even though air travel gets safer and safer with each passing month, victims are more and more afraid to travel because they’ve been watching the same bodies and wreckage being pulled from the same ocean from the same plane that went down weeks ago. They’re watching each night as new relatives are found to interview and better, more audio-enhanced recordings of the black box are found to play with subtitles so we can hear the captain and crew.
Television stations have found that ratings will climb when the TV shows appeal to our lowest levels of consciousness. But that’s not hard to understand. We usually watch TV when we are tired. (It is rare that we shout out, “I’m feeling full of energy right now; turn the TV on!”)
Even the esteemed gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson has observed that “the TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a short plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs.” That pretty much sums it up.
Reading Dr. Thompson’s conclusions reminded me of a remarkable interview I saw on TV a few years ago with Charles Manson from prison. The occasion was the release of Geraldo Rivera’s kiss-and-tell autobiography, eloquently titled Exposing Myself, in which the talk-show host brags about the variety of sexual “conquests” he has made in his life. In the same book, Rivera also talks about a famous interview he had done with the serial killer Manson shortly after Manson had been convicted of the Sharon Tate murders.
The reason Manson wanted time on TV now was to distance himself from Rivera and his book. He said that Rivera had exaggerated their relationship in his autobiography, and that he, Charlie Manson, didn’t want the world to think that he really knew the man that well.
I stopped and thought about that. Here was a notorious, convicted multiple murderer who was more worried about being associated with Geraldo Rivera than he was about his crimes. The murders he could somehow explain and live down. An association with Geraldo Rivera, never.
Take inner responsibility for the things you watch and listen to. You will start to realize more and more that what you watch, read, and listen to has a major impact on your spirit.
Once you flip on the news and become unhappy for a few moments, you will understand clearly and consciously that you made yourself unhappy with your own choice of what to watch. The news itself didn’t make you unhappy. The on–off button is all yours. You own it. Soon you can take back control of it, and when you do, you’ll be on your way to total control of how you program your mind. How you program your mind is what will reinvent who you are.