Television TV & Monitor

If you dream of these things they often represent what you feel, understand or intuit about what is going on in other people’s lives or the world. Or it is about looking at the drama taking place in your own life that you may have overlooked. Watchin TV or a screen, it may be the strategy you use to blank out the world and relax by giving attention to something else.

In a sense watching TV is like travelling to the past – costume dramas – and to the future – science fiction. Can also be like travelling to strange places and meeting new experiences.

But it can symbolise something that most of us miss seeing or understanding – for a screen, TV or monitor, constantly changes what is shown. So it represent our own screen of consciousness, which receives everything but in itself is blank and featureless. Many people miss the meaning of this because they are so fascinated by the moving images and sounds that they forgot it is they who are receiving the mass of experience.

What is behind all the moving images and sounds? Well you can see if you can imagine yourself as a blank screen. Better still, imagine you are being pumped up like a balloon and then you burst. It happened to me when I was given an anal anaesthetic. I could be give one via a mask because my nose was being operated on. At that time as thing liquid was poured into me I felt I was a balloon being pumped up. and then I burst.  As I went under the anesthetic, it felt to me that I was dying and experiencing death, along with a state of consciousness in which I felt to be God. It hit me powerfully that from there on I started reading and being fascinated by books, first on science fiction, then on death, rebirth and God.

I realised now that I had left the world in which we are hypnotised by the moving theatre of our senses and had Gone Beyond into another level of our consciousness, the world of bodiless awareness.

We build our identity and our sense of self out of the many interactions with other people and the world. In a real sense we create each other by believing in our body and communicating with each other. With prolonged absence of other people and events, and especially if we lose our ‘noises’ and body awareness, we feel we – our sense of identity – is disappearing or dying. People immersed in a sensory deprivation tank begin to lose a clear sense of themselves, and can result in anxiety, hallucinations and even depression. Apparently this happens to many people who are kept in prison in isolation.

Long periods in solitary may cause psychosis. Other studies have shown subtle physical changes to the brain when mammals become isolated. Research from the University of Illinois, published late last year, showed that the enzymes needed to produce a stress-reducing brain hormone drops significantly when mice are isolated. This can lead to aggression as well as anxiety. There is an overwhelming body of evidence that long periods of solitary confinement causes problems such as psychosis in prisoners, and that unmarried people who live fairly socially isolated lives become more ill, die earlier, and have more mental illness. Conversely, there is evidence that older people can maintain the health of their brains for longer if they keep them stimulated by solving problems.

Nothing is said about the two who coped well. Here is an interesting description from a young serviceman. “I had an eye injury to my left eye and was rushed to hospital. The result was that the back of my eye had split and I had to remain with bandages over my eyes for six weeks. Straight away I was asked several times if I needed a radio to listen to. That seemed a ridiculous suggestion because I now had a long time living in all the wonders in my mind. I never got tired or bored with it. In fact when the nursing sister said in my hearing that I must now get up and walk around I played deaf the next day making out I hadn’t heard. The sister soon got me out of bed though. But it wasn’t a shock to be made to be active, I like that too”.

I see that evolutionary we are very new to self awareness and are very vulnerable for self awareness is obviously to much for many people – think of the thousands who are always on antidepressants ; also our personality is not usually built organically but is something artificial put upon us. To understand this see Programmed

I was struck by how creative we all are if given an environment in which we can allow our originality. One woman in the group, exhausted from the demands of her job, experienced deep relaxation out of which enthusiasm and pleasurable energy arose, leading her to dance and bathe in her own joy. A man explored his relationship with love, and saw that he needed to gather to himself the love he received from others to call out his own resources of affection. A woman who worked as a nurse met the painful emotions arising from observing the difficulties of a mentally difficult patient. Her creative movements led her to find a way of accepting the reality of life’s difficulties. The pain cleared and she felt was ready to give a more flowing response to others in difficulty.