Enter-tainment or Enter-inside?
“This is awfully serious, please pay attention to this,” said J. Krishnamurti in 1981 in reference to the invention of computers and the learning capability they brought with themselves.
In that talk, he talked about the “ultra-intellectual” nature of the “super brain” which is a computer,
“[In terms of intellectual/brain capacity] They are going to outstrip man, or already have done. They think much faster, they can learn and unlearn, and so keep on learning and discover that their learning is not complete and learn further, which means, they are being programmed by experts, and the machines, these computers, can learn [not only from humans] but from themselves. They will think faster, learn faster, correct themselves, perhaps invent something new, new theories, which man has not thought of.”
And also expressed his concern about what’s going to happen to the human brain in that scenario (which, by the way, is right in front of us today),
“What happens to us who have lived by exercising our brain? What happens to our brain which is no longer being employed as a thinking machine? When the machine can take over all the activities of the brain, then what happens to the brain?”
The pace with which the technology and automation has developed over the past 50 years has been breathtaking i.e., it exploded like a volcano and continues to reach new heights at an ever-increasing pace.
The invention of new technology is the invention of more free time for humans, and we are much free today, in terms of the activities we have to do to sustain ourselves, than the past generations.
So, what do we do with the continually accumulative free time?
To this, Krishnamurti said that we have two possibilities:
“Either the brain pursues entertainment - football, which is already happening, sports, religious entertainments; that’s one direction - to be amused, entertained, or a totally different thing, which is to pursue the inward process of man - the inward, psychological discovery, deeper and deeper.”
Either pursue entertainment or turn inward.
So, these two were the buckets in front of us and we poured all the waters of our free time in the bucket of entertainment and continue doing so.
Just look at what most of us do in our free time.
Turn on the TV and watch some shitty shows. Play some shitty video games. Watch Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. See what the celebrities or your favorite politicians are doing. Go to Church/Temple/Mosque.
They all have one thing in common: they help us stay away from the reality; from our naked selves; from the things that matter. It’s not as if we are forced to do this with gun placed on our heads, it’s our personal decision, whether conscious or unconscious, to escape from reality and live in some fantasy world.
Leonard Ravenhill was right when he said, “Entertainment is a devil’s substitute for joy.”
To know about the quality of someone’s life, just look at the amount of free time he spends on entertainment. The more worthlessness in one’s life, the more he will be attracted toward entertainment, and by worthlessness I do not mean life in itself, I mean the things that he directs his life toward.
The more garbage you collect in your house, the stinker it will get, and the more perfume you’ll need to spray to get rid from that vomit-inducing smell.
Entertainment is the perfume to spread the momentary fragrance of joy in a life full of misery and suffering.
We don’t want to throw the garbage out, which is to say that we don’t want to change the way we live, we don’t want to observe ourselves and see the ever-present suffering, we don’t want to come face to face with the trauma of living wrong lives.
So, what do we do?
Instead of facing the fact of our lives, we create an elusive veneer of “happiness” woven with the wool of entertainment. We delude ourselves and say that there is no garbage in the house, but the fact that we have to go and pick up the bottle of perfume every now and then proves that there’s something wrong with the current state of the house.
What is entertainment in its most fundamental sense?
It is when you are a spectator; when you don’t play but watch someone play, when you don’t sing but hear someone sing, when you don’t dance but watch someone dance; more fundamentally, it is when you watch others, but not yourself.
Whenever you feel the urge to be entertained, just remind yourself that deep inside you are in a lot of pain, the deepest valleys of your heart are overflowing with tears, and when you see this clearly and honestly, only then would you see entertainment as an escape from that pain, and only then would you realize the need to go inside and face that pain, which is the only way to end the suffering.
As the technology continues to develop and outstrip man, we’ll have more free time, and if our approach toward free time remains the same, we’ll continue not only wasting our lives but worsening the crises that are already eating humans and other species like Minotaur.
But our addiction to escapism is so strong that given a choice between saving the planet and consuming entertainment, we would choose entertainment.
Free time can either be a blessing or curse, and for humanity living unconsciously, calling it something other than a curse would be as wrong as the philosophy of “happiness through consumption.”
It can either be your most valuable asset, if invested in diving deep into the sea inside, or it can be your most expensive liability if spent the way we spend it currently.
The Great Awakening is supported by readers like you. You can become either a free or paid subscriber to show your support )
Financial help will be helpful a lot because it would allow me to keep advancing this project. If interested, you can become a paying member today or you can leave some coins on Patreon or Kofi.
You can share and follow me on twitter: