A New Earth
ENTERTAINMENT, THE MEDIA, AND THE PAIN?BODY
If you were not familiar with our contemporary civilization, if you had come here from another age or another planet, one of the things that would amaze you is that millions of people love and pay money to watch humans kill and inflict pain on each other and call it entertainment.
Why do violent films attract such large audiences? There is an entire industry, a large part of which fuels the human addiction to unhappiness. People obviously watch those films because they want to feel bad. What is it in humans that loves to feel bad and calls it good? The pain?body, of course. A large part of the entertainment industry caters to it. So, in addition to reactivity, negative thinking, and personal drama, the pain?body also renews itself vicariously through the cinema and television screen. Pain?bodies write and produce these films, and pain?bodies pay to watch them.
Is it always wrong to show and watch violence on television and the cinema screen? Does all such violence cater to the pain?body? At the current evolutionary stage of humanity, violence is still not only all?pervasive but even on the increase, as the old egoic consciousness, amplified by the collective pain?body, intensifies prior to its inevitable demise. If films show violence in its wider context, if they show its origin and its consequences, show what it does to the victim as well as the perpetrator, show the collective unconsciousness that lies behind it and is passed on from generation to generation (the anger and hatred that lives in humans as the pain?body), then those films can fulfill a vital function in the awakening of humanity. They can act as a mirror in which humanity sees its own insanity. That in you
which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.
Such films do exist and they do not fuel the pain?body. Some of the best antiwar films are films that show the reality of war rather than a glamorized version of it. The pain?body can only feed on films in which violence is portrayed as normal or even desirable human behavior, or that glorify violence with the sole purpose of generating negative emotion in the viewer and so become a fix for the pain?addicted pain?body.
The popular tabloid press does not primarily sell news but negative emotion food for the pain?body. Outrage screams the three?inch headline, or Bastards. The British tabloid press excels at this. They know that negative emotion sells far more papers than news does.
There is a tendency in the news media in general, including television, to thrive on negative news. The worse things get, the more excited the presenters become, and often the negative excitement is generated by the media itself. Pain?bodies just love it.