Channeling, Watching and Absorbing

 

Dear Reader,

For human beings on earth, the period of increasing spiritual darkness is about to end. We are going to ‘turn the corner’ and enter a phase of ascension toward the next Golden Age, when spiritual light and consciousness will dawn into the world again. The coming galactic alignment is a cosmic event that invites us to grow spiritually. It is built into the Divine Plan and identifies the time we live in as a time of rare opportunity for our growth. ... We can identify this period of shift, the Global Shift, as stretching between 1980 and 2016  ... - John Major Jenkins (in 1999).

Then the Godlen Age, he says. But will it happen by itself? 

If - 65 years ago - someone had mentioned out loud that they were 'changing channels' I would have assumed they were talking of swimming lanes!

So when, today, we change channels to watch the News, we very rarely - of course - hear about good news. It always seems to be the bad news that we tune in to listen about - or read. One recent exception was the topic of the centenarian and money-raiser 'Captain Tom'. This week we had the pleasure of hearing about his life and the challenges he faced in it, and dealt with them all admirably by the looks of it. "Our childhood was a massive adventure", one daughter recalled.

It is TV programmes of that ilk that tempt me back to 'see what's on' - human stories that do not become self-indulgent. Similarly, the Repair Shop programme, where I find the inter-action between 'customers' and skilled artisans - and their manner of work - absolutely intriguing. 

So, taking aside the odd programmes just described, and the now-rare worthwhile documentary that appears on terrestrial TV these days (most documentaries now seem to be doctored to official notions of truth), what the dickens do we have a TV for?!

I go back long enough to remember clearly the time when we had no TV. It was when the radio was the main source of 'entertainment', and helped to create vivid imaginative portraits of what was being described over the airwaves. And even after TV had been with us for a few years, I (still a teenager) made a 'coup' by being allowed to take our old and bulky valve radio to my bedroom, and there would listen to the pirate stations - like Radio Luxembourg. How exotic some of those radio stations seemed: Luxembourg, Hilversum ... And, later, Radio Caroline, bobbing away on the North Sea - as Tony Blackburn will tell you!

But I also discovered the 'Third Programme' (today's Radio 3), and through which I became self-educated in classical music, and started to appreciate Beethoven, Mozart and all the rest. Did you know that Haydn composed 104 symphonies, while Beethoven 'only' wrote 9?

I think that listening to such radio programmes - and much more - gradually heightened my view that radio and TV should essentially be used to transmit quality programmes, Lord Reith style. But I have to confess that when Coronation Street first started ca 1960 I thought it quite an interesting social commentary! I did not hold that view for too long. Maybe it was Elsie Tanner that did it.

Anyhow, for several years there were just two TV channels (BBC and ITV), and then - in 1964 - came BBC2. Of course, with two of the three channels being given over to 'Auntie' (the BBC), Lord Reith's influence showed through quite a bit, and it was programmes like Bronowski's The Ascent Of Man and the Bill Shakespeare series An Age of Kings, that absorbed my attention. Even David Frost's appearance with TW3 seemed 'upmarket' and clever in comparison to a lot that has been seen since.

Yes, though Hancock's Half Hour kept us hysterically occupied when it was on, much of TV was quite serious back then. In the wonderful colour of black and white, it seemed more so! 

However, perhaps it shows how the quality of programmes back then couldn't have been so bad with Dad's Army being repeated so often, even today.

The world of TV did not stay still, of course. Colour TV arrived, and then two more ITV channels ... and Breakfast Television. Up until that point, apart from sports programmes over the week-end, TV was confined to evenings only. But Breakfast Television was the first big notice that all was about to change. The 1980s had arrived.

It was late in the 1980s that an overseas visitor came to our house, proclaiming the wonderful state of TV in the States, where, he said, you could get access to over 30 channels. I seriously questioned him then on how you could fill so many channels with meaningful material. He looked at me blankly.

Now, over 30 years later, with near-100 channels available on Freeview, I ask a similar question. How can you have meaningful programming over at least 12 hours in the day over so many channels? And don't tell me that Sky or any other subscription service is a good solution.

The answer is, of course, that you can't. The situation over the past 30 years is that we have seen ever-developing serious situations in our society as a result of the exponential development of the media market. It is not just violence and gratuitous programmes on TV that is now of concern (about which Mary Whitehouse had much to say) but all the other perils obtainable over the internet and through mobile phones.

To all that can be added the over-developed entertainments industry that now includes sport.

We may not realise it, but we have been massively brain-washed, and in very much a brain-numbing way so that not many people seem to have much of a true perspective anymore. Most of us have been lured into some aspect of the entertainment and travel industry. We tend to consume what's on offer without too much question.

Fortunately (perhaps), those that thought they could do what they liked as they creamed off their profits from their ill-gotten media and associated gains are being gradually found out. Jimmy Savile was one of those and we hear that certain areas of sport have been afflicted with monstrous abuse of young people. Football, gymnastics and now ballet have all employed their tyrants in this mad, huge, money economy that we now know.

And if all that has not been enough, Climate Change and Covid-19 have arrived to share the spoils, apart from the large-scale corruption that clearly exists in many countries.

The alternative? Amidst all that, those not too-few people who have avoided this social mythology that we live in speak instead of an alternative; of reality. They have noticed various things on how to live meaningfully and speak about them. They invite us to take notice that we have to change.

Indeed, change is the only sane option. Please read this to help find some inspiration in one area of possibility. 

Out of all this, there is one thing left. Hope. And 'hope' comes with the ability that we possess to do something about it.

There is a way. And it is known to all major spiritual paths:

Thank you for reading this.