Television

Guide: Television
Landmarks	Experiment with Mindfulness and Television Try Mindfully Watching Television

Guides are a Pathway in The Map of Everyday Enlightenment which are typically articles about a particular time and place for meditative practices. Guides contain Landmarks that highlight examples of how this could work for you, as well as other explanations of how to make use of certain concepts or techniques. The Landmarks in Guides can be reviewed in the context of progress through the Realms of Everyday Enlightenment, and when used in that way, Guides become another way to decide where to go next.

The Guide to Television discusses how watching television provides a very unique and instructive method for shifting your perspective around because in essence a television is another world with other people, sounds, qualities, and space.

General Exercises

• Perform any of the Rooms and Boundaries exercises, treating the television itself as a window into another room.
• Many of the People exercises can be applied to the people on television, although many of them won't apply in the same way.

Mindful Television

Just as you can be (and should be!) Mindful when with other People, you can apply that same Skill to your experience watching Television. For this Skill there's no need to put any additional layer of meditative effort into it more than just watching Television with Attention. Regardless of what you're watching, consider each of the following:

• Are you distracted by anything else right now? What is it, and why are you being pulled in that direction? Can you feel a tugging that pulls you away from what's on TV?
• Can you rest at peace with the show you're watching, without any need to wonder what's going on, what's coming up, etc.?
• You might review some of the Sounds Skills, and see how to apply them here. This will depend greatly on what you're watching, as some shows you might not want to do these.
  • Pay attention to certain sounds on the show. Especially things like certain vocal inflections from a given character that comes up often during dialogue.
• Pay attention to one moment of the show at a time. Allow every sound and sight to hit you, without any attempt to understand or absorb that one moment. Naturally, another moment, and another will continue to arise, and each time let just one moment exist at a time. After all, that's all that does ever exist at any time.
• Another completely different angle is to mindfully watch TV while also mindfully paying attention to the whole room. After all, what's going on the screen and speakers is co-equal in consciousness with anything else taking place in the room.
  

Use the following Landmarks as ways to integrate meditative practices into your everyday life and to check in on how you are progressing in your own journey.

Landmark: Experiment with Mindfulness and Television

Landmark: Experiment with Mindfulness and Television
Beacons	Attention
Realms	Engagement
Lenses	Mindfulness
Guides	Rooms and Boundaries Television

The Landmark of Experiment with Mindfulness and Television invites you to experience Mindfulness in another way to discover that Experience the Now is more complicated than just recognizing sights and sounds, it also means paying attention to your own mind, and in this case particularly how your own mind is perceiving and reacting to The Now. This Landmark is within the Realm of Engagement, and is part of the Beacon of Attention, more specifically the Lens of Mindfulness.

Landmark Lookouts:

• Mindfulness Near a Television: Can you be fully present and Mindful with a television playing in the room, which includes being mindful of the sound and light coming from the television?
  
• Mindfulness in the Television: Are you able to shift your mindfulness to the situations on the television as if you were in that scenario?
  
• Mindfulness of the Room and the Television: Are you able to extend your mindfulness to include both the scenario of the room you are in, and the scenario on the television, as if they were all taking place in the same Now?
  

With those questions in mind, try these steps while sitting at the TV.

• Enter a mindful state, and acknowledge that the television is a source of light, motion and sound in the room you are in. Mindfully notice the shape of your own room, what objects are in the room giving off sound and light or moving. For example, an overhead fan is providing a breeze, a gentle sound, and constant motion. Notice that the television is merely another object in the room, with no more significance than things like a fan or a lamp.
• Now shift your perspective into the television. Notice that you can be mindful of what is going on inside the television (the show, the movie, whatever it is) as if that was the whole world. Be fully present as if your universe was contained in the same universe as what is on TV. Your physical body, and the room around you melt into the background, and now you can engage in basic mindful activities from the perspective of a fly on the wall within the TV.
  • What are the various background sounds? (Birds, cars, people talking softly at a table.) - Try some of the Sounds Skills.
  • Whatever mindfulness exercises you personally connect with, try to apply them to what is on the television.
  • If what you are watching doesn't lend itself to any of these exercises, that's okay. Instead, practice mindfully watching the show, without distraction, allowing the world around you to melt away, and drawing all your attention to what is on TV.
• Once more shift your perception, now to include both the world of the television, and your own world, as if the space and experience within the TV was taking place within the room you are in. This will not make contextual sense in many cases, but in some cases (for example) it would be easy to see the people on the TV sitting at a table and feel that they are sitting at a table in the room with you.
• Note that this exercise is very similar to how you might play with your perception in a Mirror. Try adapting some of those exercises to the television.