Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (26 page)

XI
HOW WE TURN INTO OUR IMAGES

M
ORE
than any other single effect, television places images in our brains. It is a melancholy fact that most of us give little importance to this implantation, perhaps because we have lost touch with our own image-creating abilities, how we use them and the critical functions they serve in our lives. Not being in touch, we don’t grasp the significance of other people’s images replacing or gaining equality with our own. And yet there are no more terrifying facts about television than that it intervenes between humans and our own image-creating abilities and intervenes between humans and our images of the concrete world outside of our minds.

In this chapter, we will look at how images,
any
images, directly affect human beings and how we humans slowly turn into whatever images we carry in our minds. Then in the next chapter, we will concentrate on television images.

What makes these matters most serious is that human beings have not yet been equipped by evolution to distinguish in our minds between natural images and those which are artificially created and implanted. Neither are we equipped to defend ourselves against the implantation. Until the invention of moving-image media, there was never a need to make any distinction or defense.

And so the final effect, as we will see, is that the two kinds of image—artificial and natural—merge in the mind and we are driven into a nether world of confusion. Like the Solaris astronauts, we cannot differentiate between the present and the past, the concrete and the imaginary. Like the schizophrenic, we cannot tell which image is the product of our own minds, which is representative of a real world, and which has been put inside us by a machine.

Humans Are Image Factories

I have heard people say they can’t visualize; they can’t make pictures in their heads.

It’s true that some people do it more easily than others, but everyone does it.

If you believe yourself to be among those who can’t, please simply bring your mother to mind. Or your best friend. Have you done that? Can you see them in your head? It’s quite easy.

If I ask you to recall your childhood bedroom, you can probably do that as well. Many people can find enormous detail in that image.

If you have managed to make a picture in your head of any of these, it is definite proof that you can do it and that the phenomenon exists.

I would like to recommend a book called
Seeing With the Mind’s Eye
by Nancy Samuels and Mike Samuels. It is the most thoroughgoing popular work on imagery that I’ve come across. The authors list ten categories of natural human imagery:

The Concrete Power of Images

The Samuelses argue that images carried within human beings have a definite evolutionary and biological role. Like light, of which they are constructed, images are concrete. Images are things. We see something in the world, a river, and this river image enters our bodies through our eyes, becoming ingrained in our brain cells. The proof that the river is ingrained is that we can remember it. The image held in our mind, say the Samuelses, produces physiological as well as psychological reactions. We slowly evolve into the images we carry, we become what we see, in this case, more riverlike.

Today we are still recovering from the work of such men as behavioral psychologist John Watson. He achieved prominence early in this century by pioneering and popularizing the notion that if you couldn’t test a phenomenon and measure it, then it didn’t exist. Psychology, in those days, was eager to gain the admiration of the more respectable sciences and thus confined itself to measuring whatever could be quantified, duplicated and predicted. “In the U.S., psychology became so overwhelmingly behaviorist-oriented,” say the Samuelses, “that virtually no works were published on mental imagery for fifty years.” Even today there are schools of psychological thought which hold that imagery itself is fictional.

In a way this point of view represents the ultimate denial of human experience. All humans carry images in their heads, yet some scientists can say these images have no power or don’t exist. In turn, this denial of human imagery laid the groundwork for the common notion, held even today, that surrogate images, implanted from television, have little or no effect.

Many earlier cultures recognized the enormous power of images that are held in the mind. The Samuelses present an exhaustive history of these prior views and then present voluminous physiological evidence (measurements!) which at last fit the scientific model of proof that the images we carry have something important to do with who we individually become.

I cannot, of course, do justice to their very long work here, nor is it my purpose to repeat it. But some excerpts may be useful.

“Hermes Trismegistres believed that thoughts have characteristics similar to the physical world, that thoughts have vibrational levels and energy levels which bring about changes in the physical universe. . . . From a Hermetic point of view, the person who holds a sacred image in his mind experiences the effects produced by the specific energy of that image.”

Before Hermes, similar notions were expressed among the Sumerians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, dating as far back as 4000 B.C. Included among these notions were that there are concrete powers inherent in color and form. If a thing was shaped a certain way, its image was ingested in that form and was retained in the body as a system of energies. (A merger with modern photobiology is coming up.) Sculptures were thought of essentially as energy organizers. The very sight of them was believed to create states of mind and systems of beliefs.

The Samuelses imply that specific sculptural forms were chosen for the benefit that would accrue from seeing them, or ingesting their image. This would explain the wide variety of what we have since called “gods” or “goddesses” in the form of animals, supernatural creatures, heavenly bodies. These offered a way of integrating nature into oneself, similar to what Indians did by imitating animals. The sculptures encouraged knowledge of natural processes. Now we say that these images were worshiped. This is probably wrong. They were not worshiped any more than the Eskimo today worships the sculpture of the walrus. In making the sculpture the sculptor experiences walrusness, and so does the viewer.

The Samuelses indicate that the Hebrews, emerging between 3000 and 2000 B.C., won an important political victory by denouncing what they called the “worship of graven images.” By destroying the power of the sculptures of the Sumerians and others who preceded them, they effectively destroyed nature-based religion and the veracity of images. This made possible the substitution of an abstract, single, male, human all-powerful God. Because it was a sin to create any sculpture of it, it maintained its abstract nature. Although they absorbed God, the Christians somewhat overcame this problem. They created images of Jesus, a step backward (or forward) toward paganism.

Many Western religions, and all non-Western religions, were unaffected by the Judeo-Christian slaughter of diverse, nature-based imagery. They continued to inform their universal understanding through images representing virtually every natural form and tendency. This continues to apply to the great majority of people in the world today. It even applies, of course, to those Hebrews who followed the teachings of the Cabbala, which represented a kind of underground among Hebrews for centuries.

Today’s yogic disciples are rooted in the belief that focusing one’s mind upon objects, either outside the body or inside it, affects one’s entire physical nature.
Samadhi,
a much-sought yogic state, is the union that one experiences with an object or image that one looks upon—the form of an egg, or a mandala, for example. Union in this case means that the image itself is a concrete energy which travels between the object and the brain of the viewer. The image becomes a kind of solder that merges the three previously separated entities: sculpture (or form), person, image. Unlike solder, the image—made up of a thing we call light—can enter all the way into the cells.

When you or I look at a sculpture or painting or, for that matter, an igloo or high-rise building, the image enters us in the form of light rays. This is concrete, not metaphoric.

The form of the sculpture, artwork or structure determines the quality of the experience, what you can learn from it, what feelings you derive from it, and what image you retain inside your body/mind/cells.

The image becomes part of your image vocabulary. It remains in your mind. That is, it remains in the
cells
of your brain. It has physical character.

Sculptures of the Buddha are created to instill in the person who views them the attitude of the Buddha figure, its mood, its way of being. This is its information content— shape, color, weight, attitude, relation to gravity. The person who contemplates the Buddha figure for long hours becomes more like the Buddha figure. It is just a question of time. No thought is necessary. The image goes in and does its thing.

The person who observes the square form of the high-rise literally ingests this image, slowly absorbing it, remembering it, becoming it; adopting its character. The person who observes the pyramid ingests this image; its shape has power.

The person who ingests the tree image, becomes treelike. The viewing of a river produces riverlike people. The viewing of Christ on the cross instills the Christ experience. The viewing of birds in flight creates bird-flight in the mind of the viewer.

Viewing Kojak means absorbing his character and his way of being.

As one reviews non-Western cultures and their religious expressions, certain forms keep repeating themselves. They are said to represent universal energy formations. I have al-ready mentioned the egg and the mandala.

Consider Tantric art, for example. You find the egg form reproduced in thousands of ways. It is claimed that the image of the egg enters the mind and body of the viewer. Its smoothness, curvature, pattern of reflecting light, its “calmness,” “centeredness,” and “perfection” instill themselves in the observer, if the observer permits it. The egg is also the seed of life. From it, everything else follows. As a result, the egg image is at the heart of many meditation practices which employ imagery.

Modern physics is now finding that the mandala form is quite literally a reproduction of an essential organizing shape in the universe. The nucleus of the atom is a perfect mandala. If we could view it from space, our solar system would form a mandala—the bursting universe with stars fleeing outward from the center forms a mandala.

The contemplation of the mandala form—whether via Tibetan thankas, Hebrew Stars of David, Indian sand paintings, Tantric visualization, Hopi sun images—exists in virtually every culture of the world. Is this an accident? Or is everyone onto something?

By now, the power of images seems transparent and obvious to me. I am furious at the unconscious years I spent considering such beliefs, whenever I heard of them, as freaky, weird, unscientific or superstitious. Now, sensitized largely through my own research and what I have discovered of other people’s, such as the Samuelses’, as I walk around I literally feel assaulted by the images that are offered by the artificial world we live in whether they are buildings or signs or fire hydrants or television.