The DK Foundation

The Ten Commandments of Everyday Living 10

Do not watch TV as the default setting for free time – your mind is being controlled and your emotions manipulated.

The practice of astrology will make one acutely aware of the effects of conditioning because the natal chart is a blueprint of a life, which reveals a person’s qualities and how those qualities are designed to express themselves.

There is an inner logic to a birth chart which discloses the purpose of a lifetime and which may not accord with the ideas held at any one time about what is spiritually useful. The purpose of a lifetime is set by an evolutionary process which plays out over and above the culturally conditioned ideas that may help us understand the process.

If we do not express who we are it is because our sense of who we are which creates the connection with our qualities has been overlaid with inauthentic ideas which, in turn, lead to inauthentic expression.

These inauthentic ideas do not come from family because the influence of the biological family or the child’s caregivers is built into the design of the life, expressing as it does a part of our own psyche which these agents are offering back to us.  They do not come from the home environment in which we were raised because the quality of this too is determined by the design of a life.  And when it comes to our relationships with others, who and what we attract is in accordance with our emotional patterns.  So all these things which we consider shape our lives are simply expressions of who we are, manifesting as the outer world.  They come from personal reality. Our time in incarnation is an opportunity to live amongst the externalised expressions of who we are and how we look at life, and come to liberating realisations about the world in which we live and in which we experience so much pain and disappointment.

The forces which make us inauthentic come from influences that form part of the cultural backdrop to the lives of all people living in a society.  They do not come from personal reality and, as such, are not specific to us, although our relationship with them is something over which we can take control.  (This point was made in the previous article, Ten Commandments 9.)  These influences are collective and they are expressions of mass consciousness.

Mass consciousness is governed by the sign Cancer and can express itself in a lunar way, in which case it will control the individual agents through whom mass consciousness is working, locking them into established patterns and making them suggestible to those things which the Moon needs: instinctive and unconscious behaviour.  Or it can express itself in the way of Neptune (the planet veiled by the Moon), in which case mass consciousness may be transformed into transpersonal consciousness, and each agent given an opportunity to experience a higher vibration.

Watching television makes us part of a very large group of people all watching the same thing and, as such, agents of mass consciousness.  TV viewing could be used to generate positivity and good will, and there are examples of its Neptunian aspect (one thinks of the transmission of  Live Aid), but this is not the trend in viewing.  The trend is lunar, and we feel less and not more in control of our lives and destinies in consequence.

Night and day we are presented with a reality which is the product of editing, political agenda and collective agreement about what is ‘news’.  The TV set is made to relay to us scenes of violence, destruction, and tales of human baseness.  We watch this and we tell ourselves that we live in an awful world.  In the name of being informed, we take the toxicity into our own lives and feel badly about them.  We allow this presentation - selective at best, intentionally falsified in all likelihood - to rob us of the opportunity to look at life through our own eyes.  To escape the pain and sense of helplessness this engenders we lose ourselves in the mindless entertainment and the cult of celebrity that is also on offer through our screens.  This fills us with false values and not only devours time but makes us dissatisfied with our appearance, our lifestyles and our prospects.

Many of us suspect that TV sets are used to transmit subliminal messages which cause fear and anxiety, but I cannot prove this and this is not the point I want to make in this article.  I am concerned here with what TV viewing does, and that -for good or bad- is to make us agents of mass consciousness which creates realities which can then catch us up.

When the trend is negative why put yourself through it?  What purpose does it serve?  Are you more informed or more despondent?

As I have been writing this article I have recalled that when I was a child the media was full of talk about the Cold War and about the consequences of living in the shadow of the bomb.  The teenagers of my generation were offered this as an explanation of our rebelliousness, dissatisfaction and existential angst.

The concept of having a blighted youth appealed to my sense of drama and it was a good excuse for bad behaviour.  But, in truth, it was not the bomb which created my existential angst; that came from my relentless and often unprincipled pursuit of my own interests in which I repeatedly demonstrated that my skill to handle the experiences I attracted lagged some considerable way behind my enthusiasm to bring them on.  In common with the rest of my generation I was distracted by the mores of the time from reading the price tag attached to the hedonistic lifestyle and carried on engaging with every kind of distraction and self-destructive activity I could find.  Quiet and reflective by nature, I lived in a state of complete inauthenticity in those years, goaded on by the prevailing ethic of permissiveness.  Perhaps that ethic did owe something to the threat of extinction and so made some kind of indirect contribution, but it was not the bomb I was thinking about in the 1970s, that is for sure; it was myself, first, second and last.  I stopped suffering not when the USSR became more Western friendly but when I recognised and stopped doing the things that were harming me.

Beware the collective excuse that strips us of our power to act and change our lives.  It may be very beguiling, plausible and convenient but, ultimately, it is disempowering.

If I suffer now, this is not the fault of GW, Blair or terrorists; rather it has everything to do with my own choices and the relationship that I have to the things I cannot change. And I would rather have it this way than disempower myself by blaming someone else and taking on a reality that is not my own.  Then I have the choice and opportunity to organise and direct energy consciously towards those whose lives are being torn apart by the war in Iraq.

If you keep the TV off this Christmas and live in your own reality you might be able to pick up on the energies that comes through to Earth at this time (and which are driven into retreat by the manic cheerfulness of transmitted family entertainment at Christmas time).  If, with the TV off, you don’t like what you feel and see around you, the chances are that you will still feel calmer and clearer and you will know what resolutions to make come the New Year.

Suzanne Rough