OP ED: Opinion
No Peace in Prime Time
TV is a war machine. But the internet tells a different story.
By Bob Belinoff
War is the meat and potatoes of the television news business. People running for their lives makes for riveting watching. So do animated rockets flying over Google maps of a war zone, zeroing in on an airport hangar or a high rise.
Television demands an action sequence every 3.5 minutes and a technical event of some kind every nine seconds. It just doesn’t have the patience for peace, and that’s not where you will find peace blooming. In fact what we call traditional journalism – newspapers, talk shows, TV and Cable would have to die or re-invent if peace ever broke out for long.
What’s really being riveted as we watch war news on television, of course, is the whole idea of war. Anyone who works with a bodymind art knows that the body follows mind and mind creates reality. In the martial art of Aikido when you focus on a conflict you lock it in place. In the case of the recent catastrophes in the Mideast, the media has conspired with us to cement in place a rather classic picture of war: opposing sides locked in a grim, unwinnable battle. Talking heads delivered the language, vocabulary and concepts as old as recorded history, as we saw good guys and bad, vengeance and wrath, a mechanical world of tanks and bombs, shifting lines of conflicting forces. These strategies are 10,000 years old.
The problem of violence can probably not be solved at the level of this primitive vocabulary or the way it’s been adapted to the mass media and the media consuming mind. Such linear, grotesquely rational thinking won’t help. It only leads to rhetoric, argument and endless justification. It polarizes, it alienates. It pretends to offer easy solutions. But force is powerless to create real change. That takes an appeal to a higher order, an appeal to which listening is key – and to which television and the mass media is helpless.
You have to sit with peace, you can’t clobber someone with it. It’s a sense of being. Gandhi’s power wasn’t in his command, he commanded nothing but himself. What he had was an incredible sense of being. The man was decided, clear, simple, focused, quiet and eternally present. It is this sense of being that does not translate well in the mass media. Today a voice like Gandhi’s might have been gone in 60 seconds had we heard it at all.
We can only get to individual peace by reaching through the fog of everyday life and into the realm of spirit and an interconnected world. And we can only get to global peace by many minds doing this together.
For this the web and not the mass media is perfect. This is true not because the web is a carrier of news from the front but because it is a carrier of news from a growing ground swell of niche markets of healers, meditators and believers in powerful invisible worlds of belief and intention. And what’s more the internet is a grand connector of these niche markets, the ultimate synchronizing machine of focused intentions of people reveling in true power.
The game begins in the mind. Coordinated minds have tremendous power. And the web is nothing if not one of the most powerful coordinating, network building, mind-synching doorways to another sense of being since our forebears began to dream.
The efficacy of coordinated minds as a strategy to reduce violence is no theory. It has been proven in scientific study after study. These are repeatable, demonstrable experiments, published in peer reviewed journals, presented in libraries of case histories that illustrate how one person’s attitude, disposition or mind state can influence another’s, how one group’s focused attention can change an outcome for another group.
In Washington DC in July of 1993 a two month scientific experiment, which has been replicated several times, was conducted which brought nearly 4000 meditators together, employing Transcendental Meditation in a coordinated meditating activity to reduce violence in the District of Columbia. A remarkable calm descended on the city during this time with a marked reduction in violent crime. Transcendental Meditation has demonstrated an average 16% drop in crime in cities where 1% of the population practiced meditation at a coordinated time.
The recent U.N. sponsored cease fire between Israel and Jordan coincides neatly, as well, with a massive and co-coordinated meditating community.
Television puts us all, eyes and ears at the bombing together, making us a community at war. The Internet can put our minds together in a state of peace making us all together a community at peace.
The web is only in its infancy in playing in this arena but the signs are most promising. I am receiving more and more notices of coordinated global meditating events. There are more people that participate in these events than we think. Such prayer events may not be the big “stars” of the web, like iTunes, eBay and Amazon, but they have a collective presence that could be enormous. In his recent book The Long Tail, wired editor Chris Anderson tells us that the niche markets collectively may be larger than the hit markets in the case of music, movies and books. One suspects the same may be true in the case of those individually and in groups appealing patiently to an interconnected world of grace and power.
Not only is the internet the medium of peace at the level of mind, it is also the medium of peace at the level of politics. Consider the Peace Alliance, explored at length elsewhere in these pages.
The Alliance is a legislative effort with more power than the major media would have us believe. One of its goals is to create a U.S. Department of Peace, and it has many friends on many web sites.
The Alliance, a web fueled movement, depends on a top down approach to change the game. Which is good because there’s money, policy and paradigm changing regulations up there at the top. The leverage is considerable – to fund peaceful communities, projects, and curriculum. We could begin to sow a whole culture of peace, divisions of peace, bureaus of compassion. This could infiltrate the whole mega-ton system of governance and war. The giant mechanical structure would be eaten through by the elements of peace and crash like the old Coney Island roller coaster.
The Alliance has the advantage of starting the assault against rear brain thinking in the realm in which the rear brain lives. It is logical, doable and could even be digestible. The system might unknowingly eat this stuff and die.
When it comes to conflict and peace the mass media is a virtual war machine. Its real tragedy is not in the pictures it brings us from the battle front, but in its appeal to the hind quarter of our consciousness where frequency and image cement in place the current paradigm – and in so doing make it the future one.
All the mass media cotton to the beat of the most confrontational story. The internet is different. Here the strategy is to work from the underbelly, and spread quietly like a sacred healing, beginning at the level of interconnected minds.
Bob Belinoff can be reached at
bob@digitalwkshop.com.
Visit Bob’s web site at publichealthzoom.com.
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