Entertainment destroys initiative and weakens our imagination

"Remember that life is a celebration or can be a celebration. There's much entertainment in our life. And entertainment is destroying much of our initiative and weakens our imagination. What's really important is life as a celebration."

Entertainment is destructive

“There is pollution in our consciousness. Television, for instance, is a form of pollution for us and for our children. Television sows seeds of violence and anxiety in our children, and pollutes their consciousness, just as we destroy our environment by chemicals, tree-cutting, and polluting the water. We need to protect the ecology of the mind.”

All forms of escape are on the same level

“All forms of escape of which we can possible conceive – whether social activities, drink, the pursuit of God, puja, the performance of ceremonies, dancing, and other amusements – are on the same level; and if we see in daily life this total process of escape from conflict and want to go beyond it, we must understanding relationship.”


We don’t seem to pay much attention to the future. You see on television endless entertainment from morning until late in the night. The children are entertained. The commercials all sustain the feeling that you are being entertained. And this is happening practically all over the world. What will be the future of these children? There is the entertainment of sport, with thousands of people watching a few people in an arena and shouting themselves hoarse. Seeing all this in different parts of the world, watching the mind being occupied with amusement, entertainment, sport, if one is in any way concerned one must inevitably ask what the future is. More of the same in different forms? A variety of amusements?⠀
When the entertainment industry takes over, as it is gradually doing now, when the young people, the students, the children, are constantly instigated to pleasure, to fancy, to romantic sensuality, the words restraint and austerity are pushed away, never even given a thought. You probably won’t even listen to what the implications of austerity are. When you have been brought up from childhood to amuse yourself and to escape from yourself through entertainment, and when most of the psychologists say that you must express everything you feel and that any form of holding back or restraint is detrimental, leading to various forms of neuroticism, you naturally enter more and more into the world of sport, amusement, entertainment, all helping you to escape from what you are.
J. Krishnamurti, The Real Crisis⠀