Do not fill the brain with trash and tinsel?

The world around, print media and visual media occupy a major place. There are more than a dozen newspapers in each language which are spoken by majority of people in a country. In addition, weekly, bimonthly and monthly magazines occupy a substantial portion of the print. Naturally various print media and TV channels offer innumerable opportunities to talented young man and women. In spite of many media houses, the sale of newspaper is always on the rise. In India alone there are more than two hundred TV channels and FM radio channels too occupy a sizable portion. The beauty is that there is space for all this in our country. Many newspaper readers just flip through the pages for important news items. They will scan through the news headlines and if some heading is catching, they will read the main news!

The elderly population and senior citizens pour over the entire newspaper from top to bottom. Thus they will be able to pass considerable time in engagement. How long one can watch the TV? May be one or two hours. We need lot of patience to sit through all the advertisements. Then how to pass time usefully? Read some valuable books. Watch a little TV program. Scan the newspapers. Go for shopping or for a walk. In parks, there are many long benches meant for those senior citizens. Sometimes they will be focusing aimlessly at some place. Surf few useful sites in the web like health and yoga. Nowadays, a computer with internet connection is enough to pass time for few hours. But meaningless surfing will increase our depression. Even some elders are addicted to certain websites like Facebook and twitter! But these sites are merely for time passing and reading the comments on many world affairs by important people in society! The volume of material available in the net is more than the volume of entire oceans in the world. Hence terabytes are the norms nowadays. Why should we store more and more items in the memory? We waste lot of memory of the gadgets by saving unnecessary photos, music and videos. Whenever we need them, we can watch them downloading at that time and deleting later! As we litter the earth, ocean and space, we litter the cyberspace also with unwanted trash and debris. We must save space in the hard drive and memories by periodically deleting unwanted items.

The desktop of many people contain innumerable icons which are rarely used. Keep important and essential shortcuts and remove the other things! The computer itself will prompt us to remove those icons to ‘recycle bin’. We need to clean our surroundings more often to avoid infections. Similarly clean your “C” drives so that viruses are removed from the system. Why this long sermon? There is an important philosophical truth behind the above. Consider the life of human on earth. One half of his life is wasted on sleep, another quarter is spent for food, recreation and commuting to work place. What is left is hardly six hours. Even some people dare to waste this time in gossip in the work place! We fill our brain with all and sundry (mostly trash and tinsel). We don’t keep or retain valuable things in our memory. This is the greatest tragedy. Like the computer processor, our brain is capable of processing several times more than the central processing unit. We hardly use 5% of our brain capacity. Even distinguished scientists use hardly 5% of brain capacity. The remaining 95% is lying waste! If we just examine the contents of our brain, we will regret that it is useless stuff. Then what for we are given the powerful brain? What for it should be utilized?

Definitely, the creator has blessed the human beings the brain and intelligent to use it purposely. We need to discriminate what kind of information has to be stored in the brain? The purpose of human life is to reach back to the source which is God. As all rivers merge in the ocean, all human beings have to reach God. Interestingly, the ocean is the source of all river system. The evaporated surface water rise high as clouds and on cooling fall back as rain. When the rainfall gathers momentum, the water is collected as rivulet and form streams. When many such streams combine to gather, they become a river system and rush to reach the ocean back. We all have parted from God and hence in the natural course of events, we need to reach the source. Our intellect and discrimination must aid in the process of reaching God. To enable this, God sends periodically His Avatars, in various parts of the globe! Jesus is such an Avatar who ascended to Heaven, three days after crucifixion. He has risen from death and that day is celebrated all over the globe as Easter by the Christian community. In each religion, there were many Prophets, who sacrificed his life for the uplift of people in the region. Like Jesus, Prophet Mohammad, Buddha, Mahavira and Guru Nanak came in this world to guide the ordinary people towards God! Hence we must discriminate between the real and illusory and avoid falling into illusory life of sensual pleasure. Even insects, birds and animals eat, drink, mate and sleep! What is the use of following the pattern of lower animal species? We are all blessed with intelligence and discrimination to follow our inner conscious rather than the head which contain the mind element!