“Television has this to do with alcohol and some drugs; if on the one hand it offers you some liberation from the mind, on the other hand you pay dearly for it.
You pay with loss of consciousness. Like drugs, television is also highly addictive. You reach to turn it off and, instead, you change, you change.
Half an hour or an hour later, you are still watching and changing the channel. The off button is the only one your finger can’t press. You keep watching, almost always not because something interesting has caught your attention, but precisely because there is nothing interesting to watch.
Once you become addicted, the more superficial the program, the more it lacks meaning and the more addictive it becomes. If it was interesting, if it was thought-provoking, it would stimulate your mind to start thinking again, which would be a more conscious state…and, in that case, your attention would not be captured by the images on the screen.
When you watch TV, you tend to get down, not up. Your mind is inactive; it does not produce thoughts, but constantly absorbs the thoughts and images that come to it from the TV screen. This induces a passive, trance-like state, a state slightly higher than hypnosis.”
Eckhart Tolle