Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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Seeking the Light

There was a time while I was working on this book that I became thrilled about the implications of the human ingestion of light. As I began to understand for the first time that there is a concrete relationship between our bodies and light, and that light is a kind of thing that we ingest for nourishment and growth, like food, I began to feel that humans probably hungered for and sought light the way plants do.

We know that humans seek food. A lot of life is spent in this process. We can say that seeking food is instinctive in all humans. Even babies know how to do it, within their limits.

If light is also food, then might we not seek it, as plants do? Is this why we look at the moon? Is this why we gaze at fire? Is there an innate longing for light, like a kind of cellular hunger? If so, then I suppose Anne Waldman could be right. With natural light gone, we seek a surrogate light: television.

Well, I couldn't possibly say any of that in a book. But I did write it in a letter to an anthropologist friend of mine, Neal Daniels, who is acquainted with both "primitive" and "esoteric" religions. He wrote back:

"If photobiologists are correct, and I don't see why they shouldn't be, then they may be onto the biological foundation for the fact that every culture and religion in history has placed light at the center of its cosmology. 'Receive the light.' 'Seek enlightenment.' 'The mind of light. ''The luminescent soul.'

"The Hopi Indians speak of light entering them through the tops of their heads. It's a goal of theirs to keep the tops of their heads open for the light. Of course they are speaking in spiritual terms. I know you are speaking more in health terms, as with food. But why couldn't the two be the same? It's very efficient and sensible to develop religions around natural processes which are the bases of survival. Most indigenous cultures do that. Only ours doesn't.

"Do you remember that film we saw on those Bolivian Indians? They had a meditational routine every day at the same time, sitting high on a cliff facing the sun. They called it 'taking light.' They give it the same kind of meaning as 'taking waters.' They claimed it had medicinal value, as well as stimulating spontaneous insight.

"As I think about it, except for Western medicine, there's hardly a medicine/ healing system in the world where light is not used for health purposes ... physical, mental, spiritual."

Anne Kent Rush, the author of Moon, Moon and a professional polarity therapist—a massage system that uses much of the knowledge of Chinese acupuncture medicine-gave me a compendium of data in this area. She told me that Chinese healing systems coordinate treatments of various organs with foods of specific color. For example, for lung disorders, white foods like turnips and onions will be prescribed. Heart disorders are aided by eating red foods such as beets and pomegranates. These might be combined with meditational practices in which the patient is asked to keep a certain color in mind. A spleen problem is considered to be caused partly by the body's insufficient absorption of nutrients found in green vegetables. Intestinal problems may be caused by an insufficiency or an overabundance of foods containing pink light. (Ott told me the reason vegetables are green or blue is because of their interaction with selected light spectra. When I asked him if he'd read about any of these color healing systems, he told me he had not.)

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