Guest Article by : Penney Peirce

There is a part of every living thing that wants to become itself—the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, the damaged human being into a whole one. That is spirituality…Ellen Bass

What are the problems with entertainment media today? If we look deeper, inside each problem, what useful insight might we find about how to change things for the better? And, where’s the urgency? What’s at stake if nothing changes?

These are the questions a group of transformational educators and entertainment professionals asked at a recent summit meeting or “wisdom council.”

The aim of this alliance was to begin a process that could help transform the quality of the content now being served up to us by the varied forms of the entertainment media. Everyone present recognized how powerful these seemingly ordinary but highly invasive sources of content really are—how they shape our consciousness and culture, and how they’re influencing us negatively today.

The First Steps of a Journey Symbolize the Rest of the Journey. These are great questions—good, logical, left-brained questions—yet as I listened to the fleshing out of the responses, I felt slightly uncomfortable, like the cart was in front of the horse and we might trip over it. Sure, films and television are glorifying and perpetuating shallow, intolerant attitudes and violent, reactionary behavior, but to my mind these things are not really the problem, they are physical materializations of one stage in a much larger—and very positive, I might add—transformation process.
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