Anything you put into your mind, through your eyes, through your ears, mouth, touch and so on, anything is going to have an effect. So if something comes in through your eyes or your ears, in particular, like with a movie, it's going to have an effect. Not only will it come up in your meditation where you wander into unmeaningful memories, but it's going to affect the whole way that you look at life.
I was sorting through some papers in one of my boxes when I came across a newspaper article from 1993. They did statistics on the effects of television, and they actually had one of the surveyors who was being interviewed. One of the surveys was a twenty year survey. They'd actually watched people, they'd taken a group of seven and eight year olds at one stage and did some sort of test. They'd watched them over the years, and when they were twenty eight, they were correlating this whole research project, and they could absolutely prove that the amount of violence that people watched affected them in their life. There are probably other surveys that are doing the same thing.
Whatever you watch is going to affect you. You've got to be careful about that, that's part of the danger of watching things that aren't beneficial for your mind. Now, using the memory, bending energies, you've heard us say that. For me personally, I used one movie to bend my mind energies. This is how it goes: take a scene from a movie that you like, with a fairly neutral feeling towards the scene. Then take a scene that was a type of Dukkha scene. Actually I had two alternating ones because they were both a little similar. One of them was a scene where the star of the movie was walking down a alleyway in a big city in the West. He was a bit upset about something or other, and he had a half empty bottle of whiskey in one hand and a burger in the other. He was walking by a drunk on the ground, and the drunk looks up and sees the bottle and said, "Hey, man". The star gives him the bottle and the drunk says, "Great, you saved my life". Heavy scene, very heavy. To me it was heavy, other people in the audience laughed. A lot of people really didn't see the depth level because most people don't look that deep. For me it was very heavy, and there is no way at all I could have laughed at it and there was no way at all you could say that he had saved that person's life.
So what would happen for me if a memory of another movie ever came up, I would change channels. I would flip over into that first movie and I would pick any part of it, any part of it at all. Just to get away from the other movie. My mind wants to think about movies, so okay, I'm going to give it a different one. So I flip channels and I jump into this other movie and then I fast forward or reverse to get to that one place where he's walking down the street and hands the drunk the alcohol. And when I get there, I look at it and I remember exactly what happened and I look at it closely and I bring up some Compassion. Then I go into Compassion/Lovingkindness for the drunks on the street and so on and, before you know it, I'm out of the movie. I'm out of any movie at all. I've jumped, I've moved. I've gone into part of a movie that could ignite me to move in another way.
The same thing works in music, I use it very effectively in music. I picked old one favorite song and whenever I found myself trapped in another song I changed channels. Get to that one song I liked, get into it, let the mind have it for a moment or two, fast forward or reverse to one part that's something deep. Get into that deeply, change the channel again into Compassion/Lovingkindness. It's very effective if you want to try that.