Because you are not actually in the moment, that's what we were just talking about, you're not in the moment if you're actually entertaining yourself with somebody else's story. Got that? Movies are a story about someone else; books are a story about someone else. Watching sports, yeah they can play great out there, and we sit there and watch them. Okay, but we're not living our life, we're being entertained by other people's lives. And sometimes there are messages we can learn in books and stories. Schindler's List is a great movie for giving us a message to be learned, but that's not really what we are referring to here. We're referring to someone who's letting the mind just be entertained by this stuff, okay.
So you're actually not living your own life at that time. Is that what you want? That's what entertainment is for, it is actually for entertaining people so that they forget their life, and so they live someone else's dream for two hours or whatever it is. How often do you want to live other people's lives? How often do you want to live your own life?
Now, if you do get entertained a lot with this stuff and then you sit down on the pillow and you want to try to reflect, say, on death - the mind is not really going to want to reflect on death in the same way that we are teaching. The mind is used to getting entertained with something so it may think up something regarding death and, "ooh", we're off into one of those movies that we saw where someone was killed and then all of the sudden, we're entertaining ourselves with that movie. I'm sure you've all done this already. You've all practiced long enough that you've watched the mind go from some sort of serious topic that you're trying to understand and then you get lost.
What's that great story Rosemary talks about in the regular retreat? India and David, how the person is thinking that the trees are so beautiful, and all of the sudden the person's upset because David's now with somebody else. Whatever it is, you know, and that's how the mind works. So the more you train your mind to be entertained with stories, the more the stories are going to come up, the more the sports are going to come up, whatever else, it's all going to come up while you're sitting there trying to work on something else. You're going to be more or less swayed off with lots of these stories and dreams and everything else. So this is why we see that excessive attachment to entertainment, in this way, is definitely going to be harmful to the practice of being in the moment.
Now, a movie such as Schindler's List, as I mentioned before, can be useful for reflection meditation. You can reflect on the pain of World War II, you can reflect on the terrible hardships that some people went through, and the insanity that other people went through. You can open up that movie as a reflection meditation and there's a lot of learning that can go on. But, as you can appreciate, that's for wisdom development - that's not just to be entertained - so there's a big difference there.