The Power of Entertainment

An important passageway can be illustrated by honoring the root words of the subject of this post.

We can translate "enter" into one of its original meanings, from the French word entre, meaning between.

For the second half of the word, we can translate "tainment" into the Latin root of tenere, meaning to hold or maintain.

What we discover then, in looking at entertainment, is a word and a practice really of holding a place in between.

That is what I would like to propose, in any event, and I think it important to look at this further.

When we entertain something, we hold it in the mind, give it our thought and attention.  With entertainment, I feel, we are bridging the gap between this world and another, between the world of creation and the world of the regular, everyday.

Depending on the quality of this entertainment, which allows us to go to another place, to escape, to let our cares go for a time, we might truly come to a place we would like to continue to entertain, or to hold within ourselves.

When I propose the importance of entertainment, I am encouraging the reality of the possibility found in aligning ourselves with the work of another, or in the act of creation ourselves, immersing ourselves in this creation, whatever may be its source.

I believe our minds are realigned to the reality of the world we are experiencing, this in-between world, and it is of some quality, certainly of the quality of being outside of this world to some extent, if not quite fully immersed in this world of another.

In the ultimate vantage and viewpoint, the world occurs moment by moment, if even like that, each moment perfect in its presence of wholeness and of truth.

When we experience the world of another, in entertainment, we are experiencing a structured reality, in which we find all of ourselves participating, the parts of us we know, and the parts of us we may not, that is, the unconscious parts of ourselves.

Powerful works of creation can activate our inner workings in unseen and transformative ways.

I propose the power of entertainment lies in its ability to help us realize the perfection and truth of each moment, knowing that nothing is wrong in them, when we are in between our seeming reality and the proposed world we have come to entertain.

In this liminal, in-between space we get a taste of realizing wholeness, learning about the freedom and full possibility of each moment.