Week 6 – The Food of the Mind

Experiencing a diet for the mind

This week we have a chance to recognize how we feed our minds through the doors of the senses.
We are talking about input, stimuli such as movies, news, magazines, the Internet and then television, computer, cell phone… everyone knows what they need and what they are able to explore depending on their habits.
Of course, to do this requires all our energy.
This week every time we open our cell phone, tablet, computer or television we can ask ourselves:

WHAT AM I EATING?

What am I nourishing in me?

What energy, emotions, thoughts am I nourishing at this instant?

Am I feeding the open body or the closed body?

Am I energizing Criticism, having Reason, Complaint, Fear, or the Serene, Confident mind and the Open, Spacious heart?

Exploration on how we feed content into the mind can offer us much understanding and much healing.

The food of the mind

by Thich Nhat Hanh

“Nothing can survive without being nourished. This is a very simple and very profound truth.
Love and hate are both living things: if you do not feed your love, it will die.
If you cut off the nurturing sources of your violence, your violence will die.
If you want your love to last, you have to feed it every day.

Love cannot live without food.

If you neglect your love, it will die after a while, perhaps giving way to hate. Are you able to feed your love?

Hate will also die if we do not give it nourishment. Hate and suffering grow more and more every day because every day we feed them, giving them new food.
What kind of nourishment have you fed your despair, your hate?
If you are depressed you no longer have any strength, no energy, maybe you even feel like dying; why do you feel this way?
Our depression does not come out of nowhere: if we can recognize the food that has fed the depression in us we can stop taking it; within a few weeks our depression will die.
If, on the other hand, you are not aware that you are watering down your depression, you will continue to do so every day….

If we know how to look deeply at our suffering and recognize what is feeding it, we are already on the path to liberation.
The way out of our suffering is awareness of what we consume, not only for ourselves but for the whole world. If we can water the seeds of wisdom and compassion within us, those seeds will become a powerful source of energy that will will help us forgive those who have hurt us. This will bring relief to both our nation and our world. We are able to put this kind of wisdom and compassion into action.

 

The food of the senses

by Thich Nhat Hanh

With our six sense organs-eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind-we “eat”: a TV program is food, a conversation is food, music is food, art is food, advertising billboards are food.
When you drive through the city, without realizing it (and without your consent) you “consume” these things that enter you.
What you see, what you touch, what you feel is food.
These kinds of consumption can be highly toxic. There is good music, there are good articles in periodicals and good television programs that nurture understanding and compassion in us while many other kinds of music, television programs and magazines contain avidity, despair and violence. The advertisements that television forces you to watch are a kind of food, that of sensory impressions, which has the sole purpose of making you want at all costs the product being sell, to arouse the desire in you and reinforce it.
We consume these poisons and allow our children to consume them as well, and this makes fear and hate grow in us day by day. The question is not to consume less or more, it is to consume in a right way, in a conscious way.
We can choose foods of the senses that either nourish us or poison us.
Sometimes after we finish reading certain books or articles we feel light and content. The same goes for certain music or a certain kind of conversation: listening to them makes us feel happy and inspires us positively.
We can choose, therefore, to consume kinds that bring feelings of lightness, peace and happiness to our hearts.
A simple conversation can bring you to complete despair or it can give you hope and confidence.
Sometimes after listening to certain talks we feel very depressed: conversations can also contain toxins, which is why we need to speak and listen in mental presence.
Loneliness can push a person to talk to anyone even if only to escape it; but the interlocutor and the conversation can hurt a lot.
I invite you to listen and talk only with people who nurture love and understanding in you, unless it is a conversation that has the specific purpose of helping the other person transform the suffering and violence in him or her.

 

Overcoming the problems

by Carl Gustav Jung, Opere, XIII

Very often I saw how easily some individuals overcame a problem in which others failed completely.
This “overcoming,” as I called it in the past, resulted from a raising of the level of consciousness, as my later experience revealed.
That is, when an additional higher and broader interest of life’s view appeared on the patient’s horizon, the insoluble problem lost all its urgency precisely because of this broadening of his views.
The problem was not overcome because it was solved logically, for its own sake, but it faded in the face of a new and stronger orientation of existence. It was not removed or rendered unconscious, but simply appeared in another light, and thus became truly different.
What at a lower level of consciousness would have given rise to the wildest conflicts and fearful emotional storms, then appeared, considered from the higher level of personality, like a thunderstorm in the valley but viewed from the top of a mountain peak.
By this one does not take away from the storm anything of its reality, but one is no longer totally immersed in it, but rather sees it from above and with greater detachment.