According to the Buddha’s teachings on Nutriment, whenever we consume something, whether it’s edible food, a thought, a podcast, or a news article, it leaves a residue. In Pali, this is called upadhi. We aren’t simply touched by what we consume and then it’s gone. It leaves an impression on the heart. Our hearts get formed and deformed by this upadhi. It’s the baggage that we end up carrying around with us.
Notice what the content of the mind is when you wake up from being lost in thought. It’s not unusual for it to consist of some information that we have ingested by listening to, watching, or reading news, media, entertainment, etc. The idea here, of course, is not to judge this, but to see it clearly. We want to apprehend the cause and effect nature of our citta (Pali for the sympathetic, emotive part of the mind that we call “heart”). That is, it is basically a blank slate that takes on the shape or qualities of that which it ingests. In MN 19 the Buddha says, “Bhikkhus, whatever a bhikkhu frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind.” This is a teaching on anatta. How the mind manifests in the world is a made up thing. Fill it with X, and X will be the result. Fill it with Y and Y will manifest. Sayadaw U Tejaniya says, “Your mind does not belong to you, and you are responsible for it.” We want to see this for ourselves. For, without a clear understanding of this dynamic, fluid state of the mind, there will be little inclination to intervene, so as to point it in the right direction.
Thich Nhat Hanh addressed this by expanding the 5th precept to include all things that are consumed. With this view, it is understood that consuming anything through any sense-door has the potential to cause us to be heedless, depending on the nature of what is being consumed. For example, continuing to consume advertisements about what to buy, without mindfulness, we may become heedless of the fact that we live on a budget and buy something that we don’t have the funds for, racking up a credit card bill that burdens us with debt. Or we mindlessly ingest the news, getting more and more agitated and angry, heedless of how these mindstates are affecting our body and mind.
As a way of both understanding how we are being affected by things, and as a way to work with them in the moment, Ajahn Sucitto offers this advice: “Our embodied energy connects the material to the mental realm. Embodied energy runs through the stirring, stress, calm and gladdening of our entire nervous system: if it’s distorted, it inflames and corrupts the mind; if it’s healthy, it clears it. Accordingly, a trained focus on the energy associated with breathing offers a means to calm, brighten, understand and clear states of mind (and heart).” Therefore, we want to bring our mindfulness to bear on the effects of what we are allowing to touch our hearts. Particularly, feeling it in the body. We want to know what kind of baggage we are carrying around, see that much of it tends to be useless and simply serves to drag the heart down. Just rattling around in there, disrupting samadhi in formal practice and burdening the heart with irrelevant thoughts and concepts in daily life. In the teachings on the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha said, “Dukkha must be experienced” (sometimes translated as “understood”). Well, this is one of the areas of suffering that the Buddha is encouraging us to look at and see for ourselves. For, having seen for ourselves, there is the potential for release.