Junk Food & Other Pollutants

This morning whilst engaging in the visualisation that I wrote about in my last entry something utterly wonderful occured to me: We eat almost no junk food. Even our consumption of the one marginal junk food that we do eat...fish & chips has been in steady decline.

Junk food is a pollutant, it is just that simple. Every study that has been done into obesity has shown that there is a clear causal link between the consumption of this pollutant and obesity. There are absolutely no positive outcomes from polluting ourselves with refined carbohydrates, fats and sugars. It  tastes bad, it's toxic for you and it's expensive.

As Tantrics...or just simple adults...we are engaged in a healthy lifestyle. We are making conscious decisions to do the hard thing. Thus the consumption of a known pollutant makes no sense. Junk food undermines every decision we make. You can't be beautiful and eat this shit on a regular basis.

Realising this and the fact that I don't consume this pollutant...and I walk past a McDonalds ten times a week...it's sited directly across the Princess Hwy from Monash Uni...led to a very big smile on my face. Take joy in your ability to say no to pollutants. Take joy in your increasing health.

The other pollutant can be media. The Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh has an interesting take on the Five Trainings. In the Fifth Training he goes beyond the usual and quite limited interpretation and adds media to the list of intoxicants. For the Venerable Nhat Hanh consumption of things such as horror and splatter movies, extremely and explicitly violent actions movies is as toxic as the consumption of hydroponically grown cannabis, ecstacy and other narcotics.
 So is over consumption of "news". Think about it. So very little "news" actually makes us feel good. How many horror stories in the form of massacres, transport accidents and drug mules do you consume every day? Something interesting happened yesterday...the first sky dive from 21 km. It never made the mainstream news. I found it on space.com http://www.space.com/14931-man-skydives-capsule-71-581-feet-video.html  As people wishing to cultivate the beautiful, it is patently obvious that if we fill our minds with the horrible, then that is what we will give out. Read instead. Read the beautiful. Take the time to read poetry, the great works of literature and indulge your intellect. The more you fill your heart and mind with the timeless, the beautiful, the more you will become timeless and beautiful.