nutriments

What have you been eating recently?

I sit here with my decaf coffee, wondering what I fed myself in my past life to wind up in such a mess.

I had, and retain, a very strong moral compass, both with regards to myself and with regards to others. This is on such a deep level I feel like I was born with it, but I know that I also have the seeds to do evil in there, and the world I was exposed to was encouraging their growth, meaning that the vines of greed were strangling the trees of good.

Making up your self there are four nutriments in buddhism: the physical food you consume, sense-contact (remember the mind is a sense organ), your volition / karma (mods), and your consciousness (where you focus).

Thinking about it we can control all of these. They all go into making up who we are, but there is a delay between ingestion and installation. You can install something deeper through repeating it, and uninstall it through observation, understanding, and release. Easier said than done though; better not to install in the first place.

So physical food is one. Eat shit, feel shit. Eat good, feel good. Live longer. Have more energy and focus. Drugs fall into this category. A brief boost with a commensurate crash. I was miserable and relying on cannabis, but that makes you dependent; it traps you and makes you more miserable over time. Aripiprazole was the ultimate version of addiction; the oneness with fate and the sheer wellbeing; but as usual the wellbeing did not last and the oneness… well maybe that is still there somewhere. Maybe that was real.

Sense-contact is a big one. It’s how we make our mods; our karma. There’s some obvious things which I’ve stopped doing like associating with angry people who say I’m killing their dog (ha) and replacing miserable computer games and books with RPGs and sci-fi. I always loved saving the world in the future. It’s a good seed to water.

The less obvious and easy to control are mental objects. The buddha actually says a lot about the joys a layman can achieve in his sermons: the joy of possession, enjoyment, lack of debt and right livelihood. Money earned well is to be enjoyed without remorse. And I earned my money well, even if it nearly killed me.

The mental objects I struggle with are memories and looped thoughts. I tend to hold onto a perceived slight and just ruminate and chew until it’s boring a hole in my person. This needs to stop. This just hurts me and nobody else.

Volition is the third; our mods and our karma. What we do one day makes the person we are the next. What is done to us, too. I had the karma of suicide planted in me by that corpse I found; the cage was expanded and the tiger was curious. That arm still exists but is emotionally discharged for the most part.

Karma is - to a small degree - under our control. The more you loop on a negative thought, the more ingrained it becomes. The more you deny a negative thought the more ingrained it becomes. Looking and understanding and accepting and maybe exporting with words or art; that’s how you get rid of it.

These are just objects the mind interacts with, like the eye looking at a flower, and you can train yourself to turn you mind away. Chronic use of psychotropic substances change your entire karmic environment.

And then it comes round to consciousness. As with everything in buddhism, it’s four concepts to explain one. It’s a wheel, and it is turning, but there is no axle. 

Consciousness is how we control what gets installed. Instead of focusing on the perceived slight, or the lost money, or how your fucking investments are doing, try going for a walk and looking at the flowers. Try sitting in the garden and making a knife while listening to the birds. Try walking away from those angry people you no longer need in your life. Try consciously selecting the five people around you to be nicer, happier people. Because you will become their average over time.

So yeah.

These 60-odd days being completely ruined by this drug have acted like a mental fasting period. I don’t remember much of anything when I was in an altered state and writing; just the dancing and the movement but the writing was coming from somewhere else.

At the time I refused any input, and I am still wary of it, because my priority was exporting a lifetime of bad karma. A lifetime in the capitalist machine, operating very effectively and somehow holding onto my moral compass, but being filled with cognitive dissonance and a sense of eternal dissatisfaction.

So the way to avoid that happening again is to avoid consuming the same shit.

Eat mindfully.

/jb202508020722