Eknath Easwaran's Commentary
Today, many people are very well informed about nutrition. We worry about “junk food,” which is a legitimate concern, but shouldn’t we be just as worried about the food we feed our minds? There is junk food, yes. But there are also “junk thoughts.”
Take a close look at the entertainment pages of your newspaper, for example. We have become so used to this kind of fare that we seldom even question it. I can imagine what people who lived in the Dark Ages would say if they saw today’s paper: “They think we lived in the Dark Ages! What about them?”
It is not just a few nude scenes or explicit language, which are often more juvenile than alarming, but the terribly unkind attitudes people display toward each other on the screen, on stage, and on the printed page, which they vent in harsh words and harmful acts. All this goes into our minds and gets absorbed; it cannot help but resurface in our behavior. It is not that we want to live in a germ-free world, which is impossible, but we need to remember that mental states are affected by what we see, hear, and read every day.