The Food for Life

Happiness is not tangible. It’s not something you can just by at a store. Happiness is not made but comes from your own actions. Suffering, like happiness, is also not made.  Looking deeper in yourself, you find that there are different kinds of nutriments that have helped continue to feed either your suffering or your happiness. Hanh then elaborated four kinds of nutriments that can lead to our happiness or our suffering — edible food, sense impressions, intention, and consciousness.

The first of the four kinds of nutriments is edible food or the food or drink that we can actually ingest. This edible food can either bring mental of physical suffering (Hanh).  The ability to identify what is healthful and what is harmful in order to create more happiness in one’s and decrease the about of suffering. Without eating mindfully, the only thing that is prevalent is suffering. Eating and drinking things that are harmful will only increase this suffering. The opposite is the same, if we consume things that are healthful to our body, we will be healthy, and in return we will be happy. As far back as I can remember, I have the same memory of my father’s talks about alcohol. He would always tell me that alcohol is poison going into your body and killing you from the inside out.  I never really thought much of it until my freshman year in college. The first weekend, three people I knew got taken away in ambulances in order to get their stomach pumped to remove alcohol. It dawned on me; if alcohol wasn’t bad for your body, then why when you have too much you body removes it by either throwing it up or having it physically removed at the hospital. This toxin alcohol causes so much suffering from bad decisions, to hangovers, getting ill, fights, and much, much more. I know that my happiness is much greater than most due to my decision not to drink. My healthful body keeps me healthy and happy.

The second of the four kinds of nutriments is the sense of impressions. The sense of impressions is food for our conscious. This food comes from the 6 sense organs; ears, eyes, nose, tongue, body, and mind which are always coming in contact with sensory objects (Hanh). This makes sense because the ears, eyes, nose, and tongue all go straight to the brain allowing for direct contact. The things we hear, see, taste, smell can affect our emotions causing us to be happy or cause suffering. Suffering is caused by toxins. These toxins give us desires in which infect people with anger and sadness. The ability to be happy and avoid suffering is to remove the toxins from our world. Hanh said “If we are mindful, we will know whether we are ‘ingesting’ the toxins of fear, hatred, and violence, or eating foods that encourage understanding compassion, and the determination to help others.” Video games are a great example of the second of the four kinds of nutriments, sense of impressions. Video games involve five out of the six sense organs including the ears, eyes, nose, body, and mind. When I was younger I use to play these games regularly feeding my senses with food of the game. However, most of the games I would play involved killing, hate, and fear. These toxins did not affect me as much as they affect other people, but they do play a toll on some individuals. You are able to go on youtube and watch people getting angry over just a video game. These types of people are suffering and stressing over nothing. This is not the type of person I want to be. I stopped playing those types of games so that I can stop feeding my body toxins so that I can remain happy and remove the suffering from my life. However there are other games like those found on luminosity.com that fuel the brain and encourage it to learn. These types of games are good for you and help understand determination.

The third nutriment is volition, intention, or will. It is the desire in all of us to obtain whatever it is that we want. If we want to succeed in life than we will put everything that we have to achieve what we want most. Sometimes working your hardest to get what you want might not always give you happiness. For example, if you spend your whole life working to become president of the United States and come to find out that you were born in a different country. In that case you spent your whole life working for something that you could never achieve. In this case your whole life was driven towards suffering. We need the insight that position, revenge, wealth, fame, or possessions are, more often than not, obstacles to our happiness (Hanh). Life needs to be enjoyed rather than spent in order to live in happiness. I’ve spent too much time trying to be the best soccer playing on my team. I use to train hard every day rather than spend time studying for school and doing the things that I enjoy, like fishing. Come to find out I was not the best player on the time. When I was a junior, there was an incoming freshman that was better than the whole team. This just made me try harder and harder to become the best. By the time senior year came around, I was burnt out from working so hard that I stopped putting my all just in one thing. Slowly I saw my grades rise and I was able to fish more. I started to feel myself enjoy the game of soccer more and even more so enjoy my time in solitude fishing the river next to my house. Trying to be the best just cause not only myself as a being to suffer but also caused my grades to suffer as well. I know now that you must enjoy the little things in life that makes you happy in order to avoid suffering from over working yourself.

The last and final nutriment is consciousness. Consciousness is composed of all the seeds sown by our past actions and the past actions of our family and society (Hanh). This means that anything that my mother, father, grandfather, great uncle, or whoever’s actions will affect my conscious. Even the man down the street that I don’t know will affect my conscious. The best way to keep a healthy conscious is to practice the four immeasurable minds of love, joy, compassion and equanimity (Hanh). Our conscious is always working 24/7 so we must be able to feed it the health four immeasurable minds and keep out greed, hatred, ignorance, suspicion, and pride. In high school all you ever hear is drama. This girl did this and that guy said that, it’s all a bunch of bull$h!t. Those four years of mine and your life is mostly surrounded by hated, ignorance, suspicion, and greed. Now since I reached college I can physically feel how much happier I am to remove myself from such a negative and hateful environment. The people who say that high school is the best four years of their lives are filled with the most ignorance. I hated high school, but now since I am in college I can work towards keeping a healthy conscious. I can see myself practicing the four immeasurable minds. I feel myself loving what I am doing and who I am becoming. I am joyous spending almost every day with my friends enjoying the little things in life. I know I have the compassion of pressing forward so achieve my goals, but not working too hard to restrain myself from happiness and finally I have equanimity to stop and take a breath and keep calm even when life throws me every curve ball it has at the same. I know that even after this semester and this class is over and done with I most certainly continue to feed my conscious with the four immeasurable minds in order to keep myself happy and make me a better person.

To reach a state of happiness, you must base it upon your own actions. For some, happiness may be unachievable, but for most if you practice the four kinds of nutriments with the right mind set, you will be able to see and feel your happiness grow ten-fold and you will be able to live life to its fullest.

Works Cited

Nhá̂t, Hạnh. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy & Liberation : The Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and Other Basic Buddhist Teachings. New York: Broadway, 1999. Print.