In the human digestive system, we need to ingest a certain variety of nutrients to stay alive. Generically speaking, we need to eat carbohydrates (sugars and starches), proteins, and fats, as well as fiber, vitamins and minerals, and of course water. Different foods will provide different proportions of these nutrients, and of course, regular, well-balanced meals are the foundation of a healthy digestion.

So that’s nourishment on the dense, material level. Here’s my thinking: On an energetic, psychic level, we have the same kind of needs. We need to absorb psychic energy that’s quick and easy to digest, like simple sugars. We need to absorb energy that’s more difficult to digest but more nourishing in various ways, like complex carbohydrates, or proteins, or fats. We need trace amounts of specific types of energy, like vitamins and minerals.

The psychic analogue to simple sugars is the type of resonance that’s mentally and emotionally easy to digest. That’s interaction with that aspect of the world that’s most like ourselves — other human beings and their products: light conversation, easy company, entertainment like television shows and movies or reading. Just as everyone has different dietary needs and preferences based on their constitution, chemistry, and dietary upbringing, everyone has different psychic needs. Some people will be easier to “take” than others. Some social activities will be nice for some people, too “sweet” or not “sweet” enough for others.

The psychic analogues to, well, everything other than sugar are the many interactions we have with the world: Deeper human relationships, as well as relationships with nonhuman entities such as animals, plants, insects, and then relationships with the supposedly nonliving materia of the world, such as soil, mineral, weather, elements.

But just as many people in our society get addicted to sugars, to the exclusion of other types of food, so do people get addicted to light, fast-moving, stimulating entertainments that provide easy but limited psychic energy, and begin to dissociate from and ignore those energies that are slower-moving, more difficult to digest, and ultimately more nourishing. People who eat sugar for a long time get so depleted that they’re not even able to process more nourishing food, which creates a self-perpetuating cycle. Likewise, people addicted to light, ready-made consumer entertainments lose the ability to process the value in relationships with the aspects of the world that are more subtle, quiet, nonverbal, and move to a different rhythm.

So in many ways the energetic activity of living in the modern human civilized world, surrounded by walls and artificial lights and cars and television and Internet, with flashy lights and loud music and horrifying news and showy advertisements and the latest celebrity fashions, is very much analogous to the biochemical activity associated with a diet high in sugars and low in everything else nutritious — a chemistry that is, among other things, an addiction.

And like any sort of healing from addiction, the adjustment of the rhythm of one’s consciousness to a less powerfully stimulating psychic diet will cause withdrawal symptoms and digestive upsets — because it really feels like it’s the wrong way to go, based on years of going the opposite direction. But it’s necessary to do that healing.

How, I’m not really sure yet. It’s hard to quit an addiction when everyone around you not only is likewise addicted, but doesn’t recognize it as addiction. When people just don’t shut up about insignificant things, or care about what the trees or birds are like outside, or what the energy of the season is like. It makes healing a lonely path to walk. This is compounded by the fact that this particular type of addiction is not only broad and complex but in some ways very new, so there aren’t any good roadmaps through it. The old methods of mystical and meditative traditions and psychological resolution have to be adapted to the global and environmental crisis of peak civilization.

Still a work in progress, I’m just thinking out loud here …