A great deal of public attention in developed countries goes to considering how to cope with elimination of wastes from our wasteful habits and materialistic way of life. It is inorganic toxic waste that threatens our health and causes most concern in the physical environment.
However, we have yet to admit the dangers and destructive effects of mental pollutants that continue to degrade the quality of our mental fitness and undermine the progress of our modern culture towards the ideal of total human health and well being.
In our society, individual choice is highly respected as a freedom that each of us enjoys and wishes to retain. The principle relates readily to our personal selection of physical health choices that most immediately affect us, but also to our right to read, listen to, absorb or to eliminate unwanted mental thought and ideas. But because our mental choices are transmitted directly into our social life and environment to affect others, it is more complex.
Our mental environment, the world in which we live with our minds, just as surely as our physical environment needs to be free of damaging thoughts and destructive or toxic ideas. The mental environment has no boundaries and consists of complex mix of influences that affect us all in a measure often according our choices or reaction as individuals. Our sense of awareness helps to regulate our mental health, by affording us opportunity to avoid negative thought atmospheres and make clear, conscious choices regarding our mental health.
However, unwanted or unselected material easily enters our minds uncensored by our conscious choice as a by-product of what we watch in public entertainment, public press items, and as a result of absorption of energy in group situations where we share the same mental atmosphere.
We are willing to raise our voices individually and as a group to make complaint about physical environmental issues and do so very vocally. But we are either unaware, or not interested in applying the same criteria to mental health and mental pollution. It is time to recognize the damage caused by the toxic mental material found in both group venues and fostered in private mental space.
Once toxic material is identified, it is logical that it will be restricted or prohibited from use. But this is not always the case, either with physical toxic substances or with the subtler poisonous thoughts and ideas that spread mental disease.
But the public remains tolerant, and even encourages continuance of recognized pollutants in our society that are responsible for much psychological chaos, mental breakdowns, drug overdosing and suicides as individuals attempt to escape from the negative influences in which they feel enmeshed.
Science identifies many of these influences such as the damage done to our brains and bodies by toxic fumes, chemicals, drugs and noise. We need to listen and to act upon our scientific knowledge but also to what our scientists of the mind guide us towards in freeing our minds from toxic thoughts and negative influences if we are seriously aspiring to total health of mind and body and avoidance of disease.
