The Four Nutrients

A nutrient is something that supports and facilitates the ongoing nature of the thing it sustains. There are four types of nutrient depending on the thing it supports:

1. Physical nutrient: food, water, trace minerals, oxygen and other physical elements necessary to sustain the body.
2. Mental contact: the nutrient for feeling.
3. Mental constructs (sankhāras): concepts that, when grasped and clung to, sustain saṃsāra — the cycle of dependent conditioning.
4. Consciousness: the sustaining condition for Body-Mind.

Other than being fascinating in their own right, understanding what supports a condition allows one to develop deep personal insights and progress along the path.

The first nutrient is obvious — we need fuel to sustain life, whether we are growing or ageing. The need for nutrient becomes complicated when a normal desire for nutritional satiety becomes entangled with craving and clinging towards particular sensual experiences, resulting in disordered eating, illness, and suffering.

Mental contact is the process by which the mind ‘touches’ the object to determine whether it is desirable, undesirable, or neutral. The mind knows whether an object is desirable based on the feeling that arises: a pleasant feeling equates to a desirable object, and vice versa. Contact is a necessary precondition for feeling to arise. It occurs when sensitive matter in the sense organs detects a sense object, and with this, sense consciousness arises.

Contact is one of the twelve links in dependent origination — the mechanism by which conditioned reality arises: “Through mind and matter, contact arises.” It can be understood as a mental phenomenon akin to touching, but involving the interaction of sense organs and their objects. Often additional factors are required for consciousness to arise through this contact: healthy sense organs, sense object, illumination, and attention. When these conditions converge, contact occurs, feeling arises, and the object is processed.

Mental constructs, or sankhāras, are ‘knots’ of perception — themselves a kind of consciousness fixed into recognising patterns — that pull awareness into internal avenues of analysis. They represent our beliefs and ideas about reality. They become especially tangled when we face trauma that we cannot reconcile, often evolving into sub-personalities (larvae) that distort experience and cause mental suffering.

We cling to sankhāras, mental constructs of our reality, and through skilful or unskilful clinging, at death they propel consciousness into rebirth as the rebirth-linking consciousness arises when conditions permit.

At the centre of all sankhāras is a seven-headed knot — a dragon is not a bad analogy, with a respectful nod to John of Samos. This knot is formed of seven types of consciousness — all essentially the same, but tearing after different objects, keeping the dynamic in motion.

The conditioned sense of self arises from dividing universal awareness into seven main consciousnesses. An eighth — the ālaya, or store consciousness — underlies them, much like the quantum substratum beneath classical physics. When we perceive something, our minds immediately reference self: “What does this mean for me?” Even concepts we analyse inevitably revolve around self-referencing. This happens habitually, almost automatically.

Every new perception forms a fresh object. Each recognition creates its own consciousness, as awareness of that pattern. Multiply this process across five senses, discursive thought, and an entrenched sense of self, and you arrive at papañca — mental proliferation — a tangled, multi-headed dragon of the mind.

It is strong clinging to either sense desire or the desire for being that sustains this chain. Without eliminating this clinging, the mind will continue its moment-to-moment projections and, ultimately, propel rebirth in accordance with karma. Even annihilationist tendencies (the desire for non-existence) can result in long dormant states until the emergence of a future universe.

Consciousness itself is the final nutrient. It too arises within dependent origination. Consciousness emerges through volitional formations — the decisions made from sankhāras. With every volition, consciousness arises both immediately and subsequently, as recognition reactivates prior patterns. Through this, the duality of mind and matter unfolds.

Understanding this mechanism — how “This happens, so that occurs” — grants deep insight into where one may break the chain of becoming. And through faith and right understanding, one can finally escape what is otherwise inevitable.

“From feeling as a condition comes craving; from craving, clinging; from clinging, becoming.”
— Samyutta Nikāya 12.2