Instead of filling your mind with the daily news, fill it with stuff that helps you become more conscious, that liberates you. As you become more aware of what gets you to God and what doesn’t, you will naturally let go of what doesn’t. That’s purification. You do it to get to God, not for the sake of being pure.

We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia — highlights, notes, questions, musings.

People tend to assess the relative importance of
issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently
mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from
awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their
view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that
authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.
Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by
celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common

"Feed your head" means read a book.

An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.

How come every day there's exactly the right amount of news to fill the paper?

Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four. I read the front-page headlines through

Merely having thoughts is one thing. Consciously feeding them is quite another. You are powerful all the time, by way of your attention and intention. The question is, Toward what are you pointing that power?

You become what you think about all day long.

You become what you think about all day long.

Anyway — because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next — and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis — at any time of night or day.

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action...You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into — what else? — another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

One of the most underrated and underappreciated proven patterns is the news feed. Facebook’s powerful network effects allow the site to attract its users, but its innovation of the news feed has made it a world-class business.