Idle Mind Vs Empty Mind! Know what will work for you.
An idle mind is a devil’s workshop! This is a very well-known saying which we heard since our childhood. Our teacher would have said it and maybe our parents, too.
“Never sit idle, stay occupied!” “Why are you wasting your time? Do something productive?” We have heard this many times and if you are adults, you would have said the same sentence to your children, too. But if you are always busy, you don’t have any buffer time, then you are not sitting idle. You are occupied, you are active. How dare somebody say this to you.
But the important thing here is, you are surely busy but are you busy with something which is meaningful or important? You can also be busy by surfing meaningless stuff on the internet. You might be forwarding some funny stuff to different WhatsApp or Facebook groups which do not make any sense. If that is the case, then it may be said that you have kept your mind occupied but it is purely a waste of your precious time. And to make matters worse, you are getting used to doing things which are not required and they are becoming habits for you.
Now there is something which we can give a thought to and it is EMPTY MIND. It is quite different from an IDLE MIND. This process or state is that of an EMPTY MIND. It is generally applicable for people who do meditation and have the ability to rid themselves of thoughts for a certain period of time. But it can be quite useful for us, too, if we want to regain our composure of thoughts and bring stability to our mind. So let us understand what EMPTY MIND is.
EMPTY MIND is a situation when you have reached a stage where there are no thoughts in your mind. The mind is not idle, because it is something which you are doing by choice. It is in fact quite active because you have got control over it. It is alert. It is near to impossible for most of us to reach that stage for it requires years of meditation to reach that stage. But I will provide you some hacks, which will help you a lot.
Focus on some object, maybe a wall, or a chair. Look closely at it and try to observe every little pattern which strikes your eyes. The color of the wall, a tiny little scratch on the wall, some shadow on it, maybe a switch on it. A mark would be great for focus. The more you look at it, you might get absorbed in it. It will lead you to a situation, where your mind will be nearly EMPTY of everything else. In fact, we do arrive at this situation many times in our life. If we get absorbed in a movie of our choice, or if we look at the photos of somebody whom we like(or hate) most, we definitely arrive at that point. But we reach that state, without awareness. We have no control over it. But if we do it with choice, with an active mind, then it is highly beneficial. If you get absorbed in things that do not make sense, you will unnecessarily become addicted to them. But by developing a method of EMPTYING OUR MIND with choice, we will only become more peaceful.
This is just the starting point. You can get absorbed in the train which is there at the railway station and not yet ready to go. There are numerous things where you can try this method. But once you develop a level of expertise with this method, then you might try to EMPTY your mind without any object in your mind. This is infact the very highest state which Yogis try to reach to and is not something which we should aspire for. Our target should only be to DECLUTTER our mind, feel easy and relaxed, lower the levels of our blood pressure.
