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05 When I tried to Do 'Nothing'



     A few days ago, I traveled to Durgapur with my parents. I had come back home for my vacations. As they dozed off to sleep after the long road journey, I made myself comfortable on the sofa and plugged in my earphones. Looking at them brought in memories, old. Out of nowhere, I remembered how my mother used to say that ‘We brothers do nothing and that I particularly was quite lazy’. Although I do not deny these old facts, times have changed since.
     This brought me to the origin of this post, which I actually tried to record while I was performing my experiment. Although thinking about 'not thinking' was a tough task, it was equally fun and intriguing.

So, how can one NOT DO ANYTHING? Can one direct one's own mind to think of nothing? I decided to sit down and try it out..
(Here, I suggest the reader to actually try it out by him/herself)

     As a first step, I got rid of my music player, reluctantly though. Progress, I thought. It wasn’t to be. The tune I was listening to, continued in my mind. I will have to say it was a good tune, but just then I was eagerly trying to get rid of it. But to no avail. While I was fighting myself over the tune, I realized that the best way to 'not think' about something is to give the mind something else to feed upon. So I started looking for a topic which could lead me to think less.

     While I tried to figure out the best way to do this, I noticed how much data my brain was processing at every second and every moment. One tends to overlook things that one’s mind classifies as trivial. For e.g., the room I was sitting in had concentric circular shades over the lights, the plant near me had red-green leaves, the A/C was set to 27 degrees, and many such intricacies. We tend to overlook them and the mind doesn’t register in the memory. It treats them like trash. None the less, it processes everything.
     All this was going nowhere.

"What next?" I thought.

     Our mind needs fodder. It has to have something to feed upon every moment.  You cannot simply shut it down. Thus, the concept of ‘Om’ in dhyaan. As the mind won’t stop, you fool it. You make it do things with minimal engagement. ‘Om’ provides that.

     And, that is also why we dream when we are asleep. The mind needs to have something to react and respond to. This not being possible, it forms virtual-world scenarios using the available database (memory).

     I hope you try this little exercise sometime, on your own. I would sincerely like to hear about your experience. But one thing is sure, that:

The mind always needs something to feed upon
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