Nicholas Barnard PHL399: An Attempt at a Blank Mind 1/9/03
I attempted to blank my mind while lying on the floor in my room. I set a timer just to make sure that I didn't spend too much time blanking my mind. All in all, I was pretty much unsuccessful in blanking my mind of thoughts.
I had two major threads of thoughts. One of them revolved around Shawn, the guy who I am dating, this was obvious, as I had just gotten off the phone talking with him. The other, ironically enough was what to write for this paper. My brain generated more than enough starting sentences and phrases to fill the required length of this paper.
I achieved the most blank times of this exercise during two specific instances, one was a laughing fit, caused by the irony of that because I needed to write this paper, the activity for which the paper describes was marred by the need to write this paper. A hopelessly revolving loop, that just caused me to break out in hysterical laughter in the irony of the situation. During this time, I was just focused on my laugh, and nothing else.
The second most-blank time was when I was making a point just to stare blankly into space without any other purpose. I found this blank mind state harder to keep thoughts out than during the laughter portion. Albeit, I guess at this point, I was thinking about staring blankly into space.
I also had the strange thought of not wanting to think of anything and not wanting to think of specific things, which of course in and of themselves are thoughts. A recurring one was trying to squash thoughts of writing the paper, and push aside thoughts related to Shawn.
All in all, I would tend to say I failed at this exercise, I would say though that at previous times, I've been able to clear my mind better on previous attempts, I don't do it frequently, and cannot do it on demand. Like my mother always said, “Nick your always thinking.”