Empty of Mind

This exercise is an improvement on the more well-known Empty Your Mind Exercise: WARNING: The empty your mind exercise is often used in various New Age groups but I don't recommend it. Any exercise where we are told to empty our minds is not good because the point of these kinds of exercises is to get us to see we are not our mind by observing our mind long enough so that we can begin to identify with the observer of the mind rather than mind itself. The Empty Your Mind exercise, instead of getting us to identify with the observer of the mind, mistakenly gets us to identify with emptiness. Now if we are suffering from a lot of garbage in our mind which is torturing us, maybe emptiness provides temporary release, but it does not lead to any kind of transcendental understanding. Release from suffering is not the same thing as release of suffering. If we must do this exercise, let's do it this way. When told to empty our mind, we should empty ourselves of our mind. That works!

Sit quietly and imagine your mind as a huge garbage can full of debris-thoughts, images, sounds, colors. Have a garbage truck come by to pick up the can. Throw out the thoughts and images into the truck one by one and when it is almost empty, toss in the can. Now where can your thoughts reside with no mind? When one comes along, just hang it over the clothesline far away, and then let the wind come and blow it farther over the hill.

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