Here I was in Delhi, thinking I had conquered the world; having gotten accepted by my dream college and exceeding my own expectations on my final results. Every night out with friends was a night to be remembered. There was this sort of an eerie feeling I had whenever I went out and had too much to drink -- but i just reminded myself of the unimaginable feat of making it into Columbia and that the partying was just a reward for all my hard work during high school.
I soon got sick with all the partying and socializing and was having trouble sleeping most nights of the week. Don’t get me wrong -- I was emotionally in tact and not in any dangerous psychological state of mind. I just couldn’t get any sleep. I took advice from many people on as to how I could minimize my sleeplessness.
The counseling that I got almost exclusively pointed to me clearing my mind out while in bed and to think about nothing. There is no such thing as thinking about nothing -- believe me, I have tried. Trying to clear your mind and sending it to a state of bareness is nothing to be scoffed at. Whenever I got to thinking about nothing, I began thinking whether I was thinking about nothing which led my brain to think about how I got to that particular state of mind which was like a nuclear chain reaction, except it slowly destroyed my concentration.
Determined to dethrone the myth of clearing one’s mind, I started reading up about yoga, martial arts and other calming techniques that people may use to clean up their system. No luck… while I was able to find a connection between these calming techniques and improving one’s concentration, I was unable to find a link between them entering one’s mind into a state of oblivion. I concluded that it is impossible to think about nothing.
Well, I did the next best thing -- I tried to think about just one particular thing. Something that I could completely immerse myself into. For me the most common line of thought was imagining myself to be in the same recording room as The Beatles. Having seen the "Let it Be" documentary, I was able to picture myself in the scene -- I could picture Paul on the piano as he composed the legendary song "Let it Be." This did not take too much of an effort, and I was soon able to completely immerse myself in any setting that I wanted to.
To this day, I still don’t know why this works. It makes sleeping a very enjoyable process for me. I immerse myself in any setting that I like, enjoy the setting and go to sleep almost effortlessly. I am still very interested in training my mind to enter a state of trance as and when I want it to. For me, the straightforwardness of thinking about nothing has a very alluring magnetism to it. Maybe someday in the future, I will be able to extend my mind into this higher state of intellect that I seek, but till then I will have to make do with "thinking about just one thing!"
