What Does “Clear Your Mind” Mean?

Most of us have heard the phrase “clear your mind” many times, usually as an instruction when being guided toward a meditative or introspective space.

We often hear it thrown around casually, as if “clearing your mind” were easy, obvious, and something everyone just knows how to do.

It doesn’t seem like it should be a difficult thing to do. So, why is it that most of our initial, internal responses are confusion, frustration, hopelessness, or self-deprecation?

Maybe it’s because we misunderstand what it really means.

It’s Not What You Think

“The teacher and the student together create the teaching.” — Taoist teaching

Have you ever heard of the “curse of knowledge”? It’s an idea, popularized by the book Made to Stick in 2007, that refers to when someone explains something in a way that assumes background knowledge or mental models that the listener hasn’t developed yet. Too many of those that have worked out what it means to “clear your mind” continue to use that phrase as though any of us can instinctively transcend the phrase being a misnomer. Yes, your instincts are correct. “Clearing a space” means taking everything out of it so that it is empty. Our minds cannot be empty while they are active, and they cannot stop being active while we are awake. 

It is in considering that we are constantly, actively awake that we find the truth of what “clearing your mind” is intended to mean. 

Awake and Aware

“You are an awareness, driving a vehicle of perception.” — Tyler Benari (me)

In our waking state, we recognize the presence, or perceived existence, of the world around us. This recognition is our awareness. We are biologically designed to actively focus our awareness as giving attention to things. 

However, “awareness” is an example of conceptual blending, where it holds both the act of noticing and the act of thinking about what we notice. Here we find the crux of the problem. 

It is in separating these two very different concepts that we can find, with clarity, what it means to “clear your mind.” 

Use Your Eyes

Because perception shapes experience, we can use our senses to change our state of mind. Let’s try using our eyes for this. Take a moment to notice your surroundings without focusing on anything in particular. Some people liken the experience to “unfocusing” your site, or giving attention to the entirety of your peripheral vision altogether.  

This sensation of unfocusing is called “hakalau”, a traditional Hawaiian concept and practice that refers to a state of expanded awareness – often described as a relaxed, open-focus attention that allows you to take in your entire environment without fixating on any one thing. 

Use Your Ears

Panoramic listening (or global listening) is the act of opening your awareness to all sounds at once without trying to identify or analyze any of them. Here, you’re not listening for anything. You’re listening to everything.

Alan Watts beautifully guides us into a state of panoramic listening in his lecture on listening. You can listen to it as an intro to finding a meditative state. He mentions two powerful angles of discovery: listening to all the sounds around you as if they are coming from a single speaker, and focusing on recognizing how sound is playing with your eardrums.  

Your Thoughts

We can focus our site and unfocus our site. We can focus our hearing and unfocus our hearing. When we stop focusing on specifics, the mind stops trying to define or make meaning. The overwhelming distinction of the unfocused experience is this detachment from meaning.

But in truth, what we are calling “unfocusing” actually is focusing. It can be said that we are just focusing on the whole instead of any specific part. Or, rather, we are focusing on nothing instead of something. 

Your thoughts, as Alan Watts tells us, is a form of listening. When we think, we’re actually listening to the voice in our heads. This is a subtle but powerful shift from identifying with our thoughts to observing them as just another sound in the world.

Consider that you can unfocus your listening to your thoughts just as you would your hearing or your site. To be clearer, you can unfocus so that you are focusing on the wholeness of thought, the entirety of the space where your mind creates thoughts. And then something strange happens. For a moment, you are focusing on nothing and all thoughts fall away. 

A Singular Focus of No Meaning

The most powerful part of this exercise of finding mental clarity is deciding what to focus on. When we “unfocus”, we are focusing on the whole, or on nothing depending on whichever label works for you. 

What is most important is that we are actually focusing, but our focus needs to be on something that detaches us from meaning. 

This, finally, is what “clearing your mind” means. 

Not to empty it, but to shift your focus away from meaning, and toward pure awareness.