My Trouble With White Paper

Meditation is a mental exercise that I've been grappling with since I was but a wee lad frolicking in the world of hippy parents and the Age of Aquarius. My mom was the first to attempt the arduous task of teaching an eight-year-old what meditation was and how to accomplish it.

I was swimming in the apartment's community pool with my friend John on one of the countless hundred-degree summer afternoons in Phoenix when I noticed my mom sitting on the submerged steps with her eyes closed. When we asked why she wasn't swimming, she said that she was meditating. This word garnered the globally recognized eight-year-old response: "Huh?" She told us that meditating was kind of like relaxing, and meant clearing your mind, taking slow breaths, being very still.

John and I wanted to learn how, though less for mental clarity and more because when Luke Skywalker closed his eyes and breathed deeply he could move rocks with his mind! Yes, The Empire Strikes Back had just come out.

So we sat on the steps next to Mom, closed our eyes, matched her breathing, and sat really still.

…For about thirty seconds. C'mon, we were eight. What did you expect?

Flash forward twenty-eight years (don't let the eighties smack you in the head on the way). Meditating is still one of the most difficult things for me to accomplish. Many have suggested the "trick" of envisioning a white sheet of paper. It is said that the point of meditation is to clear your mind, so to imagine a sheet of clean white paper should nudge your mind into not thinking of anything. Unfortunately, that's not how my mind works.

Sitting still and comfortable, I breathe rhythmically and try to clear my mind. Apparently my mind abhors vacuum, and so random thoughts flood even as I try to relinquish them. So I turn to the white paper technique. I imagine white paper, nothing on it, completely clean. I focus on it, and suddenly find myself turning the white paper over in my mind, wondering if anything is on the other side. Then my mind wonders why there's nothing on the white paper. Why is this paper here in front of me if nothing is on it? Oh yes, because I'm supposed to be looking at nothing. But even white paper is something. I begin to image all the tiny pulp blemishes in the paper and see that the paper is really not white at all; rather, it is many different shades of off-white. Maybe it's recycled paper. It can't be completely white if it's recycled paper. This leads me to my art lessons of yore and the concept that the color white is not even a real color, but the inclusion of all colors reflected back to the human eye.

Thus I find myself concentrating on an imaginary multi-hued sheet of recycled paper wondering what it was before becoming this sheet of paper and thinking it might make a good paper airplane were I to fold it properly.

So much for clearing my mind.

Several years ago, I happened upon a wonderful book that helped me get closer to mental clarity. I've read it twice and have put it again on my short list of books to read in the coming weeks. It is called Turning Your Mind into an Ally, written by the Sakyong, Mipham Jamgön Rinpoche. In his book, the incarnate lama speaks to the reader as a teacher, laying out his story while guiding you in ways to "cultivate the natural strength of the mind through meditation."

Regardless of faith or philosophies, I recommend this book as a step toward strengthening your focus. Sadly, however, this book does NOT teach you how to move rocks like Luke Skywalker.

Learn more about Sakyong Mipham Jamgön Rinpoche at http://www.mipham.com/.