The mind cannot naturally stay empty because aboutness is its default state

Evidence

Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 153

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• CANDY: The two-minutes-of-empty-thought challenge is a light, shareable experiment anyone can try tonight.
• SEED: Angle: the mental squirrel metaphor as a layperson’s bridge into phenomenology and mindfulness practice.

Related

• The mind is constitutively active and reaches outward even while dreaming (similarity 0.85)
• A mind that is about nothing is not really a mind (similarity 0.80)
• The mind is defined by its aboutness rather than by any fixed substance (similarity 0.78)