And we were never being boring. That’s why we were never being bored.

— Pet Shop Boys

There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.

— Susan Sontag

1.

As I’ve traveled to foreign countries, sat for weeks in silence, pored over ancient mystical texts, and dabbled in indigenous shamanic practices, I’ve sometimes had the mistaken impression that real spirituality — simply, being my real self, seeing clearly, and engaging directly with experience — is something far away. But given the definition I’ve proposed, this is impossible. How can being “real,” seeing “clearly,” and engaging with “experience” require anything other than what happens to be around at any moment? If it has to be in a special time and place, it’s not omnipresent, and if it’s not omnipresent, it’s a feature of experience, not experience itself. Great surfing waves are someplace; but the wetness of the water is everyplace.

And here’s something they don’t tell you in brochures: spiritual practice is often very boring. It’s not like, when you sit for six weeks, you’re asleep the whole time, or in an altered state, or visiting always with angels. Sometimes those things seem to happen, but a lot of times, you are just like you are now, only with absolutely… nothing… to do.

Fortunately, boredom is not a failure of character. It has many gifts. And it is a sign that you are very, very close to “getting it.” This is because “it” cannot be gotten at all, and in that mind-emptying, vacuous state of boredom, you’re really close to getting nothing. To pick up from last month’s column, whether it’s nothing or Nothing is really just a matter of perspective. There’s no difference, really.

The only trouble is, the closer one gets to nothing, the more one wants to fill it with something. Because nothing is really boring. Get it?

2.

First, at the very least, boredom is a useful alarm bell. It lets us know that we’ve had enough of whatever it was we used to desire. This may not have much to do with God, the universe, and everything, but it is a really helpful thing to notice, and is probably a necessary preliminary to even thinking about those things: simple to see that at a certain point, the fascination we had with an object, person, sensation… disappears.

Probably it goes without saying that most of our lives are spent either desiring certain things or really not desiring others. These things may be material objects, or mental states, status, or love — whatever. It’s heartening, maybe even enlightening, to see that we can get bored of just about anything. The mind’s had enough.

So, a little gratitude when you get bored. After all, boredom is a privilege, right? Your essential needs are taken care of, even your essential wants are taken care of. What percentage of people in the world even have the luxury of boredom? Aren’t most too busy working?

Even among the small percentage of the world’s population that reads online magazines, most of us make ourselves so busy, impelled by imperatives to achieve, outshine, succeed, enrich, that boredom itself becomes a luxury. That’s true for me, anyway. When I feel bored, I’m thrilled that I’ve had the space to feel it.

3.

The essential point, though, is this: Normally, when we are bored, we’ll do just about anything to make the boredom stop. Our minds and our bodies fight desperately to push the boredom away, sometimes restlessly, other times angrily, and sometimes with an apathy that makes life seem barely worth living. Then again, sometimes it’s just irritating. And this is exactly why we’re bored: because we’re trying so hard not to be.

In this way, and others, boredom is like enlightenment. What’s needed is not an additive, but a subtractive. Here’s the exercise: just surrender and let it happen. Drink in the boredom, taste it, come to know it, let it just wash over you in waves and waves of dullness. Let yourself get really, really bored. See what happens. Explore the sensation. Do not try not to be bored. Remember: boredom arises from the effort to stave off boredom.

Because boredom is really restlessness. What, after all, is the difference between “boredom” and “relaxation”? It’s not what’s going on outside; it’s what’s going on inside. Boredom is not about the lack of interesting things going on. With enough meditation, literally watching paint dry can be fascinating. Even if it’s already dry. Trust me, I’ve done it. Boredom is about too much energy, not too little. Take a look next time you’re bored. Is your mind too relaxed, or too tense? Maybe you can even check out your heart rate — when I’m bored, my heart is almost always beating faster than I expected.

In other words, we have boredom exactly backwards. Our minds are so conditioned to be always busy and interested, that when there’s nothing interesting (we think), we get really irritable. Sometimes maybe even nervous. Personally, my next step is try to find something interesting to do, or watch, because who wants to be worried, bored, or irritable? So I’ll put more information into my head “in order to relax.” Sometimes it’s not even pleasant information; I find there are times when I’d rather get stressed out about some future plan than just be bored with the present. In any case, the usual response to boredom is to put in something interesting, to get rid of it.

But this has it exactly backwards.

4.

Okay, so you’ve let yourself get really bored, and nothing has happened. What next?

Here is an intermediate step, if you can’t just be bored. Try insight meditation. Notice the sensations of the body; if you are tense, allow the tension, and then allow the tension to relax. If you’re like me, you’ll probably find all kinds of tension you didn’t even know was there. Maybe you’re unconsciously contorting your ankles; maybe your back is hunched. Whatever it is, gently let it go — hopefully without judging yourself — and the thoughts will slowly follow. Just breathe. Give your mind a bubble bath. Relax.

A lot of times, when people are bored, they’ll start to fidget, moving their bodies around to try to somehow stimulate something for the mind to be interested in. You know, you’ll crack your knuckles, or roll your tongue around your mouth — movements that are usually quite silly, really, but remember — you’re desperate. And yet, this just makes it worse.

Try this. Come to a still position, and really promise yourself that, whatever comes up, you’re not going to move for a few minutes. Maybe you want to set the time in advance, or maybe just a few minutes will do. The first couple of minutes may be nearly unendurable. But, you know you can endure them, right? It’s just your mind that doesn’t want to. You’re not going to die. Then, instead of moving your body to try to interest your mind, move your mind through your body. Check out your toes — don’t wiggle them, just see if you can feel each one. I bet you can’t, unless you get very quiet inside. Move up each leg, being as precise as you can — shins, calf muscles, front of knee, back of knee. Go through your whole body this way (you can start at the top and move down if you want). As a game, see how precise you can actually get. Can you feel individual muscles in your arm? How about your back?

Probably, as you do this “body scan,” a lot of thoughts will come up, including some which say things like “this is stupid.” Whatever. There are several replies.

One is that using boredom in this way is actually very helpful for the rest of life. What you’re doing, practicing vipassana with boredom, is relating to something unpleasant in a different way than usual. According to the neuroscientists, you’re actually forming new neural pathways, which in “mind” terms allows you to relate to unpleasant stimuli — like your boss, driving in city traffic, or coping with actual illness or pain — in new ways, like not being as reactive as you might usually be. Boredom is a pretty moderate form of unpleasantness, so it’s the perfect place to practice and build these new relationships. Use it as a training ground for later, when these skills will count a lot more.

This is part of the maturing of spiritual practice. Early on, it’s very important to have amazing things happen. I have experienced Divine love, mystical union, full-body energetic phenomena that resemble orgasms of light — and, believe me, these are all great. But at a certain point, getting spiritually high turns into a sort of dead-end. Unless you’re very fortunate, you can’t stay high all the time. “After the ecstasy, the laundry,” as Jack Kornfield says. So, spiritual practice starts to be about the rest of the time — the laundry time. The question shifts from “How can I get this over with, so that I can go back to the full-body orgasm part?” to “How can the laundry also be part of God?” So, allow the boredom. Learn to feel completely content, happy, and bored, all at the same time.

Second, while boredom itself is boring, the long-term effects of getting to know your body this closely are anything but boring. All of life gets better: moving, resting, eating, having sex. You spend your whole life in your body. So, the closer you know it, the closer you can know life itself. Try to feel boredom in the body, really. Just as anger, say, is usually associated with a clenched jaw, a faster heartbeat, tensed muscles throughout the body, or sadness carries a “lump in the throat,” boredom, too, is a subtle phenomenon of the body. Learn it. You can become a connoisseur of these sensations, riding along with just about any one of them. Like the flavors and notes of sadness, which I wrote about last month, the particular contours of boredom can become beautiful, as long as they’re not forced to be something else. Just try it: just get to know the sensations for what they are, instead of what your mind tells you they are.

Third, beside the practicing of non-reactivity, beside the connoisseurship, seeing things as they actually are has the benefit of relieving you of a kind of mental slavery, in which everything is evaluated according to how well they cater to your desires. Slavery, and myopia. It’s like we’re wandering in a phantasmagoria of the senses, and blocking out everything except the narrow band that pleases us. As R. Nachman of Bratzlav says in Likutei Moharan #133, “Woe is us! The world is full of light and mysteries both wonderful and awesome, but our tiny little hand shades our eyes and prevents them from seeing.” The tiny hand may be our perceptive faculties, or it may be our yetzer hara, the self-centered inclination that leads to separation, evil, and missing the point of it all.

Fourth is the point of it all, and it gets a new section.

5.

The point of it all is to use boredom as a gateway to pure awareness. This is it, the nondual be-all and end-all, the whole shebang, the end of suffering, the path into enlightened consciousness, what the dzogchen teachings call the “old man basking in the sun,” and the Jewish ones call “devekut,” that shift in consciousness after which everything is exactly the same, and yet it is also God, rigpa, Being, the whole thing — and it is delightfully boring.

Truthfully, I am not trying to talk in riddles. It’s just that when you learn to subtract something so familiar as wanting-not-to-be-bored, it looks like you’ve passed through the looking glass.

One way in is this: Zen teacher Genpo Roshi likes to ask his students to act from their “non-seeking, non-desiring minds.” Try it now — play-acting is fine. Stop seeking anything, stop desiring anything. Just pretend as if you couldn’t care less — but without the anger that expression sometimes hides. Just, really, you don’t care, you’re happy as is, you’re not looking for anything. Now, you can’t really fake it for long. You have to actually let go of any desire for this moment to be any different from what it is. The desire to be excited, happy, enlightened, more comfortable, whatever. Let it go. Just stop seeking.

Life suddenly gets very boring. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Stay with it; don’t get too excited. It’s nothing special. Just boredom… only, since you’ve let go (faking or not) of any desire for it to not be boredom, it is what it is, which is what God said back there at the burning bush, and the Buddha said under the bodhi tree, and wise people have said around foliage for thousands of years.

Again: Non-seeking, non-desiring mind. Ask that mind what’s wrong, what needs fixing, what it’s looking for, what problem it’s trying to solve. And give up. Just for a little bit.

The dzogchen texts speak of this as “old man, basking in the sun” because it’s just gaping, stupid awareness, with no agenda. It’s where you go when you stay bored, and get more bored, and then finally allow yourself to get so bored that you don’t want anything other than this lovely blissful boredom, peaceful, quiet, radiant awareness, mirror-like mind, gazing, gaping, just hanging there, doing nothing, non-seeking, non-desiring.

What’s most liberating about this kind of enlightenment is that it is available in the midst of social life, work, making the world a better place, and all of the other activities which comprise most of our daily lives. Awareness is always there, if you can just give yourself the gift of boredom, in small instants, whenever. It’s like taking a vacation to Aruba, lying on the beach just like the old man basking in the sun, zoning out, and not having to worry about the flight plans back, all in about three seconds. And, unlike the indulgence in Aruba, it can be done all the time, in the midst of important obligations, moral imperatives, and the rest of life. And at much lower cost than the a plane ticket.

One important difference between Awareness and Aruba is that miraculously, at least for me and everyone else I’ve ever heard talk about the subject, simply from naked awareness flows a natural lovingkindness, more genuine than anything cultivated by oughts and shoulds. Helping others, and other beings, becomes natural; this is not narcissism, after all, since self-centered desires are precisely those which are surrendered. Sounds resonate. Nature vibrates. Even the mechanical dystopias of modern society are somehow, mysteriously fascinating. Boredom liberates.

I wish someone would have told me this years ago: Stop trying to have special experiences, be more virtuous, speak in a spiritual tone of voice. Stop beating yourself up, stop achieving, stop working so hard, stop worrying. Kicking your own ass is not the way to liberation.

It’s simple: boredom plus surrender equals enlightenment. Did I just miss the memo?

This essay is part of a larger work, “The Gifts of Boredom,” which is searching for a publisher. Got any leads?

(Charles Eisenstein, your the best. He calls upon us to wake up, and react out of our hearts rather furthering a prison society based upon fear, hatred and violence. I love the following quote. This is what we should be aiming for… “Are we capable of envisioning a society where we feel at home among each other, a society of growing trust, and not a society resembling a prison more and more with each passing year?”

He posits that our societies regime of pursuing false security and control is actually integral to the conditions that breed “terrorism”, as whatever we suppress in our psyche eventually manifests in some extreme outward manner, and by living in fear as we do in our current security state, we’re inevitably bound to experience this fear through various external acts, such as terrorism.

So before we get our panties in a bunch and call for the heads of whoever may have committed these bombings, lets first each observe our own thoughts of fear, hatred, violence that occur within our own minds. Individually, we are not exempt. We all do this every day. It’s easy to respond to acts like this out of hatred and contempt, but in doing so, we’re only furthering a society based upon fear, which is really the only driving force behind acts of terrorism. They just want us to be afraid, whether it’s our own government or a lone psychopath, it’s all the same shit.

Eisenstein cites MLK on the roots of of hate and fear. “Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody.”

So what are you going to do? Sit there and hate in your head, or open up your heart and see the bigger picture. We all hate. We all are afraid. Let’s admit this first to ourselves, and extend compassion rather than declare vengeance on our attackers.

Eisenstein offers an amazing solution to this problem when he calls for compassion rather than punitive justice, “Let us proclaim that rather than punish him, he will have the opportunity to face the families of the people he killed and the people whose limbs he destroyed. He will hear their stories and share his own. Then together, the victims, perpetrators and communittee will agree on how best to heal the damage done and serve justice.”

The bombings saw many Bostonians opening their hearts and homes to complete strangers. Eisenstein feels that these very acts of selflessness and kindness are the true lessons to learn from the Boston bombing, and I couldn’t agree more.

He ends with the following thought, and I’ll end with it as well:

“If MLK was right, surely it is also true that peace begets peace, forgiveness begets forgiveness, and love begets love. No less a revolution will create a society where we feel safe and at home amongst each other”

Much love- Anthony)

In the wake of terror attacks, politicians are fond of proclaiming, “We will not be intimidated.” By this they seem to mean that we won’t cower in fear, but will boldly root out the terrorists, visit upon them the hand of justice, and hold them to account. “Make no mistake,” about that, they say. We will be tough, and by tough they mean heightening security at home, intensifying counter-terrorism measures abroad, and punishing the perpetrators and all who give them aid and comfort.

Tough and strong though they seem, all of these responses are based on fear. They are the actions of people who are afraid of terrorism. Looking at them, one might say that the terrorists have succeeded after all. Even if their ostensible political cause is crushed, their terror has succeeded in increasing the level of fear in the world.

From fear comes hate, and from hate comes violence. Acting from that fear, we sow the seeds of future terrorism in the world, thereby confirming the image of our terror. It is as Martin Luther King said (quoted in a marvelously brave and insightful piece by Falguni Sheth in Salon, “Where does the hate come from?”: “Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody.”

Is there an alternative? There is, but I am afraid it is so radical as to be beyond the reach of our political imagination, at least until the futility of force, hate, and control becomes so apparent we can no longer ignore it. Right now, we respond to each failure of control with more control, each failure of force with more force, each failure of security with more security. Where will it end? When every school, stadium, shopping mall, hospital, home, and public building is like a fortress?

Let us ask a simple question. Do we want to live in a future where to attend any public event or enter any public building means to pass through a security checkpoint? That would be a society that runs on fear, a society in which fear infiltrates every corner of public life. Since a fortress is the mirror opposite of a prison (the former keeps people out, the latter in), a fortress society is also a prison society, in which every trip, every entry in a building, every purchase is monitored and controlled, and every act policed.

Is anyone out there asking, “What would it take to have a society where we need less security every year, and not more?” Is any politician proclaiming this as a goal? Is anyone upholding this as a vision for the future? Are we capable of envisioning a society where we feel at home among each other, a society of growing trust, and not a society resembling a prison more and more with each passing year?

One might think that yes, this is a worthy goal, and that therefore we should study and address the causes of terrorism — but of course we must tighten security until such time as we do that. That would be fine except for one unfortunate possibility: what if the regime of security and control is itself integral to the conditions that breed terrorism?

It makes a certain amount of psychological sense that this is the case. What we suppress in our psyche often bursts out in some dissociated and extreme form. When we live in fear (as we do in a security state), we are certain to experience that fear in various externalized ways, such as terrorism. The suppressed shadow emerges. Are the horrific events of the last few months the random acts of bad guys? Or could it be that we are seeing a reflection of ourselves?

More mundanely, the security mindset applied to foreign policy by a militaristic state surely creates the image of its own fear and hatred. The more aggressively we seek to protect ourselves from the people we fear, the more those people will fear and hate us. The further we take security, for example to preemptive drone strikes, the more hatred we will generate. The more hatred we generate, the greater will be the need to extend the regime of security even further.

The same is true of the mindset of control at home, in the workplace, and at school, extending even to pharmaceutical control of the mind via anti-depressant drugs. A society that is increasingly regimented, surveilled, and controlled, in which “freedom” happens behind gates and walls, necessarily stokes an explosive desire to break free. I do not mean to trivialize the complicated psycho-social factors that turn a person into a mass murderer, but certainly a key factor must be an overwhelming feeling of alienation. What could be more alienating than a standardized, controlled, endemically suspicious society, where everywhere you go you are treated as a suspect or troublemaker?

To build a society of safety and trust rather than security and fear, we are going to have to act from the former rather than the latter. I therefore offer a few modest proposals for how to respond to the Boston bombing. First, let us reverse the cycle of terror by responding, not with heightened security, but with relaxed security, demonstrating that we will not be frightened into retreating behind cameras, fences, and metal detectors. We will bravely uphold an open society.

Secondly, let us reverse the cycle of hatred abroad by ceasing all preemptive and punitive drone strikes and other attacks. Those are the actions of a frightened people. It takes courage to trust that if one holds back from violence, whomever one has seen as an enemy will do the same. But in a situation of mutual distrust, someone has to take the first step. Otherwise, each act merely confirms the distrust of the other, and the violence never ends.

Thirdly, instead of vowing to take vengeance on the perpetrator of the Boston attack, let us proclaim that rather than punish him, he will have the opportunity to face the families of the people he killed and the people whose limbs he destroyed. He will hear their stories and share his own. Then together, the victims, perpetrators and communittee will agree on how best to heal the damage done and serve justice.

While remorse and forgiveness may not result, it is more likely to than in punitive justice. (For more on this approach to justice, explore the Restorative Justice website or read this article.)

This response will reduce the amount of hate and fear in the world. The perpetrator will not become a martyr in the eyes of his sympathizers. Any response that heightens the already-endemic fear in our society will be a victory for fear. To truly resist terrorism, we must not act from terror. Can we receive the hate of this act and transform it into love?

No doubt most people will say that these proposals are dangerously unrealistic and naïve, so let me anticipate some of the objections.

The first proposal would seem to make us more vulnerable to terrorism, and to make it easier for terrorists to achieve their ends. Actually, heightened security only gives the illusion of safety; it does not provide actual safety. At best, it displaces possible terrorist activity from one venue to another. As each public place is secured, those with violent intent will simply enact their plans at some other place that is not secured. What is the difference if it is displaced from an airport to a stadium, from a stadium to a subway station, from a subway station to a shopping mall?

The only solution, from the perspective of security and control, would be to secure every public event and building, so that the act of going out in public means undergoing a search and metal detector screening. And even then there would be gaps through which a determined or creative terrorist could strike. The Newtown massacre, which happened at a school with extensive security, demonstrated that such measures, as the Chinese say, “stop the gentleman but not the crook.”

Moreover, even if relaxed security did result in more attacks, that would not mean that the terrorists had achieved their ends. Their goal is not to kill people — that is a means, not an end. Their goal is to engender fear. If our response shows that we are not afraid, then we will be deterring terrorism, not encouraging it.

I think this is what Jesus meant when he enjoined us to “turn the other cheek.” Doing so isn’t an invitation to strike again. It shows that the first strike did not work. (For a deeper explanation of this injunction, please read Walter Wink’s profound essay, “Jesus’ Third Way.”

The second suggestion above invites the protest, “But if we don’t destroy our enemies or at least hold them in check, then they will be emboldened and eventually overrun us.” This protest imagines that enmity happens in a kind of vacuum, that hatred toward the United States exists outside a context of militarism and imperialism, a relationship of violence and counter-violence. It assumes, perhaps, that they “hate us for our freedoms.” In other words, it says that they are evil and we are good. I think anyone can recognize that this is a recipe for endless war when, as is usual, both sides believe that they are the good guys.

The second and third proposals also provoke the objection, “If we don’t punish acts of terror and other crimes, then there will be nothing to deter future criminals.” Leaving aside the weak and often contradictory evidence for the efficacy of deterrence in preventing crime, the notion of punishment-based deterrence draws on a world-view that is fundamentally fear-based. It says there are implacably evil people out there who, if not deterred by personal harm, will do terrible things to us.

In fact, the classical theory of deterrence, originating in the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Baccaria, essentially extends the category of “evil” people to everyone. Bentham in particular said that human beings naturally act to maximize their “utility” — avoidance of pain and experiencing of pleasure. Therefore, in order to prevent people from committing criminal acts, there must be negative consequences to counterbalance that universal desire to benefit oneself by harming others.

The theory of deterrence, in other words, presupposes a world of separate, competing, self-interested individuals. But is that really the world we live in? If so, then a better life will only come through greater and greater security, deterrence, surveillance, and control. In such a world, trust is foolish, as is any hope of forgiveness, redemption, love, or a change of heart. Certainly, our experiences often seem to confirm this. But could it be that what we are seeing is an artifact of our system, and the projection of our own beliefs? When we act from an ideology of force and the fundamental selfishness of human beings, we create the world in its image.

In that case, maybe it is time to act from a different paradigm of human nature: a belief in our fundamental goodness, our common humanity, our desire to connect, to love, to help, and to serve. Certainly the immediate responses to the tragedy in Boston offer ample evidence for such a belief: people generously coming to the aid of total strangers.

It was as if the explosions tore apart the veil of mutual suspicion that keeps us separate and allowed a latent aspect of human nature its full expression. What if we take those acts of selflessness as the true lesson of Boston? Could we create a world in their image? If MLK was right, surely it is also true that peace begets peace, forgiveness begets forgiveness, and love begets love. No less a revolution will create a society where we feel safe and at home amongst each other.