Even boredom can teach you
who you are
The
mind exists in a state of "not enough" and so is always greedy for
more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily.
Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and
its hunger is not being satisfied.
When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind’s hunger by picking up a
magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the web, going
shopping, or — and this is not uncommon — transferring the mental sense of
lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more
food.
Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored
and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some
space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense
of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity
and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.
You discover that a "bored person" is not who you are. Boredom is
simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad,
or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours,"
not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.
Nothing that comes and goes is you.
"I am bored." Who knows this?
"I am angry, sad, afraid." Who knows this?
You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.
--Eckhart Tolle