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Someone wrote to me recently asking about how we can cure the ‘world is boring’ sickness.

I first realized how powerful this sickness was when I returned from my stay in the wilderness. During my time in the woods, I had become accustomed to a much slower way of life. My thoughts and mind-activity had become so still that there were really no extraneous thoughts, and the sensory cues I dealt with on a daily basis were extremely subtle.

Stepping back into civilization was painful. No matter where I turned, there was a near constant assault of sounds, visual images, and sensations. Cars, billboards, television, and even the energy of other people (in the woods, you can spend a day with a person and say only a few words, but in civilization, we must always talk and jabber) were nearly overwhelming. I was very tempted to turn right around and just go back to the swamps and forests.

The most fascinating aspect of this transition was to watch my own mind. Within days it adapted to the assault, and it began craving more and more stimulation. Thoughts increased, jumping from subject to subject with wild abandon. In short, I was able to experience something most of us never get to experience – the transition from a clear, silent mind, to our everyday, fast-moving, frenetic mind.

The main problem here is that we get used to our mind’s activity level. In fact, most of us don’t even think that our mind has a thing we could call an ‘activity level’. We’re simply immersed in it, and think ‘that’s the way life is’.

But our mind’s activity level is something we’re in complete control of. And it has a profound effect on the quality of our lives.

Frenetic Minds

Most of us, even if we think of ourselves as quiet and peaceful, are set on fast-forward. Our thoughts are jumpy, and we get bored if we don’t have a certain level of stimulation. This might be as simple as having the radio playing, or feeling the need to ‘do something useful’. Consider your own situation. Imagine you have an entire day before you. Would you be satisfied with just sitting down on a chair outside and doing nothing for the entire day? Or would you feel like you were wasting time, and feel a need to perform activities? Maybe watch a movie, or mow the lawn, or check your email?

We might posit all sorts of excuses for why we need to do things, but if we observe ourselves, we’ll soon find that the truth is that we get antsy, bored, or agitated if we aren’t doing something. And this is just using the example of a relatively slow-moving mind. For many of us, we need an almost constant barrage of music, television, drama, or work in order to feel okay.

Activity Addiction

This is effectively an addiction, and like any addiction, we develop a tolerance to the current level, and quickly need to add more. Soon, we begin hitting plateaus where we find ourselves wondering if there is anything ‘more’ to life. In effect, we’re experiencing a state of chronic, low-level boredom and agitation. And we get so used to it that we consider this state ‘normal’.

Our culture is all too happy to feed this addiction, especially since our culture is created by addicts. You’ll find all sorts of offerings to feed the need – new television programs, new spiritual teachings, celebrity news, ever-more exciting video games, vacations . . . all adding to more excitement, more entertainment, more activities, more stimulation. I remember, when I was in Nepal, seeing the traditionally-raised children, who were quiet and observant, and seeing the children who had televisions and spent hours a day watching WWF wrestling. The children who were fed the WWF were spastic, with short attention spans, hyperactivity, and a penchant for hitting each other.

Being An Addict

We all have the right to be addicts. As a societal norm, we will fit right in. In fact, you’ll probably be considered strange if you aren’t participating in the constant thinking and stimulation that our culture considers normal. And there’s really nothing wrong with an addiction if we are aware of it and are making a conscious choice to feed that addiction. It’s when we deny that we have an addiction, or find ourselves powerless over it, that we find ourselves enslaved. We also have the right to be enslaved – you must decide for yourself if that is the life you desire to live.

Breaking the Addiction

What if we don’t want to exist in this state of chronic low-level boredom? What if we want to take control of our mind’s activity level?

We have two choices.

Dualism offers us the route of contrast. If we simply reduce our mind’s access to constant stimulation, we’ll develop less tolerance. It’s a simple equation. A few days of living in an environment of little stimulation or devoting ourselves to a program of meditation will quiet our minds quite a bit. Then we’ll find ourselves more relaxed, and more entertained by more subtle stimulation. However, we’ll also develop a tolerance to our current level, and will slowly start climbing the mind-activity ladder again.

In our lives, we may find ourselves moving up and down this ladder as the years go by. We will increase our stress and workload until we feel like we’re just about to break, and then we’ll switch jobs or take less hours or do something else to try to simplify and create more ‘room’ in our lives. Some of us may succeed in maintaining a fairly low level by devoting ourselves to yoga, meditation, or other spiritual practices. But we’ll still be on the same cycle. Up and down, we’ll repeat the cycle over and over until the day we die.

Non-dualism is our other route. Non-dualism breaks this cycle. With non-dualism, we come to a complete understanding of what the cycle actually is. We become aware of the nature of our mind’s activity. And we find ourselves able to experience the awesome beauty of each and every moment – even moments that others would find boring or commonplace.

Creating Our Boring World

The reason for this is simple. With dualism, we replace each sensation in the world with a word and symbol. We look over at a person, but we don’t really see their true, indefinable nature. Instead, we see a word-sound. ‘John’. And if we follow our mind’s activity, we find that our mind stops at the symbol. It says ‘John’, and doesn’t need to look any further, because it thinks that ‘John’ is just this guy who’s an accountant and wears tacky clothes.

If we could actually see John, or any other person, we’d be amazed. Each person is truly a miracle – constantly changing and shifting like some amazing mirage before our eyes. At any level we care to observe John – from pure perception to logic to philosophical contemplation, John is simply astounding. But to our dualistic mind, he’s just ‘John’.

As we look around us with dualistic eyes, the whole world is like this. I look around right now and I see ‘monitor’, ‘dog’, ‘wall’, ‘computer’, ‘sun’, ‘trees’. And my mind skims over all these things, laying down a symbol and then moving on. Consider what I missed out on when I skimmed over these things. Take any one of them and just imagine for a moment what I might discover if I could see even one of these things as they are. Now imagine seeing the entire world in its vivid Thusness – we’d find ourselves immersed in a miracle.

Nothing Lost

We don’t lose anything when we see the world as it is. The symbols with which we once skimmed over the world aren’t suddenly forgotten. Indeed, we see the miraculous nature even of these symbols!

Miraculous World

The beauty of life is that we have the choice to drink as deeply as we choose from its waters. We can fully immerse ourselves in the wonders of this world, or we can move through life in a hazy sleep. Neither is better or worse – and we have free choice to choose whatever we like. What choice are you making? What are you applying your life energy to? Are you consciously choosing, or are you just being swept along without any real awareness of what forces are shaping your life experience?

This very choice is part of the world’s miraculous nature. Some of us will move with awareness, some of us will be driven by forces of which we are not even aware. Seen clearly, both of these ways are miraculous. The wonder of this world is that it will always dance with our basic mind activity (which for most of us equates with our basic assumptions). The dance will always be harmonious. If our basic mind activity is full of conflict, the world will be full of conflict. If our basic mind activity is full of wonder, the world will be wondrous. In either case, we are moving in harmony, and therein is revealed the miraculous nature of the world.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 1:51 am and is filed under Awakening and Reality. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.