15. The Cure for Boredom

I’m going to talk today about the problem of boredom. Now it’s true, we encounter boredom, less and less with all of our gadgets and with the totality of human knowledge and artistic output always available to us.

When you can always hear your favorite song or watch a great film, or read a great book, or text a friend. Because you can do all of these things with a device that you have at your side 24 hours a day, you might successfully avoid boredom for the rest of your life.

But you might also never discover what’s on the other side of boredom. And you might not recognize the price you’re paying for being compelled to distract yourself for having lost or having simply never acquired a capacity for doing nothing, or productive capacity for doing nothing.

Once you learn to meditate, you realize that boredom is simply a failure to pay attention. If something as simple and repetitive as breathing can become a source of blissful contemplation, and it can. And if the feeling of boredom itself can become an object of intense interest. And it can, there’s no way to be bored if you’re paying close attention to your experience.

So training and meditation is the true cure for boredom - is a kind of permanent inoculation. Once you learn how to meditate, you will never be truly bored again.

Now, this isn’t to say that you won’t still make choices in life, certain activities might still feel like a waste of time, and they might be a waste of time. Given all the other things you could do. You might still walk out of a movie or stop reading a book because it’s, quote, boring.

But when left alone with yourself, how do you feel? Are you desperate to be distracted by some stimulus? Or can you find a deep feeling of well being as an intrinsic property of just being conscious?

the gulf between these two conditions is enormous. And in my experience, only meditation allows us to reliably span it. In the beginning of my book waking up, I described my most memorable experience of suffering the costs of not knowing how to meditate. I’ll read you that first page because it’s relevant here.

I once participated in a 23 day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of back country culminated in a ritual known as the solo, where we were finally permitted to rest - alone on the outskirts of a gorgeous Alpine Lake for three days of fasting and contemplation. I had just turned 16 and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother’s womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake. The promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages in my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher or mystic, but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and Starlight with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence to be a source of perfect misery, for which I could see not so much a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home in their plain toughness and self pity rivaled any written at Shiloh or golipoly. So I was more than a little surprise when several members of our party most of whom were a decade older than I describe their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone’s happiness increase, when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me, only my life did. And I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change.

Okay, so that that’s how the book starts. And that is really, although I didn’t know it at the time, how my interest in esoteric things like meditation started, I mean that that was a very clear reference point, for me, the consequences of having an untrained mind and have seen no alternative, but to be continuously lost in thought.

Throughout this course, I’m going to talk about many of the insights that can come as one learns to meditate - insights about the nature of consciousness and the self, and the ways in which a growing understanding of the mind connects to ethics.

But I think the deepest reason to learn this practice is to deepen one’s wisdom and well being and that really comes down to not suffering unnecessarily.

It comes down to the simple ability to be able to recognize one’s thoughts as thoughts as appearances in consciousness, and to no longer be their mirror captive.

But we’ll talk more about that later on.