Boredom

It is an adventure and a delight to simply be alive, when one is free from the ‘I’ that has taken control of one’s body; the hunt for the ‘thrills and spills’ that is so endemic in the real world is over. It is ‘I’ who is easily bored, incessantly pursuing excitement. As ‘I’ am not actually here, one needs to feel that ‘I’ am real … that one is ‘alive’. The body can be persuaded to produce quite an array of chemicals; a veritable cocktail is available to the insidious entity that has taken up psychological and psychic residence within. Whereas I am already alive for I am actual. I am never bored, because being here now as-I-am is an escapade in itself. It takes great daring to be here now; anyone who has heeded my words and contemplated the actuality of what I am saying and doing, has reported to me that they invariably experience fear … and I too have known the full gamut of the anxious terror and horror and dread of the existential angst that comes as a result of activating the desire to disclose oneself as the contingent ‘being’ one fears one is. Initially one is deathly afraid to actually be here now, as it can feel rather rudely raw … one feels more naked and exposed than taking off one’s clothing in the market place.

However, feeling rudely raw about the prospect of being here now is not the same as actually being here now. A feeling is not a fact; it is an identity’s interpretation of the actual and is therefore unreliable as a means of ascertaining the direct experience of being here now. Being here now is to be at the place and time where all is pristine. This pristine place is this, the actual world … and it is already always here. This actual world is original; unmarred, uncorrupted, unspoiled, spotless, fresh and perpetually new. It is alarming to feel this immaculateness – it is frightening in its immediate intimacy – which is why one backs off, initially denying its very existence. What happens though, if one takes the risk to actually be here now – instead of standing back and feeling it out in order to make up one’s mind – is that one discovers that oneself is also pristine. There is no differentiation between that something which is precious and me. I am that stillness experiencing itself … I am pristine, through and through.

By daring to be here now, by being me as-I-am, I have already ‘cleaned up’ all the pollution … by not being polluted at all in the first place.

Feeling-being ‘Vineeto’

VINEETO: The phrase I would use now, in hindsight, for those ‘no-feelings’ of lack-lustre and listlessness is resentment of being here. Within the human condition there is a basic resentment of not wanting to be here, wanting to be somewhere else, waiting for something else to happen than what is happening now, as a basic attitude to life==, which is then reinforced by the various religious and spiritual conditioning that life on earth is essentially suffering and that the real life will only happen for the spirit after you die.

This resentment to being here, as this body, in the world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are, was what was responsible for my dull feelings, no-feelings, my listlessness, my boredom, my waiting for something else to happen, in short, it had permeated almost all experience of life in that it had cast a dulling shade over everything I experienced.

The way to deal with resentment in the actualism method is the same way you deal with all other feelings that interfere with you being happy and harmless – when paying attention to how you experience this moment of being alive, you notice it, then label it which helps you realise that it would be silly to carry on with it when you can instead enjoy being alive. With a steady increase in attentiveness the shift of resenting being here to appreciating being here becomes progressively easier until you finally kick the insidious habit of resentment altogether and delight in being alive for the simple reason that you are alive.

RESPONDENT: For me, while it is easy (comparatively) to label and handle obvious feelings like anger, malice, compassion, hope, I find it more difficult to label not-so-apparent feelings. These feelings create a neither-happy-nor-sad kind of state. I remember you talked of dullness in one of your mails. But I find that this dullness or boredom is not the same every time it happens and it happens very frequently.

VINEETO: Yes, I can remember times of a ‘neither-happy-nor-sad kind of state’ and I recall talking to Alan about dullness and stuckness (and the two following letters). Although my dullness had varying qualities at different times, I could mostly sheet it home to a feeling of not wanting to be here, i.e. resentment for having to be here.

I found dullness and boredom one of the most common reactions to being alive when things weren’t going ‘my’ way – and they rarely ever did or that life wasn’t exciting, which it rarely was. In the process of actualism I recognized, however, that my habitual resentment towards the various facts of life, for instance having to work 🏢 for a living, bad weather, getting sick, etc, clearly prevented me from becoming happy and harmless. I discovered I could either indulge in ‘my’ resentment or pull myself up by my boot strings and break this insidious habit. As No 3 pointed out, it was indeed a matter of priority – and I chose sensuous attentiveness over ‘self’-indulgent apathy, happiness over resentment.

The other kind of dullness or stuckness I would describe as an ostrich-behaviour – the result of my fear to investigate the particular belief or behaviour pattern that was under scrutiny at the time. Eventually such periods of procrastination grew shorter as I more and more stubbornly refused to spoil this unique present moment of being alive by not investigating the issue at hand.

And indeed each issue investigated, each belief discarded resulted in lifting an emotional weight off my shoulders and as a direct consequence, life has become easy and enjoyable. You could also say that ‘I’, the complainer, the controller, the moaner and groaner has all but left the stage.

Links to this page
  • Responsibility

    It is funny – in a peculiar way – for I often gain the impression when I speak to others, that I am spoiling their game-plan. It seems as if they wish to search forever … they consider arriving to be boring. How can unconditional peace and happiness, twenty-four-hours-a-day, possibly be boring? Is a carefree life all that difficult to comprehend? Why persist in a sick game … and defend one’s right to do so? Why insist on suffering when blitheness is freely available here and now? Is a life of perennial gaiety something to be scorned? I have even had people say, accusingly, that I could not possibly be happy when there is so much suffering going on in the world. The logic of this defies credibility: Am I to wait until everybody else is happy before I am? If I was to wait, I would be waiting forever … for under this twisted rationale, no one would dare to be the first to be happy. Their peculiar reasoning allows only for a mass happiness to occur globally; overnight success, as it were. Someone has to be intrepid enough to be first, to show what is possible to a benighted humanity.

  • Procrastination

    I found dullness and boredom one of the most common reactions to being alive when things weren’t going ‘my’ way – and they rarely ever did or that life wasn’t exciting, which it rarely was. In the process of actualism I recognized, however, that my habitual resentment towards the various facts of life, for instance having to work for a living, bad weather, getting sick, etc, clearly prevented me from becoming happy and harmless. I discovered I could either indulge in ‘my’ resentment or pull myself up by my boot strings and break this insidious habit. As No 3 pointed out, it was indeed a matter of priority – and I chose sensuous attentiveness over ‘self’-indulgent apathy, happiness over resentment.

  • Excitement
    We pursue “excitement” to assuage Boredom
  • Being the doing of what is happening

    I do that by neither dramatising the fear nor pushing it away, by seeing it more as a by-product of this strange thing I am doing. I don’t ‘support’ a panic-attack by embroidering it, and neither do I let myself be numb, bored or dull. Then, by quietly noticing what is happening, without attaching any identity to an ‘observer’, apperception happens – with some rumbling going on in the background – while I get on with the pleasures of being here, be they food, sex, a walk into town, playing with the web-site, interaction with other people, going to work or watching television. And by ‘my’ stepping out of the way I am doing what is happening, any rumbling or grinding in the background included.

    [..] We were chatting the other day about the marked difference between being here, doing what is happening and the feeling of not being here that can cause a frustration with life as-it-is. The frustration with life as-it-is, right here and now, most often causes a passionate desire to be somewhere else which serves only to prevent one from being here. For an actualist, any period of time spent not being here is clearly a waste of time. Any time spent being bored, angry, pissed off, feeling sad, lack luster, annoyed, etc. is time wasted time lost from fully living this the only moment one can experience being alive. All of these ‘time-offs’ have to be explored and investigated and understood so as to prevent the same old ‘time-outs’ occurring in the future. It takes a bit of practice and a lot of effort and attention as to ‘how’ am I experiencing this moment of being alive, but pretty soon one gets the hang of it.