26.02.06
0802 – The unbearable boredom of being
Posted in the Branch at 7:33 pm by James 
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from Issue 008 — Sep 2002
This article begins in the early 70’s. I was sitting in the café beneath the yoga school having just finished teaching a class. I had some time to myself and was reading a book and having a cup of coffee. I had just rolled myself a cigarette when a group of students from the yoga school came into the café to have some refreshments. They sat down and ordered and I continued to read and smoke my cigarette. After a while one of them came up to me and asked, with a look of concern and a bit of bewilderment on their face, “Do you smoke?”
This was still the time of Findhorn magic, organics and macrobiotics, navel gazing and tree hugging. A time when being spiritual, as I was obviously meant to be given I taught yoga and mediation, meant you were pure in all things. You certainly did not smoke cigarettes or consume other stimulants like coffee. Being spiritual meant you had to adopt a spiritual lifestyle, a pure and clean lifestyle without the temptations and vices that befall the rest of humanity. Then, as now, spirituality was seen by many to be associated with particular behaviours. True, there was some element of mind and thought, all pure of course, and in the service of spiritual advancement, but the overriding indication of being a spiritual person was the adoption of spiritual or enlightened behaviour.
Ashrams were all the go, as was the virtues of communal living and the rejection of all that seemed contaminated by the materiality of the ordinary world. Many thought that by adopting some of the outer forms or the accepted ways of spiritual life that they were indeed getting close to spirit. Within the yoga school where I taught there were students that believed their weekly or more frequent attendance in class was all they needed to counteract their everyday and profane existence. A little bit like going to church on Sunday being all the good Christian needed to do, to wash away the sins of the week.
To be more spiritual would require the sacrifice of too much of what they otherwise engaged in. To really embrace a spiritual life was akin to becoming a priest, a monk, a sanyasan or the like. All that made life interesting and exciting would be denied, and life would become just too boring. Better to grab just a snippet of the spiritual, adopt a few behaviours and leave it at that. Now, some 30 years later as I speak with many students of the Course, I detect many of the same misgivings and misconceptions’ regarding the adoption of a spiritual way, as they believe the Course is asking them to do. Yes, even the Course, they believe, requires certain behaviours or particular ways of doing rather than just being. To many this is seen as too great a sacrifice to make as frankly, life would be just too boring.
They would have to change too much of their way of life to make it adapt to all the behaviours they mistakenly think are required if one is to really be spiritual. And so rather than seeing the simplicity of salvation, as a way of life, they busy themselves with just enough “spiritual” behaviours to reassure themselves that they are engaged in a process that will eventually allow them to rise above the turmoil and bustle of their lives. Eventually, mind you, not just now. They embrace contradiction with the fervour of the true believer. Not only are they convinced they are not able to really let go of what they are currently doing in the world, they believe that it, whatever it happens to be, must be bad because it is of the material, special, mundane and even exciting. Entrapped by the “vice” and condemned for it too. Everything spiritual life cannot be. It is a carefully orchestrated, almost certainly unconscious plan to keep Peace distant enough to not impinge too much on their lives. And the excuse they consol themselves with, in those candid moments of apparent honesty, is that peace is boring.
It is expressed in a myriad of ways. It can be the surrounding of oneself in ritual as a demonstration of purity of intention and commitment. In some cases it might be through a constant evaluation of one’s actions, examining the apparent motives as they believe them to be. Dissecting and deconstructing thoughts, feelings, behaviours and actions in an effort to present them just right to, or perhaps hide them from, the self they believe is sitting in judgement of their commitment to the plan. Exactly what plan it is they do not really know except to think that it is the Course plan and it does require this effort and struggle.
This error can invariably be reduced to something along the lines of; “If I was spiritual, in other words a really good Course student, I wouldn’t do this.” At this point, the student does one of two things. They do it anyway, feeling guilty on the one hand, or consoling themselves that they are not quite ready to give it up, whatever it is they are doing. Alternatively, they do not do it and feel either resentment at their great sacrifice or pride in their great victory over their ego. However it expresses itself, the misconception remains the same. And so their attempts to be a good Course student are impeded by their avoidance of what is wrongly believed to be the end of life’s excitement, accompanied by remorse over all those lost opportunities of right, meaning spiritual, behaviour and action.
Our belief in sacrifice is deeply ingrained in our consciousnesses and its hand guides us in so many of our endeavours. Jesus did not speak about it at length because he liked the sound of the words. Love does not demand sacrifice and nor does being a student of A Course in Miracles.™ Yes the excitement and passion of our behaviour in this world and our journey through it will be called to question, time after time after time. Even so, at no stage are we ever asked to either change our behaviour or give up the excitement. That would be the very antithesis of the Course’s way. No external action of behaviour will change the way you think. The most it can do is delude you in to thinking your thoughts have changed. Yes, the Course will bring about change. But it is a change that arises of itself and express itself in ways that you simply can not predict nor pre-judge. It is a change that comes not from ritual or blandness, but from a simple decision to choose the benign.
There are many excuses that we construct, develop and maintain in order to avoid the simplicity of what the Course asks of us. Ultimately all of them can be traced back to our fear of loss of self. Nevertheless, for most of us that connection does not seem very real. There are other, more pressing reasons why we are doing what we are doing. For some of us, the reason is a result of our misguided projection of what peace might really be like, and probably more importantly, what would I be like if I attained it. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to stay there…
As for the boredom of being, how could that which is greater than the sum of all possibly being boring?
James