Boredom is a blessing

It needs intelligence to feel boredom, so very few, the most intelligent people in the world, feel boredom. Buddha felt it, Mahavira felt it. The rarest people feel boredom because it needs tremendous intelligence to experience it. So in a way it is not a curse, it is a blessing.

It is out of boredom that the inquiry for the meaning of life arises. Those who have felt bored simply show that whatsoever ordinary meanings life has, are no longer fulfilling for them. […]

The intelligent person becomes aware very soon that “All this is an exercise is sheer futility. Nothing on the outside can ever give me an inner fulfillment, an inner sense of significance.” And unless that is experienced, boredom will remain and will become heavier every day.

Now there are two possibilities. One is the western possibility. If you look only through reason then you will never find any meaning in life; then boredom will become more and more acute, chronic. It will pervade your whole existence, it will permeate each moment of your life. It will not allow you to live at all. It will become such a burden that suicide will seem to be the only possible way out. […]

But the East has a totally different alternative. When the mind fails, when the reason fails, it does not mean that life has failed. It simply means that whatsoever reason could do it has done; now you have to look for deeper realms of your being — and there are deeper realms. Deeper than your mind is your heart. Deeper than logic is love. Deeper than science is art. Deeper than mathematics is music.

The East drops the mind, not life, and starts moving into the heart, into the world of feelings. And then suddenly great meaning arises, the boredom starts disappearing. […]

Boredom is a blessing. It is a goading for the search. It is a goading towards God, towards Tao. The western approach has failed; it has come to a point that now there is no more to go. The West is stuck, but the eastern approach has not failed and it is never going to fail. But the West can also move towards the East only when its approach fails. Now the time has come that the West can understand the East and the meeting can happen.

I am not against reason. Whatsoever reason can give it has to be used as a means, but one thing is certain: don’t ask for things which it cannot give to you. It cannot give meaning, it cannot give significance, it cannot give dignity, it cannot give you your ultimate flowering. That is possible only through meditation, through discovering your innermost self, your ultimate, eternal being which is never born and never dies.

Use boredom as a jumping-stone towards the ultimate and then you will feel grateful, even grateful to the experience of boredom — which is painful, full of anguish. But the wise man can transform even misery into bliss, and the fool goes on destroying all opportunities for bliss and goes on creating misery out of the energy which could have created a paradise within you. The paradise is already there just you have to take a one hundred-eighty-degree turn.

Osho, Zen: The Special Transmission, Ch 8

Quote published in The Book: An Introduction to the Teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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