Today is Sunday, September 15, and for some it might feel like just another ordinary, humdrum Sunday morning sitting. I say that because it turns out that anything that's routine or habitual in our lives has the potential to feel boring. And we tend to identify the sensation of boredom as inherently bad. It has a negative connotation. We see it as an unpleasant mind state, and we're conditioned to try to get out of it. And that's why, at least in part, that when we're doing simple, routine activities like, say, washing our hands, which we do multiple times in a day, or driving our car to work, taking the same old route Every day, when we do these kinds of routine things, we're a lot more likely to get bored and then try to fill in that sense of void with something else. It might be thoughts. It might be some other activity, like in the case of driving, listening to the news or podcast at the same time. But actually, what's really happening in those moments when we try to escape from boredom, is Separation opposing life as it is right now and for unfortunately, as Zen practice, Zen practitioners through the process of zazen, we do learn How to slow down and to settle into stillness. So settle into doing nothing, looking inward and seeing what's there. So then, as a method, we can say that zazen, by nature, is boring, but in a good way, it runs so counter to what we've been conditioned to Do, which is to occupy ourselves with endless distractions and seek out things that interest us, that feel good. So that means we're conditioned to feel inactivity with activity and silence with speech or thoughts. Of course, we always have thoughts available on hand, and keeping ourselves busy in that way somehow lessens the DIS ease that we associate with boredom, and not surprisingly, boredom is closely linked to anxiety. One of the things that inspired me to talk about the subject of boredom this morning was a few days ago. I was sitting in the waiting room of the doctor's office I went to and everybody there was sitting hunched over, scrolling or tight. Being on their phones, everyone, and we've all experienced situations like this, where the weight is boring. Can imagine a long flight delay where you're stuck in an airport terminal for hours and hours and hours, and one feels compelled to find something to do to fill in the time, to make it pass more quickly.
You know the average person, someone who doesn't have Zen practice, probably wouldn't last very long just being there in that space of the airport terminal, Just being there without any distraction, no cell phone. I and taking it all in so many people from different walks of life, different personalities, not to mention the airplanes, these tubes that we pack ourselves into, that shoot through the sky. If we take it all in as it is, it's really amazing. It's not boring at all. But we need to allow ourselves to experience it first. Another common scenario is a long car ride. I remember when I was a kid sitting in the back seat on a trip, I say to my parents, are we there? Yet we're almost there repeatedly.
Nowadays, even young kids have cell phones so they might not even ask such questions anymore.
And when it comes to a round of sitting, let's look at that round of sitting. We don't have the option of grabbing our phone. What we have is our practice and thoughts.
It might be even thoughts directed at the timer with expletives. When's the round gonna end? I'm sure I'm not the only one who's who's thought that.
Yeah. So there's this real sense of impatience, unease, discomfort, that we experience when we're bored. We're craving something interesting, but we don't necessarily even know what it is. Kind of feels aimless, like we lack purpose. The Russian writer Tolstoy defined boredom as the state of having a desire for desires. And from a scientific perspective, what's happening is that our brain is sending a signal that there's something lacking, a void that needs to be addressed. And as I said, thoughts serve that purpose for us. They help us out. And if it's not thoughts, it might be the active pursuit of information. In the field of psychology, the term information addiction is used to refer to the. Phenomenon of craving information.
Craving information, so information can be an addiction, just like drugs and alcohol, gambling, video games, pornography, and nowadays, information addiction takes the form, usually of accessing online information, checking for texts, checking for emails, Checking your social media feeds, checking the news, Doom, scrolling. And for some, it takes over their lives, prevents them from having a healthy life. It makes their days feel very busy, like they don't have time for anything. It takes time away from from exercise, from going outdoors, spending time with friends and family and loved ones, and it takes time away from Zazen. Zazen being the one thing that really has the potential to transform your life. You
uh, filling our heads with information also affects work productivity, as in, not being able to complete tasks or projects because you're constantly disrupting yourself. It's really self sabotage disrupting yourself by checking your phone.
And just like other kinds of addictions, one gets anxious and restless when they don't have access to information. Kind of, kind of feels like you're disconnected from the world if you're not online. The first time I noticed this behavior was actually something like 10 years ago, when I was traveling with college students on an annual study abroad trip, and at that time, some of the students cell phones either didn't work in Europe, or they just couldn't afford a international plan. And so on the long bus rides that we took there, they got all fidgety with their hands, I could see it. They were like groping for something to do with their fingers, and they clung to the students that had working phones. It was kind of like a lifeline for them. And
in a Scientific American article that I read titled The chemistry of information addiction, the author, who's Shadrick lane, describes studies that show that the human brain has actually evolved to treat information like a reward. So in other words, getting information getting answers is an award like getting the answer to how much longer is this car ride or flight? And we get a little spike in dopamine when we find out, similar to when we eat certain foods, like chocolate. Or buy new possessions. Of course, for sittings and for Sachin, we've long had the rule of no cell phones or other devices for obvious reasons. And the exception is the monitors, though, who actually need to communicate with those in the online Zendo, and it's a real sacrifice that they make to have their phone on hand and their smartwatch in order for sasheen to run smoothly. But for everyone else, it's freeing. It's a privilege to turn off and put away your phone for a week. So Sheen is such a precious opportunity, and that's why it's so wonderful when people actually take the monitors up on their offer of storing phones away for the week. So you aren't going to be able to give in to the temptation of checking it. That act actually shows a great deal of commitment and faith,
faith in the fact that it's not possible to be disconnected,
Nothing separate or outside of us. Already,
I went a bit more into this scientific view of boredom, and it turns out there's a lot of interesting research on it. And the one thing that I learned is that there's no universal definition of boredom, even though it's a universal human experience, the most common indicators or symptoms of it are, and these will sound familiar, inattention, lack of engagement, absent mindedness and the experience of time passing slowly, time passing slowly, not quickly, which is what happens when we're absorbed in our practice. One of the studies I came upon was described in a hidden brain podcast titled even astronauts get the blues. Why boredom drives us nuts. The host, Shankar vedantam, interviews several experts where they discuss the psychological effects of long term space flight. Long story short, NASA scientists have observed a very unusual phenomenon in the eating behavior on the International Space Station. What they observed is the gradual increase in consumption of hot sauce. Yeah, hot sauce by the astronauts. So as time passed on, the longer they were on the space station, astronauts tended to eat more and more hot sauce. Here's an excerpt from the transcript describing why. Why this might be. One explanation is that the absence of gravity causes physical changes in the body and that weakens your sense of taste. Another idea, small, enclosed places like spaceships are really stinky. Tobacco hides the smell, then there's boredom. Now it may be hard to imagine. Astronauts getting bored. But think about spending weeks looking at the same loose hanging wires, the same floating co workers, the same blue planet, the same small window. That's where the tabascobasco sauce comes in. So one hypothesis for the reason for more hot sauce is that lack of sensory stimulation from your environment that you're compensating for it by putting hot sauce on. So yes, there's not a lot of colors in your environment, but you can have colors in your mouth. So there you have it. Even even astronauts, who arguably have the most awesome job in the world, get bored, and they find a way to relieve it. And it doesn't require too much imagination to compare the situation of astronauts to doing zazen, especially doing it in the Zendo and much more so doing it in sashin. The environment that we practice in is pared down. It's designed to minimize distractions, sitting still in silence, facing the same blank wall or divider, wearing the same brown robe, using the same mats and cushions, doing the Same thing together in lock step with one another, sitting, walking, chanting, eating the same meals as is in sashin, Following the same schedule day after day. And then there's the practice we're working on, whatever it is, it's very simple. Just keep returning to the breath, keep returning to the koan over and over again. So when you when you factor in human evolution and our social conditioning combined with the simplicity, and you could say starkness of Zen practice, it's no wonder that so many people report feeling bored at times.
We could see it as a kind of of dukkha, in that it's a state of dissatisfaction with the present moment. Dukkha is a Pali word that translates to mean suffering, and the first noble truth is that life is dukkha. Life is unsatisfactory, but that we experience it that way is only because we separate ourselves from it. We separate ourselves from things as they are.
Boredom is really just a passing mind state. It's just like hunger or sleepiness or feeling energized and joyful. They're all mind states, and they all pass, but we seem hardwired to want to do something about it, and that's because we've clung to this label, this association of of boredom as something negative.
In actuality, you know, there's, there's no such thing as boredom. In that regard, I. So without the label, what is it?
So? What we really need to do in those moments of boredom that we all encounter in the process of practice is to do the same thing we do in every other moment. Notice, don't oppose it. Return to your practice.
Redirect your attention, minus the labels and the judgments.
And if trusting that process isn't convincing enough, there's always the scientific perspective to consider and in many ways, sciences only recently catching up what the Buddha long taught Long ago
when it comes to so called boredom studies, which is an actual interdisciplinary field. There's a bunch of studies that were inspired by the pandemic, and that was a time when many, if not all of us felt like our lives were in limbo. Wasn't that long ago when our day to day routines, along with our sense of time, suddenly came to a halt. There was a real sense of absence and isolation that we experienced life as we knew it was gone, and later on, we learned that a lot of people filled that time by binging on Netflix and baking sourdough.
About the pandemic, specifically, I came across a New Yorker article from 2020 that was published at the height of it, and it's titled, What does boredom do to us and for us? And it gives an overview of various historical psychological and philosophical perspectives on boredom. And the author is Margaret Talbot, and this is what she says. I'm just going to pull an excerpt from it. She says, boredom, it's become clear, has a history, a set of social determinants, and in particular, a pungent association with modernity, leisure was one precondition enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling modern capitalism multiplied amusements and consumables while undermining spiritual sources of meaning that had once been conferred more or less automatically. So again, there's this association of boredom with the rise of capitalism and leisure time. She says expectations grew that life would be at least some of the time amusing and people, including oneself, interesting, and so did the disappointment when they weren't so including oneself, not only do did we develop this? Expectation that we need to be entertained by our external conditions, but that we ourselves need to be entertaining to others. And then she says, In the industrial city, work and leisure were cleaved in a way that they had not been in traditional communities, and work itself was often more monotonous and regimented. So I think of you know the difference between working on a factory assembly line or in a office cubicle with, say, jobs like cooking or farming that have a lot of variety and creativity involved. I
maybe that's why Truman wanted to go back to the kitchen. She She continues. Moreover, as the political scientist Eric ringmore points out in his contribution to the boredom studies reader boredom often comes about when we are constrained to pay attention. And in modern urban society, there was simply so much more that human beings were expected to pay attention to, factory whistles, school bells, traffic signals, office rules, bureaucratic procedures, chalk and talk, lectures, Zoom meetings, of course, in nizendo, We've got our own procedures, and we've also got sounds like the the wooden block bells and clappers. And aside from being important part of Zen training, playing and listening to those instruments as a practical purpose of calling our attention to the present.
And then a few paragraphs later, Talbot points to evidence that, contrary to the theory that boredom arose with modernity, that there's evidence it's existed for centuries, perhaps millennia, and probably has been around ever since humans have She says, One does find intimations of boredom, long before its mid 19th century, flowering Seneca in the first century evoked TDM vitae, a mood akin to nausea set off by contemplating the relentless cyclicality of life. So she's talking about not the indigenous Seneca people, but Seneca the Roman statesman and orator, and this is what he said. How long will things be the same. Surely I will be awake, I will sleep, I will be hungry, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end? Do all things go in a circle.
Well, yes, they do. It echoes the old Zen saying, when when tired, sleep, when hungry, eat. And then the line from the blue Cliff record, when cold, let the cold kill you. When hot, let the heat kill you. Meaning kill the thoughts, when cold, just be cold. When hot, just be hot.
It's really not possible to be bored. Because each and every moment we're receiving all of these sensory inputs, sounds, sights, smells, tastes, physical sensations,
every moment we're alive. So if we lock on to the idea that we're bored, we miss out on all of it. We cut ourselves off. So when we become restless and think that something's missing, something's lacking, something needs to be happening, but isn't the problem is where we're directing our attention. It's our mind and
it, where's our attention?
So so in that sense, boredom doesn't do anything to us. It's not like some external force bearing down on us. Where is it? Where do you see it?
But what it does for us is provide feedback. Very useful feedback. It's a signal. It's a cue, telling us to pay attention. Return to this. That's what boredom does for us.
The 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously said all of humanity's problems stem from The inability to sit quietly In a room alone you
