Boredom

 

 

No animal is ever bored. Look at a buffalo, chewing grass, the same grass every day, sitting and chewing and chewing, never bored. You may get bored looking at her: she is not bored. No animal is ever bored, you cannot bore an animal. Too thick, too dense a mind – how can you bore? For boredom a very, very high sensitivity is needed, the higher your sensitivity, the higher will be your boredom, the more will be your boredom. Children are not bored; they still belong more to the animal world than to the human, they are human animals. They still enjoy simple things, they are not bored. Every day they can go hunting for butterflies and they will never be bored – and they are ready to go every day. Have you ever talked to children, told them a story, the same story? They will say: Tell it again. And you tell it again and they will say: Tell it again.

 

You cannot bore children. You cannot bore animals. Boredom is human, a very great quality, in fact, because it exists only on a higher plane of consciousness. When one is very sensitive one feels boredom – life seems meaningless, there seems to be no purpose in it; one feels as if it is just an accident, whether you are here or not makes no difference. The moment comes when one is so utterly bored that one starts thinking of committing suicide.

 

What is suicide? It is simply dropping out. It is just saying that enough is enough. I don’t want to play the game again. I want to drop out of the whole game. Unless this point is reached, religion is not possible, because only from this point can you either commit suicide, or transform yourself. Here is the crossroads.

 

So this has been my observation: people who become prematurely religious simply waste their time. To become prematurely religious means to become religious without being really fed up with life, not yet rally bored. The game still has some attraction. It may be sex, it may be money, it may be politics, power. But something in life still has an attraction. Then prematurely you have become religious, and this will not help: you will simply waste your time. One has to be utterly bored; life has no more attraction; all the dreams are shattered; all the rainbows have disappeared; there are no more flowers, only thorns; you are saturated with it. Then there is no effort on your part to leave it or renounce it -- remember. If there is any effort to renounce it, it means there was a little attraction left. Otherwise, what is the effort? When you are fed up with a thing, do you renounce it? No, there is no need to renounce. It is already renounced.

 

If you escape to the forest, from whom are you escaping? From some attractions lingering in the world - otherwise why? Where are you escaping to, and why? Even in escape you are showing that you are attached to something. Remember this -- this is the rule: from wherever you escape, there is your attraction. If you escape from woman, woman is your attraction. If you escape from politics, politics is your attraction. And the faster you run, the greater is the attraction.

 

This is premature, you will be called back. You may go to the Himalayas, but you will think that you have been chosen a president of a country. You will dream. Sitting in the Himalayas in this lonely cave, you will find many apsaras, beautiful women, coming from heaven. They are your mind's children. Nobody is sending beautiful women to you: it is from woman that you have escaped.

 

Premature. There is no renunciation in a premature mind. Maturity is needed, and maturity means you have lived life, known it to the very depth, and found it lacking. There is nothing in it, the journey is complete; you can live in the market, or you can go to the monastery. It doesn't matter, it is all the same. Life is no longer an attraction: wherever you are it makes no difference. This point is the point of suicide. And this point is the point of SANNYAS. Suicide or SANNYAS: this is the alternative. And, unless your SANNYAS is an alternative to suicide, it is not very significant.

 

This is the point where you can feel the difference between a religious mind and a secular mind. A secular mind has no alternative. When he is bored with life, suicide is the only way, there is no alternative to it.

 

-Osho, “The Grass Grows By Itself, #6“