Boredom

 

 

Question :

Osho, do you ever get bored? Why not drop the ashram and live in the forest?

 

 

VEETGYAN, WHAT ARE YOU talking about? What ashram? I am living in the forest! These people are my trees — orange trees, aflame with flowers. Can you find a more wild jungle than this?

 

And how can I be bored with so many beautiful people around me? with such a celebrating existence? If you feel bored, that simply shows you must be insensitive, you must be thick. Your skull has to be broken. Otherwise, where can you find a better existence than this? This is the only existence there is, AND the perfect one. All is as it should be. Trees are green, and roses are red. All is as it should be! How can you get bored?

 

Boredom comes out of insensitivity. Because you are insensitive you cannot see the subtle changes that go on happening around you. Hence it looks repetitive: “The sun rises every morning, the same sun — how can one remain without being bored?” But it is NOT the same sun! It is constantly changing. It is FIRE — how can the fire remain the same? Watch fire… it is constantly changing. Flames are changing. It is constant flux. Sun is a liquid fire. It is never the same.

 

But, thinking that it is the same, you don’t look at the morning, and the clouds are new every day. Their forms are new. They take new colors. Every day they celebrate the coming of the sun. And the birds and the trees and the whole existence every moment is new, AND fresh — as fresh as a dewdrop in the morning. And so are people!

 

But you are dull, you are insensitive. You think it is the same woman you have lived with for twenty years. You have stopped looking at her. You have not looked at her for MANY years, not into her eyes. You have not touched her. You have forgotten her body smell. Then it is boring; then it is the same woman again and again.

 

It is NOT really boring — it is just that your eyes have collected much dust. Life becomes boring the more dust you collect in your eyes. The life becomes just formal, a ritual, empty. You go on doing things. Slowly slowly, all your acts become mechanical, robot like. Then life is boredom.

 

But I have never seen two moments alike. Each moment has its own beauty. Each moment is Only for once. If you miss it, you miss it forever; it will not be repeated again. God is not repetitive. God is very original — he never sings the same song again. If you hear the same song again, then something must be wrong with you.

 

It happened: A woman was singing, it was her birthday. She sang late in the night. Her voice was just horrible, but the neighbors were somehow tolerating it because it was only once in a year that her birthday used to come. So they had become tolerant about it. But that night she continued and continued… it was getting really late, two o’clock in the night. And a man just in front of her house could not sleep; tried in every way — tried all the tricks. Tossed and turned and did TM… etc., but nothing helped. She was driving him crazy, so he opened his window and shouted at her, “Lady, now it is time. You stop! otherwise I will go mad.”

 

The woman opened her door and said, “What are you talking about? It is almost one hour since I stopped!”

 

But what happened to this man? He was already mad. One hour before she had stopped, but he was listening, listening, listening… it was something in HIS mind. It was his inner gramophone.

 

Just watch: when you see a rose flower, your inner gramophone says, “You have seen it before. It is the same rose flower, nothing special about it. I have seen better.” You look at the moon and the inner gramophone says, “So what?! This is the same moon, and we have seen it many times.”

 

There are millions of people who never look at the sky. If suddenly one night all the stars disappear, they will not become aware of it. It may take a few days for them; when the news comes in the newspapers that “All the stars have simply disappeared from the world,” then they will look at the sky. And then they will miss them, and they will make much fuss and they will say, “How unfortunate! And we had not seen the stars for many years and they were here.”

You are bored because of your inner gramophone. I have none in site me. Each person is fresh, each moment is fresh. They a,Rex not repetitions — they are all unique. And I remain thrilled, I remain ecstatic.

 

Your life, Veetgyan, must have become an empty ritual. You must be moving through things, dragging. Not even under-standing the meaning, why you are doing these things. You come home and you kiss your wife — you have to, but there is no kiss, there is no kissing, there is no ecstasy in it. Just a dull phenomenon. And if you feel tired and bored, I can understand.

 

Life, slowly slowly, becomes so mechanical that it loses ALL meaning. All meaning oozes out of it. Then it is just a dull ritual. To live this way is to live irreligiously. That’s my definition of religion: to live joyously, ecstatically, thrilled by each moment that knocks on your door, is to live religiously.

 

Religion is nothing but the Al chemical process in which all your insensitivity dissolves, and you become utterly sensitive, delicate, vulnerable. Then each moment is samadhi, is God. is enlightenment.

 

–Osho, “The Perfect Master, Vol 1, #8”