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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://www.egroups.com/group/Sitaram

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=74798

http://www.metaphoria.org/ac4t9512.html

A teacher writes:

As a teacher, I often hear my students say that they are bored.
History is boring. Math is boring. Homework is boring. Studying and
watching history happen on the news is boring. Many say that the
towns that they live in are boring. There is nothing to do.

When I hear my students say that they are bored, I tell them to go
and spend some time at the lumberyard. When they ask what I mean I
say that if they go to the lumberyard, they will feel right at home
with all the other boards. When students tell me that they are bored,
they are asking for sympathy.

=======================

The western mind is so busy trying to figure people and things out
(including ourselves) that the silence which occurs when no thinking
takes place is alarming to the ego. This ego's fear can be manifest
as boredom, a signal that the ego is no longer being entertained. A
need to eliminate the boredom then sets in and we resume our hunt for
distraction. The distraction may be television, food, emotional
outburst, negative behavior, obsessive involvement with a hobby,
excessive running, being a couch potato or walking around announcing
that we are bored as if the universe really was going to do something
about our internal state of affairs, or as if someone other than we
ourselves are responsible for what we feel.

In The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, the cofounder of the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology states:

Minds are simply what brains do. Whenever we speak about a mind,
we're speaking of the processes that carry our brains from state to
state.

Sitaram adds - Mind is the melody, brain is the orchestra

Minds are pleasure machines. Minds can also be machines for suffering.

Amidst a seemingly boring job it is possible to remain mindful.

The answer lies partly in internal decisions that we make and the
state of affairs of our psychic house that we choose to accept for
ourselves.

Spirituality is the moment-to-moment internal state of affairs of our
mind.

Our preoccupation with the monetary aspects of everything has robbed
us of the simple pleasures of doing them. We overvalue the object and
undervalue the process.

We cannot be bored while practicing unconditional love. When we are
faithfully involved in the act of giving of ourselves, of caring, we
become one with the giving. Thus, the giver and the giving are one
and the same. To reach this state of oneness (which some might call
enlightenment) we need to take the first step of accepting
responsibility for our world view. It is we who are responsible for
our boredom or the lack of it. It is we who decide whether or not to
volunteer.

Erik H. Erikson states,

Care is the widening concern for what has been generated by love,
necessity, or accident; it overcomes the ambivalence adhering to
irreversible obligation.

Finding the Kingdom Within

If those who lead you say to you:

"See, the Kingdom is in the sky,"
then the birds of the sky will precede you.

If they say to you, "It is in the sea," then the fish will precede
you.

Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.

When you come to know yourselves, you will become known and you will
realize that it is you who are the sons and daughters of the living
Father and Mother.

But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is
you who are that poverty.

- from "The Gospel of Saint Thomas"

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