Are You Bored?

March 22nd, 2015 | 21 comments
Are You Bored?

Life is a journey. What kind of journey is your life? Are you inspired, creative, and excited? Or are you bored because everything seems so routine and predictable? And finally, what makes the difference between these two experiences? It all has to do with the context that you establish for living.

There are two main ways to establish a context for life. The first way is to see life as a profound, unpredictable journey of evolution where you are divinely guided by a love that is bigger than yourself. This is the way of seeing life as a magical, mystical event that unfolds with the beauty of daily unexpected surprises. This is the way of curiosity, exploration, and feeling altogether conscious and alive! It is the way of miracles. In this context, you walk hand-in-hand with the Divine. You live a purposeful, exciting life as a co-creator with God.

The second way is to see life as a journey whereby you attempt to master the art of doing what you are supposed to do according to society and other people. Your goal is to please others and get as much positive feedback as you can. The only way you know that you are doing a good job is when other people tell you. God and the divine become compartmentalized in a way that you can control that experience and make sure that it doesn’t mess up your life. In this context, the ego is your main partner. The ego doesn’t like God’s involvement, because it’s too broad and unpredictable. The problem with the divine where the ego is concerned, is that it puts the ego out of its league altogether.

When you partner with the Divine, you are working together with a force and a love that is beyond your thinking mind. You are partnering with something that is beyond the familiar controls of society and beyond what is referred to as “the norm”. The norm simply refers to a highly controlled environment where everyone agrees that the same behavior in everybody is the ideal scenario.

The only problem with this so-called normal scenario is that each human being is unique. Every human being has his or her own unique purpose that only they can fulfill. If you adopt a rule that you have to be like everyone else, then you will be forced to sideline God, the universe, and whatever other natural, benevolent forces are here to work on your behalf. These forces are present in your life to assist you in reaching your full potential as an individual. Their goal is never to help you be like everyone else.

little girl looking boredIf you choose the path of copying whatever society and other people dictate as the norm, in order to fit in and gain the approval of others, you will not only have to sideline God and the universe, you will also have to sideline your unique, individual self. You will begin to live a life where you deny and repress. You will have to effectively corral and maybe even bury your higher self. And because your life is no longer about you, but is instead about other people, you will have taken the path of fear. You will be ruled by the fear of doing something wrong and having others disapprove of you. Life becomes a boring routine where you try to spiritually live completely on your own.

On this path of aloneness and fear, you will eventually find yourself on a downward spiral that begins with frustration and anxiety. It ends with unconsciousness and the deadening emptiness of boredom and resignation. You simply become resigned to feeling hopeless. You become resigned to your excuses. You decide that nothing can ever change for you and you learn to settle. Essentially, you give up because you think you have it all figured out.

You have now become domesticated. You are subdued and thus appropriately tamed. The excitement of true spirituality begins to wither and die. At best, you may settle for religious rituals that are as routine as driving your car to work and not remembering how you got there.

So what’s the alternative? The alternative is to open your heart to a much bigger journey that is not entirely controlled by human hands. You can recognize the potential of your life to be a journey of unpredictable, amazing evolution guided by divine Love. This is the journey of higher consciousness. This is the path of waking up to something greater than yourself and recognizing how real that something is. What can you do to open up to that incredible potentiality?

You can start by realizing that perhaps you don’t know everything there is to know about yourself. You can start by letting go of your assumptions. By the time a person reaches the level of boredom, they essentially believe that they know everything there is to know. Period. And that is precisely why they are bored! There is no more mystery to life. Life is merely a routine that’s all been figured out.

This is also how relationships die. The routine becomes so paramount, so utterly unconscious, that it is mistaken for knowledge. “I know what to do because I know what to expect” is not knowledge about yourself or another person. It’s called a rut. A comfort zone of repetitiveness. It’s a situation where both parties behave like unconscious robots and then wonder where the magic went.

The magic didn’t go anywhere. You just stopped looking. You thought you had it all figured out, so why bother? What if you were wrong? Human beings, yourself included, have an endless array of things going on inside of them. So why are you bored? Is life boring? Or are you simply holding a very boring perspective on life? I would submit that it’s the latter.

So the first thing to do is to jar yourself awake again. Stop assuming that you know everything about your life. Wake up and get conscious. Refuse to accept your own boring view. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Now you can be open to something greater.

bird on branchWild birds are a wonderful example of what it’s like to live an exciting, unpredictable life that is a part of something much larger than themselves. They are vital, awake, alive, and aware. You will never see a bored outdoor bird. Each bird lives in a way that it will absolutely reach its full potential as a bird, whatever that may be.

Contrast that with a domesticated bird in a cage. That bird lives an entirely organized, routine life. It knows exactly what will happen from morning to night. There is nothing sadder than watching a perfectly domesticated bird in a cage that is literally bored out of its mind with the utter predictability of its environment. Full potential for that animal will never be a known experience.

If you relate to the domesticated bird, then your cage exists in your mind. It’s what can be referred to as a closed mind to opportunity. You simply have no reason to fly because the cage door is closed. The lock on the cage door is comprised of reasons why you can’t. It’s comprised of everything you think you have figured out.

Opening the cage door is opening your heart to something greater. It’s having the humility to recognize and admit that there could be more than what you know and think you have figured out. It’s being fed up with your routine way of thinking, perceiving, and of pretending to be in total control of your reality.

Now you can let God in. You can open your tired arms to receive help of a much higher order of magnitude. This is not a religious experience. This is a spiritual experience that does not require a middle man of any kind. God does not need human organizations and brokers in order to reach you. This Infinite Presence of Love is certainly not that powerless. Religions might serve as reminders, but they can never serve as a substitute for the Real Thing.

Once you make your own personal connection to that higher power of all creation, your life can become an exciting adventure. The beauty of this is that you can trust that love and thus relish in the unpredictability of a life that is beyond your imagination. Let the amazing, personal journey of your evolution begin. Become like the wild bird who is supported by the entire universe to reach its full potential. Free yourself from the mental dullness of thinking you know everything. Open your heart and fly!

 

bird in flight