WHEN ONE FEELS THAT LIFE IS BORING, REPETITIVE, THREATENING …
.. uneasiness, indifference and helplessness eat us from within.
ARTICLE BY PSYCHOLOGIST SERGIO SANZ NAVARRO (SPAIN)
Do you feel that your life has lost all its flavour and has become monotonous? Have you lost the joy of living? In this text you will find some of the causes that extinguish the flame of life and some suggestions, full of poetry, that will invite you to re-ignite it.
I decided to write this article because boredom or existential boredom has always been one of the great issues of my life and is something that hasn’t been tackled in depth by psychology as, unlike depression it is not considered to be of a serious categorisation. Neither is it considered by literature, not considered a source of inspiration like other states of being which are regarded as having a halo of beauty, and thus melancholy.
Pascal said that only whoever is capable of being alone in their room is capable of being happy. He referred to those who are able to confront boredom, that strange sensation that mixes so many pale emotions while being a fierce mirror that returns an exact reflection of the existential moment in which we find ourselves.
What are we bored of? Ourselves ? Of always responding with the same defensive patterns at every opportunity?
For the psychologist Boyle “boredom is the precursor to creativity,” because it is a state that challenges us to create our life. If something bores us, it is because it is repetitive, and that monotony comes from a certain vagrancy or laziness of a spirit that makes daily concessions to fear. When fear manages to gain ground, energy gradually stagnates causing the blackish gangrene of uneasiness to spread throughout the whole being, leaving us dying, without oxygen and resisting the new. Resisting to opening, licking our fingers from the dry plate of a banquet that once brought us completeness.
To want to know what is going to happen is one of the ambassadors of fear.
Wanting to know what is going to happen makes us almost involuntary slam the door shut when life is about to bring us those fresh winds of love that we long for but that in the end we fear.
To want to know everything that is going to happen, to prepare, is to mutilate will and desire, and this is how we cease to be surprised by life and ourselves. That control comes from the fear of feeling needy and vulnerable, and that chronic, self-immolating resistance leads us to go out and experience the absence of desire. In this sense, we differentiate between situational boredom which is the absence of the object of desire, and existential boredom which is the absence of desire itself. Those who suffer from this latter type might be considered as enlightened by Buddhists. But this would be a misconception because there is no peace with that absence of desire. On the contrary, there is a tremendous yearning to recover it again and to taste that chemical and electric cascade of pleasure that runs through the body and caresses every corner of the being.
As Jose Antonio Marina said, boredom is: “The poor relative of anguish.” It is not about two different categories, but rather that both are established within one dimensional category where anguish is the climax of boredom, and boredom a fog of anguish that soaks and weighs on the soul, accompanied by a dull and stubborn pain that pushes down our constant impulses to lift our spirits. That damp fog, motivated by the pyrotechnics of the imagination, takes us with its fireworks to look for that sensation of completeness that we yearn for so much. Paradoxically, the entrance to that illuminated amusement park of neon lights can make us rush into a bleak ghost park of dimmed lights, whose vomit tends to return us again to frustration. Trying to attract the new, replacing our yellowish thanks and old glories in the present, only condemning us to taste a flavourless gum once again.
There are expressions like “wasting time” or “dead time” that allude to moments that, far from nourishing or regenerating us, we experience as an abyss that we fear being sucked into to disappear into oblivion. A sense of alarm and guilt, as if by calming down, the whole world would collapse upon us and crush us.
These are the moments from which many of us flee, camouflaged in the frenzy of doing things non stop. And this is how we stumble upon the unpleasant feeling that we are missing out on something wonderful that is happening elsewhere. Other times it happens that we come across unused or repressed potential, and then we feel we are wasting ourselves.
If I had to quote a book that collects a whole literary and philosophical collection of those who went deeper into this subject, it would be: “The School of Boredom” by Mexican Luigi Amara. In it, the author goes into his house for 40 days in order to face that sensation that he fears so much and that breathes in his ear when he sits alone on his worn-out sofa. Luigi’s attempt is based on hope and the supposition of being able to cross an threshold within that boredom that could lead to inner peace. But what happens, to the contrary, is that he despairs and doesn’t achieve it, as none of the authors he cites do either. And what he can’t stand is feeling that he doesn’t feel, because boredom etymologically comes from “ab horrere” meaning without horror. It was applied to enemies who were not fearsome, who could not kill you in combat. That is, something that does not even make you feel horror. Like a fear of not feeling that has arisen from a fear of feeling. A maddening limbo where will and reason resound like balls in the narrow corridors of pain of a pinball machine.
When boredom can not be transcended, it tends to veer towards transgression due to the desire to feel something. Even if it has to bypass a moral law or something considered a bad habit. Hence a multitude of addictions are a flight of boredom and crimes that appear in newspapers are motivated by it. Things that show us the most ugliest side of this phenomenon.
Luigi Amara went to Las Vegas, the city of fun for another 40 days and there he only found “boredom in motion”.
Schopenhauer said that the ship of our life sails between two great monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, agitation and tedium …. and tedium is that voracious monster that devours us with its yawn and that Baudelaire painstakingly portrayed in his poem “To the reader”:
“Our souls strive, our bodies erode
Meanness, guilt, stupidity, error,
And, as beggars feed their lice,
We hospitably indulge our regrets.
Stubborn in sins, lax in intentions,
With expectations we pay what is confessed
And we make the muddy road happy
Believing, in vile tears, to wipe away our faults.
On the pillow of evil, is Satan Trimegistus
Who with patience cradles our stunned spirit
and the precious metal of our will,
completely evaporated by the work of that alchemist.
The devil is the one who handles the strings that move us!
We find charm in sordid objects
And, undaunted, surrounded by hideous darkness,
We take daily steps down to the Orc.
Like the dissolute one who kisses and nibbles
The lacerated breast of an old harlot,
If an occasion of clandestine pleasure is offered
We squeeze it to the end like a dry orange.
Dense and tingling, like a million helminths,
A village of demons dances in our heads
And, when we breathe, Death, in the lungs
It descends, the invisible river, with a dull weep.
If the poison, the dagger, the fire, the rape,
Are not yet adorned with his rare drawings
The banal scrim of our poor luck,
It is because our spirit was not daring enough.
Furthermore, among the jackals, panthers, lynxes,
The apes, the snakes, scorpions and vultures,
The howling monsters, whistling and rampant,
In the hellish mishmash of our vices
There is another more evil one, more gloomy and unclean!
Without making ugly grimaces or yelling coarse cries
He would gladly turn the earth into debris
And mid yawn, he would devour the globe;
It’s Tedium! – Inundated with an involuntary cry,
He imagines gallows, while smoking his weed.
Reader, you know this delicate monster well,
-Hypocritical reader, my neighbour, my brother!”
What is the way out of such misery?
There is a corpse agonizing inside us. A Frankenstein that we create to survive as a substitute for our true self and to which it is increasingly difficult for us to breathe. That corpse is full of bullets, failed expectations, unfulfilled desires, and has revolted against us in a pathetic and grim attempt to survive. It looks at us with its sullen gaze narrowed with disgust and suspicion, but it holds on and feeds on complaint and ungratefulness, control and hatred. Why do you think Zombie series are so successful lately? Seeing them allows us to cathartically download an unconscious reality that drowns us from the inside.
To bear this corpse is to live existence as if impregnated in a web of dead skin. They call Ayahuasca the “rope of the dead”. With it, many people experience the anticipated death of that living corpse, and even smell its stench.
And I say ‘in advance’ in the same way I say quasi-definitive, because ayahuasca is the only one that allows us to see the ghostly and macabre face of that living wound that governs our life which is hurt by rejection and made of dead flesh and pus and artificial defence mechanisms that we have created so that no one touches that wound we hide so much. I once saw it. I saw my wound. I saw its face and how it made decisions for me. How it perceived and “loved” on my behalf, taking control of my life and wearing my fear reluctantly. It is necessary to be very attentive whenever that uprooted shadow, made of fury and of the past, tries to usurp the throne that corresponds to love.
Other medicines we use, such as bufo alvarius, allow us to live a momentary and eternal experience of reconciliation and complete gratitude for existence. It also makes us perceive the ridiculous and booming voice of the ego with which tedium is woven. That clumsy folly of a limited compression, obsessed with the leprous perception of a world where everything and everyone is missing something. Something that only an overwhelming energy of infinite love could heal.
Returning from the ayahuasca experience we see how that voice is made and how it entangles us in a prison of doubt, but at least we now understand its absurdity a little better, and we already know the possibility that such a voice does not exist.
At our inner evolution retreats we offer you the tools for you yourself to give a quietus to that corpse – see in this blog: cognitive dissonances as a path to transformation – and you can light that fire again within you that destroys everything that is out of date inside you so that the renewed winds of innocence and the desire to live may emerge within you.
Sergio Sanz Navarro
[email protected]
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT AYAHUASCA:
ABOUT AYAHUASCA – What you need to know before the experience.