A certain level of boredom can happen after spending a lot of time alone, not working or engaging in daily activities with others, no TV, reading books or surfing on the internet.

This was written a few months into a two-year retreat:

I am bored. It’s been like this for some time now. Nothing is going on. Same place, same mind, same practice — everything is just the same. Same, same, same. It is so boring.

In this boredom — it seems to be coded into me that boredom is not a good feeling. Intelligent people never get bored! I hear my parents say. The feeling is if you’re bored, it means you are copping out or getting off the hook. It’s bad and/or something bad will come of it. It’s like the saying, idleness leads to all evil. Boredom can easily be seen as laziness: you are a huge couch potato. Not good.

Boredom is not productive in terms of things you can show people, I did this and that, all these amazing things I have accomplished.

So, boredom is like being close to the point of non-existence, it activates a feeling of not existing because you don’t have anything you can see you’ve done or you’re doing, producing, even “hitting the mark” of something great you think or say.

Of course, you can turn boredom into a practice and say, as Trungpa Rinpoche said, that boredom is the gateway to freedom, or no self.

Then you can use boredom to go through that gateless gate. And then, easily, there’s a feeling of now I’m doing something again, I’m becoming great and excited because I’m going through boredom. There’s just no escape. The ego will always try to come and take over and then I feel entertained and excited again. It’s just a distraction and then it drops dead again.

But that’s all right, there’s not a problem with that. Boredom is often in me like a feeling in the body, of aggravation, irritation. It activates a strong feeling of restlessness. There is this big NO there to that feeling, ‘that’s the last thing that I can accept,’ to feel bored. There is a vague feeling of being sucked into the unknown. It’s a feeling of leaving the conscious realm for the unconscious, there is a subtle but distinct sense of resistance or even fear of being sucked into nothingness.

But recognizing the reaction or feeling and allowing it to be, the restlessness ceases. And then there really is nothing. It’s so true what Trungpa says, then there’s just nothing there, no one there. And it does not come as an expansion at this point.

There is just nothing there, there really is no one. So, the experience of boredom is really a restlessness and underneath a fear of realizing, no one there. Boredom is where you get to really face it, you’re nothing! It’s just rare to get to this point, because we usually have to work and earn money, work to survive and take care of ourselves and family. And never have the privilege of truly getting bored.

I have this time, I’m very lucky, when I don’t have to think in those terms right now. I don’t even know what the gift is of going through boredom, just realizing there’s no one there, which is anyways the truth. So, there’s no gain in it, because it is already what you are, and it doesn’t take care of anything practical for you. However, it’s complete freedom.