You Are Not Bored, You Are Just Afraid To Be Alone

If a king from 500 years ago walked into your bedroom tonight, he would think you are a god. Really. But if he watched you for 5 minutes, he would feel so sorry for you. You know why? Because he would see a person who holds the entire world in their hands, lying on their bed, staring at the small piece of glass which is the phone, and sitting with a sad face. We are all like that. Whatever we may do, at the end, we all go to our phones.

You see, with just one finger, you can listen to almost any song ever made. You can watch any story. You can see people talking, or laughing, or living on the other side of the planet. Right? It's so convenient these days. And yet, what do you do? You scroll. You watch something for 10 seconds, and then you push it away. You look at another video for 20 seconds, and you push it away. You spend 30 minutes looking for something to watch, and then you say, "There is nothing to watch. I feel so bold." Right?

We all treat boredom as an enemy. You see, we have everything to look at, but we have forgotten how to see actually. That is the pathetic thing with all of us. Think about how strange this is. A starving man dreams of a piece of bread, right? But a man who has eaten too much food loses his hunger completely. We are not bored because life has become small. We are bored because we have taken too much of everything. An endless feast does not bring happiness. It only kills your appetite for life. Similarly, when you have everything around you, we all become idiots.

Most people think boredom means nothing is happening around them. They think the day is too slow, or everything is quiet, or the world has become dull, and so on and so on. Right? So what do we do? We try to fix it with more noise. It doesn't work. That's like a noise trying to say, "I want to reach silence," but making more noise. It cannot find silence. If a video does not grab our attention for the first few seconds, we throw it away. If there's a quiet moment in our day, we immediately run to our phones to kill that quiet moment before it can even speak to us. We listen to people at two times the speed, right? We keep the video playing while we eat, and we check our messages while the movie is running, and so on and so on. So, if you only eat sugar every day, plain water tastes like nothing. Similarly, if your mind only feeds on excitement, normal life feels like a dead desert. We all must keep that in our mind.

You see, when your life is filled with loud noises from morning to night, ordinary peace feels like punishment. Sitting in a quiet room for 1 hour feels like being locked in a jail cell for many people. But the room has done nothing wrong to you. The silence has done nothing bad to you. The world did not become boring. Your mind just became too tired to feel. This is the truth. We blame the phone or the screen for not giving us something good. But the truth is much deeper than that. Boredom is not the lack of something to do. Boredom is the fear of being left alone with the person you are.

Watch what you do when you are waiting for an elevator, or standing in a line to buy food or something like that. Before you even think about it, your hand is already in your pocket, right? You unlock your phone before you even know you took it out. Why can a grown person not stand under the open sky for 20 seconds with empty hands? Because in those 20 seconds of quietness, something wakes up inside you. And this is important. The moment the noise stops, your real life comes knocking on the door. The sadness you never had time to cry about shows up. The fear that you are living the wrong life sits down next to you. The thought that your years are passing by too fast looks right in the eye.

That is why I tell people, "Feel it. It is important." When you're feeling sad, be sad. Don't try to run away from sadness. Let me tell you something from my own experience. I moved on from my first lover not because I became spiritual or things like that. I moved on faster and quickly because I allowed myself to feel. It's okay to sit and cry like a baby. It's okay to sit and cry like a mad man. It's okay. You heal by feeling. I mean, you heal when you feel. Not running away like a coward from the feeling. Just face it.

So, we do not look at our screens because the world is so interesting. We look at our screens because our own silence tells too much truth. Face it. It's okay. That's how things are. The fastest way to heal is to feel actually. We tell our friends that we are bored because "bored" sounds like a normal, safe word. But nobody is truly bored in this world. And this is the truth. We call it boredom because we are too afraid to call it fear. It is the fear of meeting yourself without any noise to protect you. We use entertainment like a pill to make ourselves numb. That's so idiotic. We do not watch videos because we love them. We watch them so we do not have to feel our own pain. Why are we like that? The screen does not take away your loneliness. It only keeps you company while you run away from yourself. You all must understand that. That is why it is important to turn within and question what you are doing. Why are you doing what you are doing? Are you seeing what I'm saying?

Now look at the nature of the mind. Why is it that after watching 10 videos, you still want to watch one more? Why is it that you can spend 4 hours looking at stories and still go to sleep feeling completely empty inside? Why? Because the mind can never be filled from outside. This is the truth. We are all filling our brain from outside: watching videos, reading spirituality, going to a guru, mailing me, having online sessions with me, or doing that blah blah blah. The mind can never be filled from outside. This is so important to understand. It can be filled only from within.

You see, the mind is always looking at the next minute. It tells you, "The next video will be a good one. The next song will make me happy. The next piece of news will satisfy me," and so on and so on. But the next thing never brings peace. The mind is like a fire. The more wood you feed, the hungrier it becomes. Even it happens with spirituality. The more spiritual books you read, you are not becoming spiritual. You are only becoming a pathetic intellectual creature who seems to appear like a spiritual person. True spirituality is living in this world and not letting the world live in you. That is the truth. Not running away to an ashram like a coward. Not sitting in meditation and abandoning your worldly duties. True spirituality is doing your duties with the intention, or with the understanding, that you are not the body and mind.

You see, you cannot heal an empty heart by giving pictures to the eyes, just by reading Upanishads or feeling yourself. You cannot become what you already are. It is important to turn your mind within and figure out who you actually are. Then you will understand that you have always been awareness. So, using entertainment to stop boredom is like drinking salt water to stop your thirst. Every cup you drink only makes your throat burn more. We think we own these devices, right? But the devices own our attention. A person who cannot sit quietly in a room for 30 minutes is not a free person. They are a prisoner who loves their chains because their chains are shiny.

So, what happens if you just stop? Now, coming to the main message. What happens if tonight you put the phone in another room, turn off the screen, and just sit on the floor? The moment you sit down, your mind will go to war with you. There's nothing wrong. It will tell you that you are doing something stupid. It will make your body feel restless. It will tell you that someone might need you, or that something very important is happening in this world right now that you must check, or you must see Harry Potter movies, or you must check what Emma Watson is doing, and so on and so on. Right? It will give you a hundred reasons to pick up the screen again.

You see, a bird that has lived in a small cage for years thinks that the open sky is a dangerous place. We all have heard that, right? But do not get up. Do not touch the phone. Do not touch the door. Just sit there and look at the feeling of boredom. It's okay. Feel it in your body. It is just a tight feeling in your chest, a little heat in the head, or a restless thing in your belly. Look at the feeling without running away, and ask yourself this question: "Who is the one that is watching this boredom?" Think about that for a second. If you can see the boredom, then you cannot be the boredom. If you can feel the restlessness, then you are not the restlessness.

You cannot wash dirt away with more dirt, right? You cannot cure a busy mind with more noise. Get that in your head first. Look at a mirror. When an ugly face looks into the mirror, does the glass become ugly? No. When the face walks away, does the mirror complain? It's clean and things like that. No. The boredom is just an ugly face looking into the mirror of your mind. But you are that awareness which is reflecting all these things. The clouds can be dark and heavy, but the sky behind the clouds is always clean and calm. Similarly, your mind might be a pathetic one, but you are not your mind. You are the unblemished awareness on which the mind itself exists. Your thoughts are just clouds. Your boredom is just a cloud. But who are you? Are you the one saying right now, "Aswin, enough man, stop talking, man"? Are you that person? Is the breath going in and out? Are you that? No, you are that unblemished awareness. This can be found not by listening to me, but by turning your mind within and seeing things for yourself.