Man is the bored creature. He is bored because he fills his mind with ideas of what could be, severing his connection to the place he is in. This is the psychological reason why no creature expects variety and novelty from his environment like the (modern) human being.
When you are enveloped in this way of approaching reality—that it must be altered and made more interesting—you don’t really see that the effort to make it more interesting is motivated precisely by the most profound inner sensation of unease, of boredom, of monotony. The human being seeks salvation from the horrendous inner monotony from exploring the external world, and the various ways in which he is able to influence it, to poke his finger into it and see it push some stuff out on the other side.
The modern world is precisely a manifestation of the refusal to confront the inner abyss. This ever-hastening plunge into novelty—manifesting itself as drug exploration, social media, “the metaverse,” intricate and ever-abstractifying technology etc.—is in its background nothing but man’s attempt to escape his inner sensation of boredom.
Let’s explore another way to approach boredom, with the help of G.K. Chesterton.
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A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
emphases mine
The child, as Chesterton says in the above quote from Orthodoxy, is so overflowing with vitality that he finds the greatest pleasure in observing the mundane and having things repeated. A child is able to find great delight in being thrown in the air repeatedly by his father, or in throwing and catching a ball, or in doing anything at all which to the observing “sensible adult” seems like a great waste of time. One can observe this in dogs as well—“Do it again,” their exulted mannerisms propound as you throw a stick far away and the dog brings it back time and time again with the same enthusiasm.
It is, then, obviously for this reason that Jesus said that in order to reach the Heavenly Kingdom, you must become again like a child. The Heavenly Kingdom is precisely finding the greatest joy in apparent monotony; the Garden of Eden, as has been said by the mystics throughout time, is the world you are now observing. The only thing different is that you no longer impose conditions on it for it to be any other way. Another quote most fitting from the same work by Chesterton:
A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.
This is the whole thing about Adam’s—mankind’s—exile from Eden. His mind is everywhere; he does not see that the gate to enter Eden is any gate at all. Any activity done without ulterior purposes other than itself, with the focus on the activity itself and not scattered all over, is the gate of Eden.1 “All paths lead to me, Arjuna.” What Krishna left out is that all paths are him. Arjuna—sort of in the same position as Adam—from his worries about morality cannot see that he is already enveloped in the divine presence wheresoever he might turn his head. No path is needed to reach It, because It is one with the path. And so are you.
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The divine principle operates thus in completely the opposite manner of the modern human. We are exhausting our physical organisms—within and without our bodies—by trying to cater to the deceptive desires of the mind. We do all this to escape from the inner boredom which children, animals, God, and the rare individual who becomes again like a child, transmute into a source of immeasurable wonder in the world. And in running away from this boredom instead of confronting it, we are enslaved to it, and carry it wherever we go; wasting energy on pointless escapism instead of working with love with the world.
Much of what Jesus said is centered around this. To be poor in spirit, for instance, means simply to embrace this inner emptiness, realizing it is but “a window to be looked through.”2 When you embrace it, you see that because it is empty you can experience everything to the fullest. The inner void is empty so that you see and live through it—the clearer (emptier) it is from the muck of your preconceptions and culturally conditioned ideas about what is or should be, the clearer the infinitely intricate wonders of the world of creation present themselves to you, and the better your ability to find God’s joy and ecstatic self-expression in all that is.
This is the genesis of the childlike wonder which allows you to eternally find interesting the monotonous repetitions of the ever-repeating rises and dawns of the sun, of the changing of days and nights, of walking one step at a time, of washing the dishes one at a time… returning to the Garden you left only in your imagination.
Thank you for reading.
But only when you go through one at a time!
“Inner emptiness is not a void to be filled with comforts; it is a window to be looked through.” —Alan Watts
It has taken me a hot minute to find the time to read this but it did not disappoint. You’re a rare gem on the internet. 🏆