Boredom! and dullness! and dissatisfaction!

Boredom is Time's most evil trick. But like all things wretched in this world, it serves a noble purpose.

Boredom is not death. Death is death. Death is an end and a great mystery. It still contains within itself some hope, and some excitement: for we do not know what comes afterwards: perhaps it will be a final explosive release from the earthly body – exciting times!

But boredom is to be in a dreamless sleep whilst awake. Boredom is not exciting enough to be death. It is hollow and predictable - boredom followed by boredom.

If we had to find a uniting factor which linked every human being of every culture in every instance of history, I would say that those human beings eventually grew bored of things, and that they must always distract themselves from such a feeling.

And why not - boredom is wretched. It is not like tranquillity, at peace with the world. No one ever chose to be bored. I imagine a great number of us would prefer death in 'glorious' battle over a dull, long life in the fields.

But let us not be too harsh on old boredom. We grow bored for a reason - a very good reason. Just as to put your hand into fire causes pain, boredom is the 'pain' of lack of variety.

If we never grew bored, we would repeat things incessantly. If old songs stayed forever young, we would never listen to anything else. If we never grew bored of ourselves, we would lose an immense motive to adapt and change.

Boredom, dissatisfaction, dullness - these are platforms to greater things; necessary stages of pain to force us into growth.

Retreating from boredom is hopeless. The truly great know this. They know that they must suffer to ascend mediocrity, and so when boredom strikes, and when the times are dull, they know that they have to ride it out, not hide from it, or pretend it isn't there, or buy another smartphone app.

Be dissatisfied and boring! Turn away from revelment and joy! Do not try to lead an exciting life! In dissatisfaction be forced into creativity. In dourness be strengthened against life's occasional misery. In dullness expect nothing but grey skies and let every gleam of sunlight be a bonus.

How could such a person ever become bored (for very long) again?

Selim 'Selim' Talat

Life in 3D

 Once you overcome frustration, the world in 3D is not that bad.

Density. The passage of time. Places being so far away. The slowness of travel. These are all characteristics of life in 3D. Light for example, light is so pure that it doesn’t have to sit on an aeroplane for 30 hours in order to get to Thailand. No, light travels fast. It lives in the dimension of the eternal now. How about time?

Time, slow at work, fast when having fun. Supposedly eternal. Time. We crave to grow up and then wish never to be old. Time. It takes TIME to master any craft, any art. And then there is density and matter, a matter that blooms and decays. There is tiredness. Having to feed a body, your body. These, as I said, are all traits of life in 3D. The Third dimension which causes what? What effect can this have on our being, which is so full of wishes and whims which we want immediately satisfied? Full of desires we are. Pleasures and pains. And boom! Here we find ourselves, in the third dimension, the dimension of density, of matter, of the passage of time, of slow travel… what do our desires have to face? Frustration. That’s right. We live in frustration because of our unfulfilled dreams and expectations. Because our mind and being long for an immediacy that is not from this world, or more like, not from this dimension. But don’t get me wrong, its not all bad, this is the only dimension we know in which we can taste food and watch sunsets, so its not that bad.

We just have to get used to the awkwardness. Maybe the elements that our body is composed of, the atoms which are claimed to have belonged to stars, want to live and behave in the same way that they do in space (freedom) and they find themselves trapped in the small confines of 3D life. Maybe our deep mind and self belong to the less denser realms and that’s why we can’t grasp… our own selves? Because we are trapped in 3D. Dense. We see it with our eyes and touch it with our hands.

The third dimension is the dense dimension that gives us matter, and matter, many believe, is us! As in, you are your body! Are you? Are you a being from the 3^rd dimension? I thought so, earthling.

Thus, we deal with the frustration of living life as if we had to cross a bridge in order to do pretty much everything. There is a bridge between our ideas and desires and reality. Time and space are that bridge. So we feel, frustrated. Then we try to beat time. We start to ‘work’ towards things (some call it the process of life). We create habits, we create life patterns in order to organise our life in 3D.

We feed our body with healthy things if we wish to be healthy, we cannot simply wish it, willed it, attract it and be it (or can we?). We turn the frustration into our ally. We can learn to enjoy the passage of time and how with it, we receive our wishes and desires like little drops of mother pearl that come to satisfy our previously frustrated being. Things here are dense and slow, but once you grow some patience and learn to accept how linear time works in the 3^rd dimension, you will be much much happier.

The End.

Eliza Veretilo

Something must be done!

'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.' Blaise Pascal

I have often wondered if Man (in the gender-neutral sense of the word) has a nature. To ask this question does risk being massively general, not to mention seeing Man as a fixed entity, rather than an evolving entity. It is also a question running the risk of generalizing ones own cultural heritage (or brain-spamming) across a vastly varied globe.

I do, however, think Man has a nature. And that nature is 'to do things'. It sounds a bit obvious and general - and you might accuse this vague answer of being meaningless. Of course Man has to do things! Yet I am not saying 'to do things' as a massively broad prophecy. I am in fact saying that Man would rather do something over nothing. Given a choice between grief and nothing, Man would choose grief; it agonises Man less than boredom.

Man is a creature of motion, never able to stay still without a powerful reason to do so. The essence of Man is therefore action. Even stupid or 'evil' action will suffice over inaction. In fact, what does Man call more evil than inaction? (He may also call inaction anti-social or cowardly!)

The gaps in Man's endless movement - which we call holi-days, are windows set into his tightly packed schedule. And those holi-days are not spent in rest, but grief! If the sabbatical were to be truly a time of rest, Man would do nothing with them, rather than something. Sadly for Man, he is obliged, even coerced, into going on holi-days in an attempt to prove to the world that he is enjoying himself.

For Man is a social animal, however much he may try and deny it and call himself an individualist. In short, he cares about what other people have, what other people think he has, what other people think he should do, what other people think he thinks about what they think he should do, and so forth.

Preferably, Man would like to have more than his fellow specimen one or two notches up or down on the 'scales of success'. Man is the great comparer, the great envier. He is pushed and pulled into motion by his petty dreams; dreams of quantity over quality. Even though this appalling state of affairs is so dismal and unsatisfying (even for the winners), Man would rather clutch onto his second-rate existence then pause for thought. For to truly think about the soiled world he lives in is to destroy it utterly.

But why? What drives Man on in the face of such obvious ignorance, depravity and simple stupidity?

The simple answer is evolution. We have not evolved to be thinkers - we have evolved to perform immediately pressing linear tasks. But this is not to reduce the whole of Man (the story-teller, the inventor, the artist) to chemical reactions and genes. That would be silly, Man is not his genes.

However, part of Man is his physical body and this is forever an influence upon his character, producing in him that which feels intuitively right without explanation. For instance, why should Man fornicate and procreate? Because it feels right to do so.

Nature is a circular entity. Try asking it question: Why exist? That I might exist. Why grow? So that I may grow. Why reproduce? That my offspring may reproduce. Why adapt? That I might become more adaptable to my environment. Unsatisfying answers to the philosopher!

Observing the white moss growing on the windowsill, one colony has dominated more of the sill than its fellows. In the context of the moss, that larger moss is something of an expansionist empire! But why are they growing? That they may grow. There is no reason beyond this and nor do they need a greater reason to continue their quest for mastery of the window-sill. To the outside observer, it seems utterly futile, but try telling that to the moss (or by analogy, anyone who thinks the purpose of life is just to procreate and seek nutrients)!

Fortunately, we homo sapiens sapiens have been 'blessed' to be more than a colony of moss, or a fruit fly, or a tiger, or what have you. We have the power of language, the power to create many great things - literature and mathematics and of course philosophy! And we have the creativity to dream of timeless scapes and create wonderful works of art. And we can invent incredible new devices that alleviate the suffering imposed upon us by nature. And we can reach the stars.

We have imagination.

Our ability to imagine the perfection of affairs in the world (in this world) creates for us a virtuous character to strive for. This is the boon of our imagination. Many a philosopher has posited worlds which exist outside of space-time where perfection exists. Many a religion has promised bliss and eternal salvation in this life or the next. I do not believe either of these to be true. They are perfections which exist only in our minds, as opposed to the actual world confronting us. Still, they are another means of keeping us moving.

These perfect dreams are what grant us purpose, and allow us to be virtuous; for virtue can only exist when there is an end purpose toward which we may move. Far from making us idle utopian dreamers, this perfection is the yardstick against which we can compare our underachieving selves.

We do have a purpose, and that is to glorify our creativity, our intellect and our spirituality (self-awareness) over our evolutionary commands. When something feels right without explanation, it is nature's voice. Love, hatred, visceral emotion, sensual pleasure, this is the voice of nature. When something is dreamed as in art, or reasoned as in philosophy, or observed as in scientific endeavour, it is the creation of Man, built on the foundation of his so lofty mind. It is of great value. It can take us beyond adaptation to our environment into the realm of what I call the imperfect balance of Man; the best we can possibly do. Fiction and art is often a direct representation of this striving, a spiritual journey without which life would be quite unbearable.

For to think that we have no cause greater than to procreate, seek worldly power and enjoy physical pleasure is to set the bar extremely low, and invite all sorts of horrid wars, greed, hedonism, pretense, madness and tribalism into the 'daily life' of our species.

To conclude, I would fain return to the beginning of this article. We must allow our wretchedness to fail and die, rather than maintaining it for the sake of something to do. For this we must recognise that sometimes, just sometimes, doing nothing is better than doing something.

St. Zagarus