I'm trying to describe the feeling (boredom) to you, and I see that it's the same as a thought. It just stays there for a longer period of time compared to a thought. What's
Let’s look at ‘time’.
There is a general assumption that there is linear time that started (if started at all) somewhere very far in the past and advances to the distant future. The present moment (now) is considered to be a very small fragment of time, or an event that is moving forward on a linear line, coming from the past and advancing to the future.
But is there an experience of the ’now’ moving along the line of time?
Any experience of one ‘moment’ giving way to the next?
Is there any actual or direct experience of one event following another?
How fast is the ‘present moment’ actually moving?
Just look at 'this moment', can you find a point where it began?
How long does the ‘now’ last?
Where does the ‘now’ start, and where does it end?
When does the ‘now’ exactly become the 'past'?
What is the ‘past’ in actual experience?
So is there actual experience of ‘time’ or only thoughts about ‘time’?
What's the difference between a thought and a feeling? I think every thought is accompanied by a feeling, only more subtle.
There’s a simple way we can investigate this directly:
Emotion (or feeling) = Sensation + Thought-story
This is something to test in immediate experience.
For example you notice that anger usually appears as:
* bodily sensations
* plus thoughts ABOUT those sensations or the situation
The thoughts might be:
“This is bad.”
“This won’t end.”
“Something is wrong.”
“I need this to change.”
Meanwhile there are sensations… pressure, heaviness, contraction, restlessness, dullness, agitation, numbness, whatever.
What I was pointing to is if you look very closely at the sensations themselves, without the narrative, they often don’t actually contain the meaning the thoughts assign to them.
And if you examine the thoughts carefully, you may notice they are interpretations, predictions, memories, resistance and not necessarily truth.
When the thought-story and the raw sensations are seen separately, the “solid reality” of the emotion can start to loosen. (Not because ‘you’ controlled it, just that it is seen through)
Sometimes the emotion dissipates quickly. Or it doesn’t.
The important part is actually not making the emotion disappear. This comes later on in the awakening process.
For now seeing more clearly what is actually happening, instead of automatically collapsing sensation + thought into “This is me suffering.”
So when boredom is present, take another look. Is breathing the same, posture, eyes, guy, jaw, sense of boundary, energy etc all the same as before?
