Spiritual practice is the practice of boredom.
Liberation is not necessarily the right for free speech, free sexuality,
free internet..but the right to be bored.
Say you saw a man or women running around all day, frantically performing
various tasks and errands that seemed urgent, although it was not always
clear if they were important;
and say every time he or she stopped to rest, for just a moment,
they were almost immediately whipped.
You might call that person a slave.
But, I know at least from my experience, that a moment without stimuli,
sitting with no movement, eyes closed, no smartphone, no food, no laptop,
is enough to get mentally whipped from within.
Are we whipping ourselves, or is it some demon from another world? That's
just semantics maybe..
Usually, we reach so fast for the smartphone or a piece of food,
that we don't even notice or remember it is to avoid the whipping.
But the counter-intuitive fact, that is forgotten again and again,
is that we are strong and our master is weak. When you keep sitting, just
feeling the lashes, resisting the urgent call ``new stimulus now!!', the lashes
grow weaker exponentially fast.
Within a few minutes you feel a bliss that evaded you all day when you
were running around trying to make everything perfect.
Why would there be bliss when doing nothing?
Suppose there was a huge ocean, and in that ocean a bottle.
Very quickly the bottle is filled with water.
And suppose that the water drops that got swept into the bottle started
thinking ``I am bottle''.
``I am a small fragile individual in this huge scary dangerous ocean''.
It would be quite stressed out, and it would even forget the basic reason
why it is stressed out, and blame its discontent on trivial matters
and disputes with other bottles.
But then..say after years of thinking this way,
the water drops had a glimpse of the truth
``Wait a second, we're just water drops that happen to be inside this bottle right now,
and if anything happens to the bottle, we'll just be water drops outside of the bottle..
so what's to be so worried about?''
Imagine, the relief a water drop would feel at such a moment.

Likewise, a few consciousness particles, in a sea of consciousness
particles, floated inside a temporary container,
and started thinking, I am this container.
But a few minutes with no stimulus are sometimes enough to feel -
nothing here but consciousness particles floating around.