I AND MY BOREDOM

I and my boredom
Who am I?
Of course, I am surely the entity that feels the pain when this body is pinched.
No doubt about that. Is that your body that feels the pain or the mind behind it?
The body feels the pain and the mind recognises it.
Then who are you?
The body-mind-complex, or the body-mind system as a whole.
But what is the mind?
Running thoughts, memory, and memory retrieval mechanism (and the running commentator?) constitute the mind.
What about the sense organs and attention? Are they not part of the mind?
No, sense organs just feed the attention at the moment, and the memory storage. Attention seems to be focussed awareness, a part of the vast awareness that powers everything.
Then where comes the feeling of ‘I’ or the ‘ego’ as it is referred to?
‘I’ seems to be a mental construction of an image from various memory factors for purposes of identity, self perceived security, and self importance.
In this set up, who is bored? The body cannot be bored. There is no reason for the memory, or running thoughts to be bored. Awareness, while supplying power, is a passive witness, never bothered about boredom. Then who gets bored?
The mental construction that is ego, who is selfish and wants some pleasure all the time, coaxes the attention to jump from one thing to the other searching for pleasure or at least some engagement of the attention so that it can ride on it and enjoy. Otherwise it is afraid that it will be burdened with suppressed fears, discomforts or aches of the body highlighted, and other unpleasant experiences. That could be the only reason to be bored. It is this ego, a fictitious element that is getting bored.
There is that great saying Tat Twam Asi ‘that thou art’. What is ‘that’ and what is ‘thou’? ‘that’ seems to refer to the Ultimate reality, and ‘thou’ to ‘you’. How can the ultimate reality be the miserable ’you’?
'THAT', of course, refers to the Ultimate Reality, which is the same entity as the Pure Awareness that powers man including his universe. Or it could be what is virtually beyond and behind the Awareness in the quantum domain. There is no way of knowing.
And ‘thou’ here does not refer to the miserable ‘you’ or the ego. It refers to the entity that is beyond and behind the body-mind complex, powering it as well as everything else. It cannot be ‘you’ in the sense that the limited ego or ‘I- feeling’ cannot be the vast immeasurable Infinity that is the ultimate reality. The profound statement if thus interpreted would seem to be nothing but a tautology saying ‘ultimate reality is ultimate reality’. It may look absurd, but It means that the ultimate principle of the universe is the same as the ultimate reality lying within you. That is to say that you need not look elsewhere to find the Truth but within yourself.