3.8.5 Boredom in samadhi.

After the first, intense period of concentration is over, you may find yourself facing a different problem – boredom. Up to this point in your meditations, you will have derived great strength from the intensity of your inner experiences. As your consciousness expanded, through committed daily practice of the meditations, you began to understand the inherent richness and wonder of reality.

At this stage, as a result of intense meditative concentration, you are now able simply to witness and experience the current moment. At first, this is a rather bland experience. Put bluntly, sitting for sustained periods simply being aware of the surrounding environment, witnessing both inner and outer phenomena, can be very, very dull.

Instead of learning, understanding and growing each day, it seems now that you are devoting significant amounts of your energy to a state of witnessing which provides no inherent richness of experience. In simpler language, at first samadhi seems to provide little in the way of results for the substantial effort put in. Be assured that this difficult, dull and unexciting period will pass as your awareness stabilizes in samadhic concentration.