We don't allow our consciousness to rise higher because then life would be a constant surprise and you might not be able to manage it. That's why you have settled for a dull mind, there is some investment in it. You are not dull for no reason, you are dull for a certain purpose — if you were really alive then everything would be surprising and shocking.
If you remain dull then nothing surprises you, nothing is shocking. The more dull you are, the more life seems to be dull to you. If you become more aware, life will also become more alive, livelier, and there is going to be difficulty.
You always live with dead expectations. Every day you come home and you expect certain behavior from your wife. Now look how you create your own misery: you expect a certain fixed behavior from your wife and then you expect your wife to be new.
You are asking the impossible. If you really want your wife to remain continuously new to you, don't expect. Come home always ready to be surprised and shocked, then the wife will be new. But she has to fulfill certain expectations. We never allow our total flux-like freshness to be known to the other. We go on hiding, we don't expose, because the other may not be able to understand it at all. And the wife also expects the husband to behave in a certain way, and, of course, they manage the roles.
We are not living life, we are living roles. The husband comes home; he forces himself into a certain role. By the time he enters the house, he is no more an alive person — he is just a husband.
A husband means a certain type of expected behavior. The woman there is a wife, and the man there is a husband. Now when these two persons meet there are really four persons: the husband and wife, which are not real persons — just personas, masks, false patterns expected behavior, duties, and all that — and the real persons hiding behind the masks. Those real persons feel bored.
But you have invested much in your persona, in your mask. If you really want a life which has no boredom in it, drop all masks, be true. Sometimes it will be difficult, I know, but it is worth it. Be true. If you feel like loving your wife, love her, otherwise say you don't feel like it. What is happening right now is that the husband goes on making love to the wife, and goes on thinking of some actress.
In imagination he is not making love to this woman, in imagination he is making love to some other woman. And the same is true about the wife. Then things become boring because they are no more alive. The intensity, the sharpness, is lost.
It happened on a railway platform. Mr. Johnson had weighed himself on one of those old-fashioned penny machines that delivered a card with a fortune printed on it.
The formidable Mrs. Johnson plucked it from her husband's fingers and said, 'Let me see that. Oh, it says you are firm and resolute, have a decisive personality, are a leader of men, and are attractive to women.'
Then she turned over the card, studied it for a moment and said, 'And they have got the weight wrong as well'
No woman can believe that her husband is attracted to other women. There is the whole point, the whole crux. If he is not attracted to other women, how can she expect that he will be attracted to herself? If he is attracted to other women only then can he be attracted to her, because she is also a woman.
The wife wants him to be attracted to her and not attracted to anybody else. Now this is asking something absurd. It is as if you are saying, 'You are allowed to breathe only in my presence and when you go near somebody else, you are not allowed to breathe. How dare you breathe anywhere else?'
Just breathe when the wife is there, just breathe when the husband is there, and don't breathe anywhere else. Of course, if you do that you will be dead and you will not be able to breathe in front of your wife also.
Love has to be a way of life. You are to be loving. Only then can you love your wife and your husband. But the wife says, 'No, you should not look at anybody else with a loving eye.' Of course you manage because if you don't it creates such nuisance….
But by and by the glimmer in your eyes disappears. If you cannot look anywhere else with love, by and by you cannot look at your own wife with love — it disappears. The same has happened to her. The same has happened to the whole of humanity. Then life is a boredom; then everybody is waiting for death; then there are people continuously thinking of committing suicide.
Marcel has said somewhere that the only metaphysical problem facing humanity is suicide. And it is so, because people are so bored. It is simply amazing why they don't commit suicide; how they go on living.
Life doesn't seem to give anything, all meaning seems to be lost, but still people go on dragging somehow, hoping that some day some miracle will happen and everything will be put right. It never happens. You have to put it right; nobody else is going to put it right. No Messiah is to come. Don't wait for any Messiah. You have to be a light unto yourself.
Live more authentically. Drop the masks; they are a weight on your heart. Drop all falsities. Be exposed. Of course it is going to be troublesome but that trouble is worth it because only after that trouble will you grow and become mature. And then nothing is holding life. Each moment life reveals its newness. It is a constant miracle happening all around you only you are hiding behind dead habits.
Become a Buddha if you don't want to be bored. Live each moment as fully alert as possible, because only in full alertness will you be able to drop the mask. You have completely forgotten what your original face is. Even when you stand before the mirror in your bathroom and you are alone, nobody is there, even standing before the mirror you don't see your original face in the mirror. There too you go on deceiving.
Existence is available for those who are available to existence. And then I tell you, there is no boredom. Life is infinite delight.
OSHO