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W.D. James's avatar

Thanks! These are great related ideas.

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Tobin Owl's avatar

Again, as so often, I find your work refreshing and clear.

I've mentioned Quaker philosopher Jim Corbett before. He spoke a lot about the meaning of sabbath. Sabbath is not just a ceasing from endless labor but it is a ceasing from "remaking the world", as he put it. A recognition that things are already good. When one ceases striving it is then that the holy, or wholeness, or the sacred can break in upon our present moment. In Buddhist philosophy, it is the overactive mind that keeps eternity shut out of our experience. So it is not enough to cease from labor, but to quiet the mind. When the mind is quiet, labor or activity can go on but it gains a different quality; becomes an activity that is without slaving, a joy as you spoke of.

There is a relationship between sabbath, allowing the land to rest (jubilee), and redeeming the land. Civilization is man's attempt to bring nature under control for his own purposes. The land becomes, in Corbett's language, enslaved. It is seen as chattel. It is not allowed to have its own glory, freedom and beauty, but everything must be made to conform to the requirements of the culture (the local tribe-mind). In freeing one's own mind, one becomes immediately in tune with the presence of the land itself. Our fellow inhabitants (trees, grass, crickets, brush rodents, spiders, grazing animals) are part of the land community to which we belong, rather than belongs to us. Redemtion is to free our minds from enslaving (ourselves, time, the earth) and to allow the land to be free.

Civilization was Cain's folly. Alowing ourselves time to rest opens a space that, when the mind is quieted may allow us to re-conceive what it means to be alive. What it means to live.

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