Sleep and rest are an important aspect of life, but snoring and extraneous sounds prevent me from sleeping. Somehow in these circumstances I've only been able to sleep when I really tired. So it's 1.40am Tuesday morning I'm wide awake after trying to sleep for an hour and a half but just getting annoyed in the hotel room.
Sabbath is something I've also done some important thinking about and yet have failed to significantly integrate into my life, both weekly and over the year. Yet I have never considered myself a workaholic.
I supposed we all carry our burdens on out our backs and eventually we hardly notice we're carrying them. Assumptions, values, worldviews are intrinsic to human existence otherwise how do we make sense of the world. I think this is all still linked into the view that we are what we do. I can assert that is a false view because my value is who I am before God within that relationship and yet at core that value is still firmly entrenched. Can I love without doing? I think so but the problem is a worldview. Charles Reich has a three stage theory of the development of American consciousness.
Consciousness is not a set of opinions, information, or values, but a total configuration in any given individual, which makes up his whole perception of reality, his whole worldview.In his three stages the first is the consciousness of the immigrant, pioneer or small entrepreneur who founded America in the 19th century. The second is the consciousness of the corporate state where the individual is sacrificed to efficiency. Here I remember Charles Chaplin's silent movie Modern Times which portrays the alienation found not merely in Marx's class struggle but culture's consciousness itself imposed on the individual. For Reich I think the third stage is salvific for the recovery of self, this is a form of transcendence, of personal liberation. However this is not a ontological transcendence rather a domesticated earth-bound hedonistic humanism.
... listen to music, dance, seek out nature, laugh, be happy, be beautiful, help others whenever you can, work for them as best you can, take them in, the old and bitter as well as the young, live fully in each moment, love and cherish each other, love and cherish yourselves, stay together.BUT ontological transcendence carries two directions
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and Love your neighbour as yourself. Luke 10:27
