Tuesday, July 21, 2015

you say I enjoy what?

Church recently has been all about what to do on the Sabbath day.  This is often hard for me to resolve because God rested on the Sabbath and supposedly he is the example,  It doesn't mention anything about meetings or Lords work.  Christ said the Sabbath is for man and not the other way around.  One of the things that finally pushed me off the ledge so to speak was being told what would bring me rest on the Sabbath and that always left me feeling mentally exhausted from the weekend on Monday.  In a word it sounds like doublespeak to me.  Anyway,  it eventually wore me down and now I realize what others think might be best for me might not actually be so and the world is not binary.
So how does this correlate to Buddhism?  I suppose I was suffering and lieing to myself saying I wasn't.  If desire causes suffering what was the desire here?  I suppose a desire to reach the point where all this provided fulfillment, the arrival,  the promised peace I was supposed to have but never seemed to reach.
Another take on it is mindfullness.   Yes mindfullness.  I think the issue here was delegating my mindfullness to someone else and not analyzing the true issue instead of being told what my issues were by someone whose authority I took without question.   Hmmm,  seems like I've heard this challenge to question attributed to buddhist teaching somewhere.  With no exceptions implied,  one is encouraged to even question the teachings of Buddha himself.  Do mindfullness and questioning go together?
I think mindfullness and questioning have everything to do with each other.  So I guess, as I sit in church every Sunday questioning what is being said, I am being mindfull.  Am I right in containing my questioning to myself so as to not antagonize others? I think so.   That would be loving kindness.
So, I do not find meetings restfull inasmuch as I am not with my family.  I do not consider staring into a computer screen a good portion of the day to digitize the names of someone long dead from a hard to read historical document restfull either.  Staring at a screen and documents is what I do all week,  it is not rest or rejuvinating in the slightest.  I do admit that it might be for some though and I will not criticize anyone who finds it so.  Anyway,  those are my thoughts.  I need to be mentally rejuvinated after the weekend, and it turns out, when I approach it mindully I come up with a much different set of activities.  It's a small wonder I got as far as I did.

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