So, Jesus is walking with his disciples, and they observe a man gathering corn on the Sabbath. The disciples, seeking
instruction, are moved to comment. The same situation happens twice, maybe on the same day. The first time, Jesus spoke, saying "Do as you must, for the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." 

On the second occasion, he says, "Man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed. If you do not know, you are accursed, and in violation of the
law."

I wonder what that law is?

I was at a gym today. It’s spring, and soon I will be very busy. It’s good to prepare. While I was helping my body remember fitness, I chanced to look about me, and nearby saw several people working away on exercise machines, and reading too! I was amazed.

I asked a woman, who was reading some glossy magazine why she was reading while working out, and the woman’s
reply was that exercise bored her silly, so she needed something to keep her mind occupied. Another, younger woman was listening to some groovy thing on a walkman, so I couldn’t ask her anything. A man said he had to read, because he had to keep
up with the news. He is apparently retired and has a heart problem that he said was stress-related. He’s on drugs to help it, apparently.

Now, not so far from where I once lived, a quite sizeable group of folks come out into this park every day and practice tai-chi.
Every day as I think back, I can’t recall anyone reading while they did this, or listening to the Peking opera. They just did tai-chi for maybe twenty-thirty minutes and went on about their lives.

For various reasons, I never got the chance to talk to the folks doing the tai-chi. But their faces were portraits of serenity, even
though some of them were in very difficult circumstances economically. When I think of the earnest, even dogged determination
on the faces I’ve just seen at the gym, I am moved to wonder. There are few actually working with their bodies. Instead, there
seemed to be the sense that body needs could come second, or third, after news of the latest merger, or the latest teen-age gang outrage. To paraphrase Yoda, the Jedi Master, ‘always in his life did he look away, to the horizon, to the future. Never a thought in his mind of where he was, or what he was doing.’

Many of my work-out mates were behaving as if they really thought mind and body could be separated.

It’s a sign of the times, and the culture, I suppose. All over the place one can see advertisements offering to help people explore the mind-body connection. It’s as if we’ve discovered something new, like the Americas, just as if they were at some point missing.

Here’s the thing. There is a connection between mind and body. There’s a connection between mind and body so what you think, you become. There’s a connection between mind… and every thing. It matters what you think. It is possible, however unlikely, that one might learn to shoot free throws while reading the Wall Street Journal, or something else. But it’s a waste of effort, and
time too. For maximum effect and performance in anything, and everything, the healthy mind should be interacting with the healthy body - all the time.

And that’s the law. So there.

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