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Proverbs 20:13 · World English Bible

Proverbs 20:13 Meaning Don’t Love Sleep

Don’t love sleep, lest you come to poverty. Open your eyes, and you shall be satisfied with bread.

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What does Proverbs 20:13 mean?

The sleep the mind is warned against is not rest but the dream of separation, the drowse in which fear keeps replaying a world of loss. To cling to that sleep is to stay poor amid everything love has given, blind to a peace that is already present.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 20:13 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The sleep the mind is warned against is not rest but the dream of separation, the drowse in which fear keeps replaying a world of loss. To cling to that sleep is to stay poor amid everything love has given, blind to a peace that is already present. Waking is simply opening the inner eyes, letting a gentler sight return, and the moment perception shifts, the mind finds itself fed.

A mind does not have to earn its fullness; it has only to stop preferring the dream, and the instant it truly looks, it is nourished by a peace that was there the whole time it slept.

Sleep: the dream of separation the mind is tempted to prefer, the drowsing in fear that hides the peace already given Eyes: the inner sight that opens when the mind chooses love, the awakened perception that ends the dream Bread: the fullness of peace that feeds a waking mind, the nourishment love has always been holding out

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 20:13 today

  1. When you wake and reach for your phone, put it down for one minute first and let your eyes just rest on the room. You are not missing anything in that minute, and you may find you already have more than the feed will offer you.
  2. With one person today, stop the loop of what is wrong or missing and say out loud one thing that is already good between you. Say it plainly, not as a compliment, just as something true.
  3. When a worry starts replaying itself in traffic or in a long line, name it once, then look at something actually in front of you: a face, a tree, the light on a windshield. The worry can wait; you do not have to live inside the rerun.

What have I been telling myself I lack, when it may already be sitting right here?

The same truth in other traditions

Zen

The whole practice is often summed up in one word: wake up. Nothing has to be added to the moment, only the sleepiness that keeps us from seeing it has to fall away.

Upanishads

The teaching opens with the line that what is there is full, and what comes from it is full; take the full from the full and fullness still remains.

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

He tells himself at dawn to stop clinging to the warm bed and get up into his real life, because the comfort of staying under is a small theft from the day.

Mid-century illustration of Jesus teaching the crowd on a hillside above the sea

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