Our Thursday meditation sessions are a fairly ad hoc mixture of teaching and discussions about Buddhism and meditation practice. I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but I am very drawn to the philosophy and quite interested in the history. At the last couple of sessions, we’ve had some quite intense teaching about the history, and about the more mythological aspects, although when I say ‘mythological’, they are relevant to meditation because they draw attention to different psychological aspects.
Anyway, last night, the usual ‘leader’ (not a great name, but I don’t know how else to describe him) wasn’t there, so someone else (who is also very good) led the session. He announced at the start that because everybody there was quite experienced, we would have a ‘practice’ session of short meditations, some sitting and some walking, and that he wouldn’t talk us through them, we would just more or less guide ourselves. But before we got started, a new person turned up, someone who knew nothing about Buddhism but said he had felt drawn to it for years and had come to find out more. He had also never done any meditation.
Nevertheless, the leader went ahead with his original plan, and didn’t give this guy any particular guidance. I was sitting next to him, and I felt awkward and uncomfortable for him, wondering how he was finding it. This disturbed my own meditation, because I was thinking about him all the time. But in observing my own feelings, I guess I recognised that I was being quite compassionate in empathising with him in this way. In observing myself, I found myself feeling quite warmly towards myself, which was helpful, because it’s not something I find very easy.
And in the tea break, the leader spent a long time chatting to the new bloke, so hopefully he did get something out of it and will come back again. He did seem quite enthusiastic.
In the last short sitting meditation we did, when we were extending our thoughts out to all living things, he suggested we start with the people in the room, then people we know, and move out from there. This set me off thinking about the 6 degrees of separation idea, where if you think about all the people you know, and all the people they know, it only takes 6 stages before you have reached everyone in the world. This seems inherently implausible, but has been well studied, and I once tried doing the maths on the basis that everyone knows 100 people (a conservative estimate when you start to think about it), and that maybe 50% at each stage will overlap (a generous estimate) and the numbers really do build up remarkably fast.
Anyway, I brought this up in the tea break, when a couple of people were swapping notes about their knowledge of people from the 60s folk scene. One dear old lady is very friendly with Donovan, and her son works in the music business and has loads of contacts, while it turns out that another of the group was very involved in the folk club scene in Luton at that time, and had met all sorts of interesting people from then. The same guy also pointed out that my encounter with Ken Clarke last weekend puts me only 2 steps removed from Maggie Thatcher and her crew, which I wasn’t terribly thrilled about, but it’s quite impressive when you think of all the people she/they must have encountered.