The Learning Process

There is always scope to get wiser. I thought that at the age of 55 I had reached as far as I’m going to get in this lifetime (lots left over for the next life of course!) but what I have discovered in the past few days is, that I’ve become even more mature than I thought I could possibly get! This became apparent to me when I realised out of the blue, that I don’t get excited any more (polite word for hysterical) when faced with an electronic crisis.

I had put together a special MP3 CD for my meditation session yesterday evening which a couple of new people were going to attend. New people means potential nail biters, guys with nervous twinges, individuals who are busy hypnotising themselves silently or aloud with the slogan “I CAN’T MEDITATE” before they've even bothered to find out what the heck meditation is, and are all set to prove to you that meditation doesn’t really work.

So I go through all this trouble to organize a collection of music for the newcomers and when the CD is ready I put it in my MP3 walkman to test it out and guess what. The walkman tells me there is no disc inside. So I take the CD out and put it in again and this time the player tells me, after an even longer interval than the first time that there is no disc. So now I take out the CD lens cleaner and give the inside a good drubbing and put in the new CD a third time. Now the player shows nothing. It is blank. After repeated attempts to get it to play I give up. But in the middle of these attempts I notice something puzzling. For once I am actually feeling quite cool - not merely thinking I am being cool. (You know the difference?!) I'm not even vaguely angry. Not the slightest bit of irritation in me. I just tell myself I will have to get a new walkman and since I cannot do it today, well, I’ll just have to use something else for the meditation and I get out the minidisk player with some of the old stuff on it and forego the choice music I’d lined up.

The meditation went well except that right in the middle of it the cat started yowling. Yowling like she was being murdered or as if she herself was getting ready to murder somebody. This is not an unusual thing to happen. Our cat for some mysterious reason has started reacting very strangely to meditations. I just have to get a handful of people together to listen quietly to music in the house and after about twenty minutes she starts going “Meeeeaaaaaaow! Mrrreeeeaaaaowwwwrrrrgh! MRRRREEEEEOOOOOWWWGGGHHHH!” and so on and so forth. This is incidentally a much worse habit as far as I’m concerned, than turning over the dustbin to look for chicken bones.

A couple of people (luckily not the newcomers, but the old timers) told me after the session, that the sounds had terrified them and they had prepared themselves to deal with a lunatic feline jumping onto their chest while they were deep in the land of bliss. Eventually it seems they had decided to take it all in their stride – a major learning for them on keeping their cool in the here and now. As for me, I did wish the old cat (she is almost 18) would shut up and quietly go away but my irritation was nowhere near its usual explosive level and on the whole the session was a success.

Yup. It feels like I’ve grown about an inch taller since yesterday, in the spiritual sense. Nice surprise!

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