I did some work in the morning, honest. Then I went for a meditation session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre.

Metta Bhavana (development of loving-kindness) today, and the first time I’ve been to a Centre session for a couple of years. New faces, but on the way in I experienced an interesting feeling of something like “You should definitely be doing this.”

The session leader was talking about imagining the various people we were visualising throughout the various stages of the meditation, then noting our response to them, and sitting with the response, whether positive or negative, for a while before gently trying to suggest a more positive response.

I thought that was very interesting – I had a quick chat with her afterwards and she was saying that she’d struggled herself with “wishing people well,” chanting to the visualised characters, “may you be happy,” because she eventually felt that she was missing her own, genuine response to them. I’ve got a feeling I’m so left-brain that it’ll be years before I even connect with my genuine responses to the people I visualise during a Metta Bhavana meditation, but that idea of separating the wishes you’re chanting from your own emotional responses, then responding to the response with loving-kindness, struck a chord.

Just thought I’d note it here, so I can mull it again later.

For years I’ve read articles and discussions about what it is that magically separates human beings from other animals; I suppose sister-faith religious traditions make it difficult for us to accept fully that we simply are animals, and that in fact nothing marks us out as being different… and that there’s nothing wrong in that.

Ten to fifteen years ago, one of these mantras seemed to hold that language marked us out as being amazing: we can discover, and share with each other, the nature of the world, the truth about the universe. But subsequent experience and different channels of reading have left me thinking that language’s descriptive aspect is actually quite patchy – possibly so patchy that, the more you examine it, the more you find that any meaningful truth is either (1) not really meaningful, (2) false, or (3) inexpressible in language.

Which leaves us viewing language as a medium in which a species of animal coordinates its social, tribal interactions. From the inside, it feels meaningful; from the outside (and this would mean outside the realm of human affairs), it looks like social coordination.

Ants communicate in a chemical medium: hormones and gastric exchange. Bluntly stated, ants sick up on each other to “tell each other [things like] that the nest needs patching” – or, viewed from the outside, to coordinate processes like nest-patching behaviour. Our anthropomorphic tendency to attribute perceived meaning to the antpuke (”my regurgitated fishcakes mean mend the roof“) stems from the way we feel meaning ourselves. When we look at ants, it’s easy to see through the illusion: it makes sense that the puked-on ant isn’t really thinking, “Crikey, really? A hole in the nest? The rain will get in, we can’t have that. I should do my duty and go to help.”

But… to what extent is the meaning that we ourselves feel really, really meaningful? Ants don’t coordinate their behaviour in language, but then we’re not very good at coordinating our behaviours by throwing up on each other. “Look, it must be human beings’ way of coordinating vomit-cleaning behaviours.”