Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Infants, Meditation, and Contemplation

As I was walking Sadie past a home, I heard a young child experimenting with language. This child spoke a few recognizable words in the midst of gobbledygook. This got me to asking my Self: what might life be like for the child before it begins to acquire language? How would it amuse itself? It must spend most of its existence in awareness, interacting with its environment and satisfying its body's demands. Given this wordless state, I continued to ponder what a vocabulary-challenged infant's existence would be like.

I realized that as an adult, my forms of amusement are almost exclusively aimed at entertaining the mind: that there is some sort of thinking behaviour that is totally dependent upon words, taking place in association with everything I do. I would go so far as to say that if an activity is not going to somehow use words or incorporate the mind in an analytical way, I probably won't do it, or at least, I won't do it for long.

I concluded that, prior to the acquisition of language, infants must spend most of their time in a meditative or contemplative state.

Namaste

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