Wendy
asked
Jacqueline Winspear:
Maisie meditates; how important is meditation in your life? Did many people in England know about meditation in WW1 England?
Jacqueline Winspear
I don't know that meditation is important to me really - I sort of do it every now and again but I am not a serial meditator. And people most certainly knew about meditation in the early part of the last century, but it would have been more among what we might call the "chattering classes." Remember, the jewel in the crown of Britain's empire was the Indian subcontinent - indeed, there were cases of soldiers and civil servant sent to India going AWOL to sit on a mountain meditating. I have books on eastern philosophy going back to the early 1900's - the interest grew as part of a general interest in the psyche at the time, fueled by a rise in spiritualism, which led to an interest in spirituality, and on to the work of people such as Freud and Jung - an explosion of consciousness, if you will. But it was confined to a certain narrow class of people - the very people known to Maurice Blanche, who he would have taken Maisie to meet as part of her education. The influence of the Indian subcontinent could be found in almost every home though - cheap cotton bedspreads and fabrics were all over the place, even in working class abodes.
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