Meaning Is In the Memes

The Simple Explanation states that a huge part of our personalities is shaped by the memes we hold dear as well as the memes we hate.

The memes you cling to (sanskara), both the ones you like and ones you don't like, influence your ability to exercise your free will in the here and now. When you unthinkingly lock onto a meme or set of memes, it is your belief in the memes that determines how you will interpret your surroundings and how you will respond. Your response may or may not be the best response to a situation, but it is the only one your set of memes allows.

We see this phenomenon at play every day. For example, a person (person A) whose meme bundle includes a belief that others are "out to get me" will interpret events in a manner that reinforces that meme. The most innocent statements on another's part (person B) will activate person A's "out to get me" meme, even when no such insult was intended. Person A's ego is hurt by their own meme, not by person B.

Another example of delimiting memes occurs during problem-solving. The more tightly held one's memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves. The ability to consider solutions "outside the box" and to engage in "lateral thinking" comes about through nonattachment to the "shoulds" and "oughts" of how things work. One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one's own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions.

I realized the other day that each and every cultural institution we belong to (family, workplace, church, mosque, tribe, nation, etc.) not only comes with its own bundle of shared memes held in common by its members, it also comes with a filter that prevents members from acknowledging or adopting incompatible memes. Memes are even more important to an institution than its members in the sense that members come and go, but memes persist.

Institutions are defined as much by their excluded memes as they are by their included memes. An exclusive institution holds tightly to the indentity provided by its memes; its border is strong and its filter powerful. An inclusive institution allows members more latitude in the memes they may hold; its border is less defined; its filter less opaque. An "open-minded" institution acknowledges the fact that there are memes out there in the greater culture that may have value, and is willing to consider new memes; its border is permeable and its filter thin.

A goal of the Simple Explanation is to demonstrate the simple commonality of the reality underlying the panoply of memes. Not just the religious memes; not just the spiritual memes; but the "rational" and "scientific" memes, too.

A Simple Explanation of The Perennial Philosophy

A philosopher friend of mine recently commented on the Simple Explanation, "Excellent retelling of the Perennial Philosophy!"

I was unfamiliar with the expression "Perennial Philosophy," so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here's their essential definition:

Perennial philosophy is the philosophical concept which states that each of the world’s religious traditions share a single truth. Perennial philosophy asserts that there is a single divine foundation of all religious knowledge, referred to as the universal truth. Each world religion, independent of its cultural or historical context, is simply a different interpretation of this knowledge...

Yes, my friend was right. The Simple Explanation is all about identifying the universal truth embedded underneath ages of confusing memetic overlays.

And what is the basic truth that all traditions share when you strip away their superfluous memes?

• There is a Divine Reality underpinning everything; without This, no thing and no one would exist. 
• Ground, Sat, Undiffentiated Unity, Brahman, Godhead, Pure Light of the Void, Pure Consciousness, Metaverse

• This Divine Reality may be directly perceived under certain conditions.
• through prayer, meditation, near-death experiences, mystic revelation, psychedelic drugs, religious ecstasy, inspired ritual, super-rational intuition
• Humans possess a dual nature: the little, egoic "me" of day-to-day living, and a true Self that reflects the Divine Reality.
• egoic "me" is selfish, competitive, single-minded, short-sighted, meme-bound
• transcending ego, Self reaches out to others with love, help, and information for the betterment of all
• People long to reunite with that divine Reality from whence they came.
• salvation, enlightenment, Self-realization, Buddhahood
• Unification is only possible through denial of the earthly self and identification with divine Reality.
• focus on the here and now; drop unwanted memes

          ****************************************

The late Aldous Huxley wrote an excellent book on the topic in 1944 called The Perennial Philosophy. I've only read the first three chapters so far, but they are already marked up with happy scribbles. What a smart man Huxley was! Everything he is saying fits in perfectly with the Simple Explanation, so if you would like a fuller explanation of the Perennial Philosophy, I'd recommend Huxley's book.

Process Note: Why Is My Model Toroidal?

In 1979 I first read Itzhak Bentov's book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum.  Recently I realized that what the Simple Explanation has been calling the conscious "fractal" universe is another term for what Bentov called the conscious "holographic" universe. (By holographic, Bentov referred to fact that any small fragment of a holographic image can be used to reproduce the whole image out of which the fragment came.)

Here's an overview of Bentov's universal model from the website worldlingo.com

•  Our bodies are mirrors of the whole universe, at every level.
• Vibration permeates all things.
• The universe and all matter is made of consciousness in the process of developing to higher levels.
• Our brains are thought receivers and amplifiers, not the source of thought.
• All knowledge that has ever been generated is potentially available to us from other consciousnesses somewhere in the universe.
• The universe is a hologram. The brain is a hologram interpreting a holographic universe.

These memes were first planted in my meme bundle in 1979. I didn't reread the Wild Pendulum until after I began writing the Simple Explanation, but the genesis of the Simple Explanation from Bentov's cosmology seems clear. Bentov may even have coined the term "unit of consciousness." It's still a great book and I recommend it.

As for the toroids, I've been doodling them in the margins of papers and on love notes since I first read his book. I even sewed two toroids into the pattern of a house blessing I embroidered in 1982 that hangs on the wall here at the Albion Inn. Obviously I'm holding onto and regularly activating that toroid meme.

The toroid makes its first appearance in Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum on page 132, in his chapter, "A Model of the Universe." Here's the only Bentov torus image I could find online.

This Winter as I have been writing these articles and searching the web for images for illustrations, I have been very surprised to find so many spirituality and cosmology articles and blogs touching on the toroidal model of the conscious universe. The Simple Explanation of this is that I and the other writers are all resonating to and evoking the same toroidal model meme out of our shared transpersonal memory. I can assure my readers that I am not researching other people's articles and blogs and cobbling together a bunch of torus ideas from what people are writing. I have written; they have written; we've all tapped the same meme; we're all manifesting the same exact concepts filtered through our various individual governing UCs. And the more we each individually explore and tap out this same meme, the stronger it becomes, because memes are starved through lack of usage and reinforced through invocation.

A Simple Explanation of Transpersonal Memory

Transpersonal psychology deals with mystical and spiritual experiences of the human psyche. "Transpersonal memory" is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level, rather than a personal level. Transpersonal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through sub-conscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurances such as the "100th Monkey" phenomenon.


Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. Here Jung is quoted in Wikipedia:  “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness . . . there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is  identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” [C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43

Again from Wikipedia: "Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levy-Bruhl's use of collective representations or "représentations collectives," Mythological "motifs," Hubert and Mauss's "categories of the imagination," and Adolf Bastian's "primordial thoughts."

The Simple Explanation refers to these collective memories as culturally shared "memes" and "meme chords."   A person can be defined by the memes they cling to. To a large extent, one's memes shape one's personality.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about, and staked his professional reputation upon, a scientifically controversial process called "morphogenetic fields." How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic field surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms what quantum probability clouds are to sub-atomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form.

The Simple Explanation would site these morphogenetic fields at the zero-point field at the center of the toroid, part of the metaversal information streaming into our universe through our universal unit of consciousness, tempered by the organism's karmic record and acquired memes. In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree's karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off. What karma can a tree have? Its karma is the record of its life--nutrients, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. What memes can a tree hold? "The sun feels good on my leaves; must follow the sun."



In an article published in the journal In Context, Robert Gilman ties together morphogenetic fields and personal memories by describing how the memories generated by our brains "are not locked in your brain, but are available throughout all space and all future time!" through the process of morphogenetic resonance. Gilman claims that not only is our biological form influenced by these fields, but our behavior as well, as shared memories influence behavior.

The Simple Explanation agrees with Sheldrake and Gilman that personal memories do not reside in the meat portion of our brains, but are vibratory patterns held in the zero-point field, and accessed through our minds. Furthermore, apparently personal memes are actually harmonics of collective memes and are shared in common with all who hold onto that meme. The particular shadings of one person's meme differs slightly from the next person's, as is to be expected among fractal replications  of a single phenomenon, but all who hold it recognize its pattern and are affected by it.

9 Who Am "I"?

“I” am the aggregate UCs of my material body, from the subatomic particles to molecules to cells, all the way up through the UCs of the body’s organ systems.
     “I” am also the self-aware unit of consciousness generated at conception.Like all UCs, this capital-letter “Self” came into this universe as a perfect echo of God’s mind. The job of this Self UC is to oversee the body’s aggregate UCs and to join with other UCs to build things.
     “I” am influenced in my decision-making by many forces acting upon me as I approach the here and now. These forces include the karmic records and meme bundles of my Self and my body’s aggregate UCs, and the karma and memes of those around me. Despite these influences acting upon me, it is always within my power to make a free-will decision at any particular moment.

8 Bundles of Memes

We are not all affected by the same memes. Most memes pass us by unnoticed. A meme must be either instinctually acquired or learned in order to be invoked by a unit of consciousness. Once a UC does acquire a meme, it becomes a part of that UC’s unique vibratory bundle. If the UC does not wish to continue holding that meme’s string in its personal bundle of strings and chords, it must detach the string from its grasp through disuse.

Some memes are easy to detach because they do not fit in with the UC’s overall bundle of strings and chords. One may, for example, forget a foreign film as soon as it is over because its memes do not bond well with the observer’s meme bundle.

Some memes are very difficult to detach once they are acquired because their vibratory pattern is so intense—the glamorous seduction of the cigarette or the chemical allure of the crack pipe, for example. Emotionally evocative memes such as victimhood or jealousy are difficult to detach due to the intense synergistic coupling of thoughts and emotion. Unwanted memes must be detached through an effort of will, either through conscious disuse or by acquiring a competing, more desirable meme. The Alcoholics Anonymous meme chord, for example, has successfully replaced alcoholic meme patterns for many drinkers.

A unit of consciousness may pick up entire chords of associated memes, but it is also common to pick and choose among individual strings. “Happy Marriage” is a complex meme chord that means different things to different people, depending upon their selection of particular strings. One prospective couple may resonate to the “Big Wedding” meme and so expect to invoke that meme at the outset of the Happy Marriage. Another couple may not be holding on to that memetic string and so do not need or want a big wedding. For most couples, the Happy Marriage chord includes a house full of children; other couples do not resonate to the offspring meme, so no children are necessary. For many couples, the “Bouncing Baby” meme may be adequately invoked by the “Man’s Best Friend” dog meme.

Every unit of consciousness holds on to a unique bundle of memes that informs their every decision.

Toroidal Art by Richard Keely

Continue on to Chapter 9 Who Am I?

7 Memes and Chords of Memes

Memes are the cultural expressions of societies. In human societies, memes are most often propagated through mass media such as magazines, films, and the internet, although they may also be spread by word of mouth and tradition. The Beatles is a meme. Andy Warhol’s iconic poster of Marilyn Monroe is a meme. Archetypal figures like the Trickster or the Shadow are memes. Football is a meme. Patriotism is a meme--all “ism”s are memes. Every discrete cultural concept, mythology, or icon is a meme. Indeed, each and every particular concept that a person can know is a meme.

Some memes are held in common by most human cultures—the wheel; the ideal model of a caring family; archetypal heroes and villains; universal human values such as honesty and loyalty. Other memes are exclusive to their particular culture. This especially applies to memes dealing with local traditions, religions, politics, and regional myths.

Humans are not the only units of consciousness affected by memes. All cultural aggregations of UCs propagate and utilize memes. Cats, for example, bury their waste because there is a strong waste-burying meme that resonates in all cats. “Dog is man’s best friend” is a shared meme chord continually re-propagated by both humans and dogs. “Flying in formation is awesome” may well be a duck meme.

The memes we cling to are like threads draped over our Self UC.

Every UC's garment of memes is as unique as each person's opinions and beliefs.

Memes are energetic waves of cultural patterns fueled by repetition or starved by lack of usage. As wave forms, each meme has a distinct vibratory signature, akin to a musical note. Each individual meme can be likened to a string on society’s harp.
 

A single meme is like a single note. A group of related memes is like a chord. In the example above, "America" is the meme chord, and each stripe is a meme or set of memes that contributes to that chord. Each meme chord vibrates to the particular concepts that make it up. Believers in those memes and meme chords are like members of a choir cloaked in the robes of their meme chords. 

 Continue on to Chapter 8, Bundles of Memes

The Problem with Religion

The problem with religion is that too often, ritualized memes have replaced personal communion with the Holy Spirit. Religious doctrine or dogma falls into the category of meme chords. Yet memes obscure access to one's spiritualized Self or governing unit of consciousness. Since it is the Self UC that seeks union with God (the universal UC), beclouding the Self UC with meme chords is the last thing the seeker wants.
Merely surrounding oneself with religious meme chords and performing works out of duty to the meme chords does not grant access to God.
Here's how the Bible puts it in Matthew 7:
21 Not every one that said to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that does the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? and in your name have cast out devils? and in your name done many wonderful works? 23 And then will I profess to them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity.
What does it mean, to "work iniquity"? It means putting your mud's desires ahead of God's will (or the metaversal plan). When a UC puts its own well-meaning-but-limited plan into action, a karmic debt is created. Seekers after God desire absolution from sin/karma/iniquity. Building even more karmic debt out of personal effort is the last thing the seeker wants.
Here's how the Tao Te Ching puts it in Verse 18:
    When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
    When goodness is lost, there is morality.
    When morality is lost, there is ritual.
    Ritual is the husk of true faith,
    the beginning of chaos.
The Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is an ancient Chinese collection of 81 wisdom verses. In “The Simple Explanation” model, the Tao spoken of by Lao Tzu refers to the metaversal information and principles of organization that have informed our universe since the moment before creation. 

This verse describes ritual's fall from grace. 

The highest state is to be at one with God and God's plan, called herein the Tao. 

When one loses touch with the universal UC, one loses the Tao's information pipeline. But, says Verse 18, even if your UC has lost its way, you still know goodness when you see it, and your heart may still be in the right place.

But, once your heart loses its way, you no longer have true goodness. Morality is what you are left with once love departs. Morality is a system of rules meant to engender Godly behavior in those who no longer know God.

Once morality is lost, empty ritual takes its place. Ritualistic behavior no longer serves to bring one closer to God. At this stage, the Way to God has become replaced by meaningless gestures.

"Ritual is the husk of true faith." Lifeless, dried-up memes have replaced morality, goodness, love, and access to God. Verse 18 declares this state to be chaos, anarchy, entropic, because when the Word of God cannot pass its organizing principles through your UC, the opportunity is lost to accomplish whatever part your UC was to play in making things better. This is the last thing the seeker wants.

A Simple Explanation of Meditation

Scientific research has proven that the brains of regular meditators function differently than those of non-meditators. For one thing, more information travels through the meditator's corpus callosum, uniting left and right hemispheres.
For another thing, meditators recover more quickly from emotional upsets and startle reactions.
For more information on this topic, you can watch 17 minutes of a good documentary provided through Canadian Television:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3LtQH4Etjo

What is it about meditation that causes these effects?

The general process of meditation involves sitting quietly and stilling the mind through concentration. Various schools of meditation encourage concentration through a variety of techniques--attention to breathing, uttering a repeated mantra such as "Lord" or the word "om," focusing on the "third eye" between the eyebrows, or upon love and heartfelt connection beyond oneself. Any method that quiets the mind's chatter will do. Interior silence must be achieved. The goal is relaxation, a sense of perfect peace, a feeling of bliss, or union with God. 

Quieting the mind's chatter during meditation achieves two things.  First, it allows you to temporarily lay aside your meme bundle and briefly unite with your governing Unit of Consciousness Self; secondly, interior stillness provides the empty space needed to go beyond the boundary of your personal Unit of Consciousness (UC) to perceive the reassuring sheltering presence of the universal unit of consciousness. Spiritually oriented meditation techniques refer to this transcendence of personal identity as recognizing the essential Oneness of All, or as approaching the Throne of God. 

Here's what I think happens to the nesting toroids during meditation:

This first drawing represents our nested universal space. (Please click here to review this concept if you need to.) 

The red center represents the material universe; the white arrows represent proto-energy radiating into our universe; the beige is our governing UC; the yellow is the universal unit of consciousness, known as God.

During ordinary consciousness, our Self is engaged in the material-based world. According to Yoga philosophy and energy healers, an observable red current of life-giving energy (prana) runs upward from the base of the spine. Since our toroidal model indicates that matter and energy are generated from the center zero-point of the conscious universal field, our human bodies must occupy our personal UCs thusly:

This illustration represents the human chakra field drawing universal proto-energy (ananda) through chakra one at the base of the spine.

During ordinary, matter-bound consciousness, human awareness is  entirely trapped within the mind's perceptions of the material universe. These matter-bound perceptions include both processed sensory stimuli(touch, taste, hearing, smell, sight) and thought ideations in the form of meme chords and karma. In this state, the Self's governing UC can only occasionally influence the "mud-up" mind.  You could say that in the ordinary state, the matter-bound mortal is "out of phase" with his or her Self UC.

During meditation, the source from which the body draws energy shifts from chakra one at the base of the spine to chakra four--the heart. Yoga philosophy characterizes the heart as the door between the material and spiritual. When the mind is perfectly still, the heart swells with love and with joy. We propose that during meditation, the human goes "in phase" with pure consciousness, uninfluenced by perceptions of and opinions about the material world. This phase shift brings the mud-up mind into full contact with not only its own  governing UC but, with practice and patience, the individualized UC resonates entirely in phase with the universal UC.

At that stage of advanced meditation, when one's personal identity unit of consciousness becomes one with the universal unit of consciousness, the seventh chakra at the crown of the skull channels unimpeded information and coherence directly through the "top" or aligned metaversal funnel. At the same time, the personal toroidal space is entirely in phase with the universal UC and "pressed" directly against the coherence boundary, stimulating an unparalleled sense of love ("Divine Love"). Also, universal proto-energy pours through the "spiritualized heart" at the core of the meditator, bringing an unrivaled sense of bliss to the meditator.

One technique meditators employ to achieve this advanced state of love, bliss, and awareness is to balance their ascending (chakra one) prana with their descending (chakra seven) spiritual energy (mud up, spirit down) so that they meet at the (chakra four) heart center. Perhaps this model's simple explanation may help with that endeavor.

9 Who Am "I"?

     “I” am the aggregate UCs of my material body, from the subatomic particles to molecules to cells, all the way up through the UCs of the body’s organ systems.

     “I” am also the self-aware unit of consciousness generated at conception.This capital-letter “Self” came into this universe as a perfect echo of God’s mind. The job of this Self UC is to oversee the body’s aggregate UCs and to join with other UCs to build things.
 
     “I” am influenced in my decision-making by many forces acting upon me as I approach the here and now. These forces include the karmic records and meme bundles of my Self and my body’s aggregate UCs, and the karma and memes of those around me. Despite these influences acting upon me, it is always within my power to make a free-will decision at any particular moment.

8 Bundles of Memes

     We are not all affected by the same memes. Most memes pass us by unnoticed. A meme must be either instinctually acquired or learned in order to be invoked by a unit of consciousness. Once a UC does acquire a meme, it becomes a part of that UC’s unique vibratory bundle. If the UC does not wish to continue holding that meme’s string in its personal bundle of strings and chords, it must detach the string from its grasp through disuse.

     Some memes are easy to detach because they do not fit in with the UC’s overall bundle of strings and chords. One may, for example, forget a foreign film as soon as it is over because its memes do not bond well with the observer’s meme bundle.
     Some memes are very difficult to detach once they are acquired because their vibratory pattern is so intense—the glamorous seduction of the cigarette or the chemical allure of the crack pipe, for example. Emotionally evocative memes such as victimhood or jealousy are difficult to detach due to the intense synergistic coupling of thoughts and emotion. Unwanted memes must be detached through an effort of will, either through conscious disuse or by acquiring a competing, more desirable meme. The Alcoholics Anonymous meme chord, for example, has successfully replaced alcoholic meme patterns for many drinkers.
     A unit of consciousness may pick up entire chords of associated memes, but it is also common to pick and choose among individual strings. “Happy Marriage” is a complex meme chord that means different things to different people, depending upon their selection of particular strings. One prospective couple may resonate to the “Big Wedding” meme and so expect to invoke that meme at the outset of the Happy Marriage. Another couple may not be holding on to that memetic string and so do not need or want a big wedding. For most couples, the Happy Marriage chord includes a house full of children; other couples do not resonate to the offspring meme, so no children are necessary. For many couples, the “Bouncing Baby” meme may be adequately invoked by the “Man’s Best Friend” dog meme.

Every unit of consciousness holds on to a unique bundle of memes that informs their every decision.