Like dormant and long-forgotten seeds, instructions for
awakening from the meme-dream can be found planted deep within time-honored
and non-traditional religious and spiritual memeplexes the world over,
from the drumming, ecstatic trances and healing journeys of indigenous
shamans, to the simple grace of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, to Hindu
Yoga, Sufi dances, Christian monastic disciplines, and even such modern
“ways” as psychological counseling, the Gurdjieff “Work,” or the openly
occult teachings of the Theosophical Society or Wicca. But
the fact that literally billions of individuals throughout history have
embraced the external trappings of these teachings, with only a tiny fraction
of those billions achieving true awakening through them, testifies to just
how thoroughly distracting and burdensome the mythological, ritualistic,
dogmatic, fundamentalist, and guilt-or-comfort-ridden memetic “belief-padding”
encasing such deeper truths can become.
We should not be surprised. That’s what memes do.
Remember that the single-minded agenda of all memes and
memeplexes is their own replication. Until we awaken, our meme-dependent
brains will continue to wrap all incoming and outgoing information in self-flattering
layers of illusion, which then intermingle with other memes, adapting and
evolving in our minds, bouncing back and forth between brains as we elaborate
our beliefs to one another, snowballing around the seed of truth originally
communicated until, at the stage where the process balloons into a large-scale
memeplex (like every organized religion on Earth), all instructions which
might have empowered individuals to escape the parasitic power of memes
have been deleted altogether, or so grossly overshadowed that the lay-follower’s
chance of ever stumbling across them –or of recognizing them for what they
are, if he does – is slim at best. Most often, at this stage of development,
cult or splinter groups still possessing even partial seeds of true liberation
are labeled heresy by the larger memeplex, and subjected by it to active
persecution.
Taking a “meme’s-eye view,” the reason this is so becomes
obvious. In exactly the same way that, for all the election year
ballyhoo of politicians, no government can ever really outlaw taxes or
eliminate bureaucracy without undermining the raison de'tere of its own
existence, even the most “sacred” belief system can never lead its adherents
to genuine freedom because it is never in the best interest of any memeplex
to enable us to escape its power to control us.
Now that’s another sentence that deserves a second reading
– It is never in the best interest of any memeplex to enable us to escape
its power to control us. Take a few minutes to mull that thought
over before moving on. Just as the core function of all government,
under the rule of any political party or system, in every country on Earth,
is to collect money from its citizens (taxes) and systematically spend
it (bureaucracy), so the central task of all beliefs, in a way that is
wholly unrelated to their content, is to limit our freedom to know reality
directly and think for ourselves, and never to make true psychic autonomy
available.
The sole earthly environment in which memes can survive
is a meme-susceptible human brain. Memes can no more afford
to pass on genuine instructions for escap-ing meme-dependency than a fish
could afford to teach classes on how to drain lakes.
It would be in the fish’s best interest to insist at
every turn that lakes cannot be drained, that all attempts to do so are
foolhardy and destined for disaster, and that only the power of water (and
lots of it!) can solve the world’s problems. It would also be in the fish’s
best interest to preach that lake draining technology is by its very nature
dangerous and occult, and that anyone showing so much as a mild positive
interest in such technology serves evil, and should be killed or otherwise
disempowered. If you listen closely, you’ll hear a lot of metaphorically
similar rhetoric being espoused by every one of the large-scale memeplexes
now battling for control of our planet’s future.
Such beliefs serve no purpose beyond their own proliferation,
and the continued parasitization of Humanity. True freedom comes
only when we drain the lake. When we awaken from our sleep, we cease
to be meme-susceptible. The lake is drained, the parasites die, and
we are set free. This mental transformation, referred to in the original
Koine Greek of the Bible as metanoia (a term which literally means "change
of mind," but which has been consistently mistranslated into English as
"repentance"), by Buddhists as Satori, and by Islamic Sufi mystics as presential
vision, both breaks the grip of familiar memes that have long controlled
our experience of reality, and inoculates us against future infection,
leaving newly encountered parasitic beliefs no doorway into our minds,
or perch to cling to within them.
MEMES OF SLEEP
We are not asleep and dreaming because we are bad people.
We are not "fallen," defective, degenerate or otherwise responsible, in
a moral sense, for our present condition. The genes our parents contributed
to the making of our bodies included instructions for equipping us with
meme-susceptible brains. The memes already possessing their similar
brains directed them, under the best-intentioned illusion of “preparing
us for life,” powered by feelings of responsibility and love, to infect
our brains with all the memes necessary to construct dreams matching the
ones they were hypnotized as children to accept as the "real world."
Their parents did the same to them, as did their parents before them, and
their parents, and theirs, and so on, and so on, and so on, all the way
back to that early crisis when memes first took the wheel of human thinking.
In the realm of religion, concepts like "original sin,"
or Humanity's "fallen nature" and "need for salvation" are all memes which,
on the one hand, innocuously, name the feelings of weakness, frustration
and vulnerability sleepwalking generates in our lives, allowing us to put
words to the uneasy psychic dissonance we experience when the actual events
of our lives lose coherence with our illusory expectations. On the
other, far more insidious hand, these same memes explain away such feelings
as a morally just aspect of human existence that can never be overcome
via personal effort. We’re “fallen” because some ancient ancestor
“sinned,” or because we’re “made wrong,” “broken,” “sick” etc. Life
sucks because we’re bad. Our punishment is earned, whether by ourselves
or another, and we have no recourse but to humbly await externally applied
mercy.
By thus "blaming the victim,” and by linking with "salvation"
memes that identify supernatural intervention as the only remedy for what
ails us, a meme found not only to Christianity, but in a host of world
religions, including a large segment of the New Age movement, if you substitute
Mother Earth, benevolent extraterrestrials or “ascended masters” as the
intervening agent, the greater memeplex insures its own survival, and that
of the majority of its constituent individual memes, into perpetuity.
Our memetic handlers permit us to acknow-ledge the genuine spiritual insight
most adults eventually have that something’s gone terribly wrong here…,
and to cope with the unsettling emotions that naturally arise from such
a revelation – but only within a starkly meme-controlled, deceptive context
in which nothing much can be done about our sense of disconnect from reality
beyond more closely following the rules as written, and patiently awaiting
divine intervention or physical death, whichever comes first. Through
such self-referential circular theology, the memeplex reinforces dogged
adherence to its tenets as the solution to life’s existential anxiety,
rather than its cause.
Our intuition that something's gone terribly wrong
here is correct, and our sense of disconnect from “real reality” is right
on target, as well. But 99.9% of all the remedies religion, politics
or cultural traditions have ever advised us to apply toward righting that
wrong and reconnecting with reality are memes whose sole agenda is their
own replication. Beliefs themselves are our number one barrier to awakening.
WHY WE ARE SLEEPING
The simple truth is that we are sleeping because we lack
sufficient energy to wake up.
Just as flesh and blood parasites thrive by draining
the blood or other physical resources of their hosts, so memes consume
our mental and emotional energy, leaving us just enough to slog along from
day to day in a hypnotic state of psychic lethargy – but never enough,
under normal circumstances, to become consciously aware of their existence
as independent entities controlling our minds, or of the price we are paying
for their continued survival.
While the commonly accepted myth that “we use only 10%
of our brain” is, biologically speaking, a demonstrably false statement,
this fiction captures in a pithy image our very accurate intuitive observation
that, while we surely use 100% of the physical gray matter of our brains
every day of our lives (for if we did not, in the frugal economy of Nature,
the other 90% would not likely be there), we do so at far less than 100%
of that organ's full potential.
With more computing power in each of our heads than the
largest supercomputers on Earth, most of us struggle to balance our checkbooks,
do our own taxes, or follow a recipe. Most Americans, after finishing
high school, never read another book, cover to cover, as long as they live.
With no fewer or less-strategically-connected brain cells than Mozart,
we eschew learning to read or write music, or to play the piano or any
other instrument, because such activities seem “too hard.”
With the same mental capacity for philosophical insight as Aristotle, for
wisdom as King Solomon, and for invention as Leonardo da Vinci, we feel
helpless in the face of even mildly complicated moral challenges, avoid
making decisions for fear of choosing poorly, and spend a disproportionately
large percentage of our waking lives in dull servitude to corporations
and governments, conforming to the externally-imposed social norms of our
religion or community, and dissipating the hours available to us for creativity
in utterly passive pursuits like watching TV.
Right this moment, just as we are, every healthy human
brain on Earth comes fully equipped to function with all the enlightened
awakening of a Buddha, a Jesus or a Loa Tzu, or secularly, with the genius
of an Albert Einstein, a Steven Hawking, a Beethoven or Michelangelo.
Such dynamic awareness is our natural birthright as human beings – a birthright
that has been stolen by our memes.
WAKING UP
If we had to wake up by sheer force of will, we would
fail, because that’s not how throwing off meme-sleep works. Many
“spiritual casualties” along the path toward awakening – those bitter cynics
who, at every mention of expanded consciousness or higher human potential,
cry, “Been there, done that! It’s all B.S! Didn’t work for
me, so don’t waste your time!” – are where they are today, psychically,
because they misunderstood this crucial point. So pay attention!
Meme-free, enlightened awakening, as defined in this
book, is the natural state our brains functions in when parasites are not
sucking them dry. We do not have to “attain” an awakened state of
consciousness. Awakening happens of its own accord when we remove
enough parasitic memes from our minds that the net gain in energy available
to our brains – because memes are no longer consuming it – becomes sufficient
to activate higher modes of functioning.
That’s right, “modes,” in the plural. Our brains
work very much like a 3-way light bulb. At their lowest setting,
our brains are, without question, 100% "on," and illuminating the area
around, say, our reading chair – in other words, we are using 100% of our
brains, but at minimum "wattage." Add just a little more power, and
they leap to a brighter setting, throwing light halfway across the room
– though they are no more or less "on" than before. Click the switch
again, the wattage jumps, and we get a clear view of the far wall, maybe
even the next room.
True awakening is a process of gradually stepping up
the "wattage" available for running our brains by reclaiming energy currently
being consumed by parasitic memes.
Berating ourselves for being asleep in the first place
won’t wake us up, nor will flooding our brains with so-called “consciousness
expanding” drugs, pursuing puerile “guided journeys” to ever-more-illusory
inner realms, surrendering our autonomy to one memeplex to the exclusion
of all others, or even sitting cross-legged, propping our eyes wide open
and shouting “Wake up! Wake up!” – all of which have parallels in
today’s religious/spiritual meme-marketplace.
The real work that brings about awakening, rather than
merely granting the external appearance of “being spiritual,” while actually
embroiling us ever more deeply in the dream, is a rigorous, daily commitment
to the identification and elimination of every self-serving belief
from which our personal dream-lives are constructed.
Unweave the tapestry of the dream, and awakening happens.