The ten “keys” to be explored in Part II of this book
are a set of questions which, when entertained in a specific and somewhat
counterintuitive manner I'll be describing shortly, have the power to disrupt
the hypnotic control of their target memeplexes in a way closely akin to
the strategy used by antiviral drugs to stop the spread of viruses within
our bodies. But, just as is the case with physical medications, the
method of administering these Key Questions is every bit as important as
their "chemistry." The most potentially beneficial medicine, taken
against recommended instructions (imagine swal-lowing a suppository, rubbing
cough syrup on your chest, or attempting to inject a large pill) can have
all sorts of unintended, even disastrous consequences, ranging from the
medication simply not working, to overdose, illness and death. So,
too, plowing forward into Part II without first gaining a clear understanding
of the Key Questions Technique is almost certain to disable the curative
effect of the explorations ahead, and may even have strong negative consequences,
such as allowing the memes already controlling your perception to gain
a deeper foothold on your mind, or the opening of your brain to fresh memetic
infection.
So, slow down! Pay attention! The achievement
of genuine awakening depends, not only on asking our-selves the right questions,
but on doing so in exactly the right way.
CREATING REALITY
Memes enter our minds through imitation of the words and
behaviors of already-meme-infected human beings in our environment, or
of their representative cultural artifacts, such as books, magazine articles,
songs, TV shows, movies, classroom education, etc. That explains
how memes get in. But, once inside our brains, how do they manage
to so effectively "hijack" our perception of reality, and to maintain such
a powerful, long-term, and largely invisible grip (invisible to us, that
is, though friends and family can often quite easily diagnose our primary
mental infections) on our identity and behavior?
Let's look again at my office chair from Chapter Two.
We can agree that the "chair meme," under close examination, turns out
to be a memeplex that can be broken down into the smaller, individual memes
of "sticks" plus "wood" plus "cloth" plus "sit" plus "comfort" plus "welcome,"
etc. But what pulled all those puzzle-piece memes together into a
unified, functioning chair in the first place?
The answer is our brains, and not any power belonging
to memes themselves. Memes have no power of their own to create our
experience of reality. What they do, instead, is present themselves,
surreptitiously, to our brains as "facts" with equal standing alongside
measurements of light entering our eyes, of sounds received by our ears,
of scents caressing our nostrils, flavors dancing on our tongues, and sensations
prickling the multitude of nerve endings embedded within our skin.
Our brains then generate delusional reality simulations built from facts
and falsehoods indis-tinguishably co-mingled, in which memes lie invisibly
coiled around every object, hidden within every idea and relationship,
and costumed in the face and form of all our most apparently personal emotions,
desires and beliefs.
While the New Age commonism "We create our own realty"
can be dangerously misleading when mistakenly applied to the objective,
external world (imagine the hubris of believing oneself to be personally
responsible for the formation of distant galaxies or the maintenance of
fundamental cosmic, chemical or biological processes), it is literally
true regarding our individual virtual reality simulations. We are
real physical beings inhabiting a real physical world in a real physical
Cosmos – that is, we are not creating any of these tangible external features.
But our subjective experience of all these things – from viewing distant
galaxies through the most powerful earth-based telescopes, which, however
great their magnification, can only extend the reach of our physical eyes,
to walking along a glistening white sand beach or hiking a fragrant forest
trail, to our most intimate impressions of our own bodies reflected in
a mirror, the sight of our sleeping children's faces, or the sensation
of our spouse's body pressed tightly against our own in the night – takes
place wholly inside our own heads. In this sense, "creating reality"
is a core function of all brains, human and animal alike. Our ability
to experience, understand and interact with our environment and each other
requires our brains, first, to generate and continually update an internal
psychic copy of as much of the outside world as we are able to "read" with
our senses in the moment.
And that's where memes "get" us.
Our brains, having evolved over the course of millennia
in service to our genes, have yet to develop any natural system for distinguishing
memes from bona fide sensory input, comparable to our body's complex and
effective immune response to the presence of bacterial or viral invaders.
Under normal conditions, we are naively blind to the counterfeit nature
of the psychic insinuations memes feed to our brains, and have little choice
but to obligingly stir them right along with legitimate data into the mix
of our personal "reality copies."
But it is of critical importance to recognize that, just
as biological viruses inject healthy cells with viral DNA, which then tricks
the cell’s natural replicating machinery into dropping its proper function
in favor of making copies of the virus, so memes accomplish their conquest
of our personal realities by really doing nothing more than “injecting”
our brains with comparably lifeless informational “coding.” When
that coding is brought to life in the creation of our delusional, 3-D dream-worlds,
it is always and only our brains, and never memes, that are doing all the
work.
Which, in turn, is where we can "get" memes, and
begin the work of reclaiming our evolutionary birthright.
There is nothing wrong with our brains. In creating
our personal meme-dreams, mixed up and illusory as they are, our brains
are not malfunctioning. They are working efficiently as designed,
doing a very good job of processing bad information, just as a desktop
PC, infected with a computer virus, is not malfunctioning when it erases
its own hard drive and sends copies of its attacker to every e-mail recipient
listed in the stored address book, or a cell is not demonstrating incompetence
when it shifts from fulfilling the instructions of its own DNA to executing
the more chemically compelling commands of a viral assailant. Both
are dutifully, and quite capably, carrying out malicious programming –
as are we, when we create and inhabit meme-infected dream-worlds.
We have seen that the most effective method for defeating
viral infection in our bodies is not to attempt to kill viruses directly,
but rather, to interfere, chemically, with their ability to reproduce.
In an almost exact analogy, the path to freedom from memetic possession
lies, not in attacking any meme or memeplex directly, but rather, in working
with an anti-meme system like The Simplest Path to gradually and permanently
alter the “normal conditions” of our minds, converting them into environments
that inhibit, rather than promote, the procreative cycles of memes in general.
WITHOUT A DOUBT
What lends all of the facts, both real and ersatz, from
which we weave our personal reality simulations their “factual” status
– the “psychic glue” that allows authentic sensory signals from our environment
and the deceptive siren songs of memes to bind, blend and blossom in our
minds into the 3-Dimensional illusion we mistake for objective reality
– is our assignment to those facts, individually and collectively, of an
utterly subjective and unquestioning quality of certainty. One command
the viral coding of all successful memes and memeplexes have in common
is some variety of instruction signaling us to believe, to accept the full
coding packet that follows the command to believe without the benefit of
sub-stantiating evidence, and often in the face of strong contradictory
data coming to us from other sources. We never question the majority
of the memes controlling our experience of reality, not because their "obvious
truth" is in some way genuinely self-evident, but rather, because it simply
never occurs to us to challenge their validity. This is no accident.
Some biological viruses, once they have come into contact
with a healthy cell, emit a chemical signal that tells the cell to engulf
and absorb the invader, tricking the cell into swallowing the full strand
of viral DNA deep into its own interior. Effective memes operate
much the same way. One natural function of our brains, in the creation
of our virtual reality simulations, is the filtering of incoming data at
incredible rates of speed. As external information enters through
our physical senses, our brains must decide in scant milliseconds, making
hun-dreds of such decisions every single second, all day every day, whether
to weave each particular informational "thread" into the fabric of our
personal experience of reality, to disregard it altogether, or to leave
it out of the mix for the time being, but store it away in memory for future
consideration. When a meme’s coding begins with a signal commanding
unquestioning belief – a command mimicking the signature of legitimately
gathered sensory data – our brains are tricked into instantaneously “swal-lowing”
the viral meme in its entirety, and tagging it for inclusion in the construction
of our personal realities without further review.
But, while genuine and mimicked certainty commands have
similar effects on our perception when applied to the high-speed information
processing taking place every second within our brains, the two signals
are by no means identical. The seductive whisper of memes and the
thunderous shout of genuine sensory data stand worlds apart in their intensity,
and therefore, in the extent to which we can learn to identify and resist
their influence, as well.
Parasitic memes are relative newcomers to the evol-utionary
scene, being, of necessity, no more ancient than the development of the
human brains that provide their host environment, while our big human brains
are physical heirs to the full 3.5 to 4.5 billion years of biological evolution
that preceded the birth of our species. Those billions of years of
gradual genetic evolution leading up to the emergence of Homo sapiens have
quite effectively “hardwired” all brains on our planet, human brains included,
to recognize genuine sensory data as real, whereas our species’ unique
and, by comparison, extremely brief and recent affair with memes is far
too short lived to have yet created any true biological mandate compelling
us to “swallow” malicious memetic programming.
Simply put, reality does not go away when you stop believing
in it. Memes do. Reality is testable. Under close examination,
memes crumble.
FROM CRISIS, OPPORTUNITY
Imagine driving down a winding country road at night,
traveling 90 miles an hour. Yours is the only car on the road, but
your excessive speed, the continually changing landscape as you swerve
left, then right, then left again, and your limited view of the road directly
ahead, illumined only by your headlights, requires total mental focus if
you hope to stay out of the ditch. Your eyes, trained steadily on
the road, are taking in and sorting hundreds of bits of information every
second – the changing pavement, trees, horizon, sky, moon, stars, potential
shadows of animals darting out into your path. The radio is blaring,
but, behind the music, your ears are also carefully measuring the subliminal
sounds of the purring engine, of wind whistling past windows, weigh-ing
the absence of car horns in anticipation of the sudden appearance of other
drivers. The wheel is solid in your hands, your foot heavy on the
accelerator…
Now imagine suddenly losing your ability to believe your
own perceptions, to trust, without question, that the road is, in fact,
a solid road beneath you, as opposed to, say, a flowing river or an empty
mirage, that your hands on the wheel are, indeed, your own hands, and not
someone else’s (or tentacles, or the glowing hands of an angel), and that
it truly is the trees that are standing still as you whiz past them, rather
than you who is stationary, as the woods hurtle by…
The most likely fate of anyone undergoing such a profound
and poorly-timed disillusionment would be death in the ditch. Fortunately
for us, the possessor of a healthy, non-inebriated human brain is never
likely to experience such an unbidden psychic meltdown. Our “hardwired”
prejudice in favor of information gathered by way of sight, sound, smell,
taste and touch would never allow it (and if you find yourself disagreeing
with this assertion, please check your definitions of “healthy” and “non-inebriated”).
But every one of us has experienced the memetic equivalent
of the scene above:
After many years of marriage to someone you have loyally loved and built a life with, you discover that your spouse has been repeatedly unfaithful the whole time you’ve been together …
A lifelong patriot, you discover that your own government secretly participates in exactly the same corrupt and immoral activities as the “enemies” it decries…
The company you’ve built your career with gets caught illegally dumping toxic waste into a lake that provides drinking water for thousands, distributing what it knows to be dangerously defective products to unwary third world markets, and/or attempting to shred 20 year old documentation of the devastating health hazards to workers of the manufacturing process still in use today …
A loved one doesn’t smoke, eats right, exercises daily, and still dies from cancer in his fifties…
Your most respected religious leaders are revealed to molest children, frequent prostitutes, and apply the considerable power of their spiritual authority toward “grooming” followers for exploitation…
A trusted parent, step-parent, teacher, boss, doctor or psychiatrist makes sexual advances toward you…
After being dragged home by police in the middle of the night, your “squeaky clean” teenager, of whom you have boasted proudly to friends, and who you have trusted to come and go pretty much as he pleases because of his consistently responsible behavior, confesses to a secret life of drugs, sex and petty crime…
The well-intentioned “white lies” you long ago par-doned your parents for telling you as a child – Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy – turn out to have adult correlates you find harder to forgive – the Perfect Marriage, the American Dream, the Only Right Way to Live…
We can easily imagine a hundred other examples.
To the extent that our personal reality simulations are woven from a greater
percentage of memes than of present-moment perceptions – a percentage which,
in the lives of Stage One and Two sleepers, usually approaches 100% – the
introduction of even small amounts of uncertainty, let alone the massive
helpings above, can literally shatter our worlds. We are left reeling,
disoriented, lost in terrain that looks the same to our eyes, but which
we do not recognize. All familiar meaning (memes) has been ripped
away.
We most often greet such devastating shocks to our bedrock
beliefs, understandably, as crises – but they also present some of our
best opportunities for awakening by alerting us, experientially, to the
deep unreality of our dreamed lives and the artificiality of the “meanings”
we assign to the words and actions of others (and ourselves, too).
In such situations, the “facts” we accepted as true, real and trustworthy
in the construction of our personal reality simulations were never actually
any of those things. We just believed they were. The collapse
of our world comes, not as a consequence of any real external change, but
of new data blasting away memes that previously held our personal pseudo-reality
together.
Such disillusionments, successfully lived through, can
provide us with tangible, first-hand proof that having the memetic foundations,
good or bad, torn out from under our dream worlds changes nothing that
is real. In the aftermath of personal crises, the way we live our
lives may be altered dramatically – relationships end, we make new choices
based on new information, we might adjust our residence or profession –
but the Earth keeps turning, spring still follows winter, Hydrogen and
Oxygen continue to combine into water and galaxies go on drifting inexorably
apart. One hundred percent of the upheaval within, and resettling
of, our lives occurs inside our minds, and nowhere else. When we
internalize this negative lesson in moments of crisis, it becomes easier
to remember in moments of contentment and apparent security that our "happy
dreams" are built on no more solid a foundation. We can begin to
understand that good and bad dreams alike spring from the same common root
of illusion, and that we are far better served by working to awaken from
both than by wasting our lives bouncing back and forth between them in
deluded slumber.
All earthly brains, from the simple ganglia of earthworms
to the hundred-billion-neuroned super com-puters in the heads of human
beings, come “hardwired” by our shared billions of years of biological
evolution to recognize and automatically filter species-appropriate, externally-gathered
sensory data into our "personal reality mixes” with reasonable accuracy.
However hard we might try to "unbelieve" in our external environment, we
stand in little danger of finding ourselves floating in nothingness or
otherwise tragically disengaged from the real physical world, or our experience
of ourselves as physical beings within it, by simply thinking differently
– otherwise, the wide popularization of quantum physics would have long
ago utterly transformed our sensory experience of the world’s solidity,
size and stillness. The material nature of our environment, our senses,
and our brains, all of which have a real, physical existence beyond their
faulty representations in our minds, is such that our most penetrating
questioning of external reality will have little or no effect on what is
real “out there.” We will surely come to understand our bodies, the
Earth, the stars or the greater physical Cosmos better as a product of
systematic questioning (which is a pretty good definition of the Scientific
Method – systematic questioning), but for the most part, objective reality,
closely scrutinized, is going to sit there, just as it is, and let us study
it.
The same is not true of memes. Where certainty
is not present, memes have no power. Our goal in applying the Key
Questions Technique must always, therefore, be to attain the relinquishment
of certainty, which – and this is a critical distinction – is by no means
the same thing as simply doubting our beliefs.
NOT DOUBT, BUT WONDER
Belief and doubt are two sides of the same memetic coin.
While most memes trick our brains into tagging them as facts to be woven
into our personal reality simulations by leading with a signal commanding
us to believe, others have very craftily evolved the ability to gain entry
to even the wariest of minds by "dressing up" as their polar opposites,
and gaining a foothold in our minds with fervent lead commands calling
us to disbelieve. Rather than deceiving us into accepting their own
factual nature, they present us with "opposite facts" we are ordered to
reject, and we wind up accepting the real, undisguised meme by default.
One clear example of this dynamic can be found in the
exceptionally meme-ridden field of UFOlogy (the study of Unidentified Flying
Objects, or UFOs), where the vast majority of researchers, sighting report
investigators, and especially authors publishing books and magazine articles
detailing their research findings on the subject, can be divided into two
polar-opposite, black and white camps – True Believers and Debunkers.
The True Believers may disagree on whether UFOs originate in outer space,
other dimensions of reality, inside the "hollow earth," or from spiritual
planes of existence, etc., but they all resoundingly agree that there is,
in fact, a mysterious UFO phenomenon to be researched, debated, and eventually,
solved. UFO Debunkers, on the other hand, while they may disagree
amongst themselves on which prosaic natural or manmade phenomena explain
specific sightings, all begin their thinking processes from the same, often
unconscious, base assumption that no real UFO phenomenon exists, and that
all reports of strange lights in the sky, encounters with non-human entities,
"alien abductions," etc. must, by definition, be honest misidentifications
of airplanes, satellites, clouds, etc., intentionally-perpetrated hoaxes,
or a result of psychological processes warping the perceptions of the witness.
For UFO Debunkers, there is no UFO phenom-enon, per se. There is
only a human phenomenon of naivety and wish fulfillment being projected
onto the skies.
From the standpoint of memes, which side of the "UFO
Question" any one individual falls on, True Believer or Debunker, is irrelevant.
Both types are successfully infected with the "UFO meme," and contribute
a great deal of personal psychic energy to its maintenance and proliferation.
Belief and doubt, as those terms are generally understood, serve identical
functions. As long as people keep talking about UFOs, the meme thrives.
Both True Believers and Debunkers are necessary for there to be a sufficiently
lively debate on the issue to attract new minds to the discussion, and,
thus, into "infection range," and the larger UFO memeplex uses both strategies
simultaneously to ensure its survival.
Another good example might be the contemporary religion
of Satanism, which, on one hand, can be seen to appeal most strongly to
individuals disaffected by a traditional Christian upbringing, but which,
on the other hand, cannot exist in any serious way independent of the Mother
Church it rebels against. As a central figure in Christian mythology,
the fallen angel Satan has no purpose without the Christian God/Christ
he so vehemently opposes, and who, alternately, has no clear adversary,
or easy explanation of evil, without Satan. It is irrelevant to the
grand Christian memeplex whether indi-viduals embrace God or Satan – all
followers of either deity invest enormous psychic resources in maintaining
and spreading the core Good VS Evil mythology that unites them. The
greater memeplex, wholly unified on a larger scale, is strengthened by
the apparent lower-level conflict.
We cannot break the power of memetic possession by simply
doubting our beliefs. If we use the Key Questions in Part II of this
book to cast shadows of doubt over the beliefs we once held, and then stop
there, we merely trade one self-satisfying meme for another, and remain
enslaved and asleep. By keeping Key Questions open in our minds and
hearts, we can bypass certainty in either direction and move beyond both
belief and doubt into a space of extraordinary psychic and energetic freedom
– the space of satori, enlightenment, salvation, awakening, in which neither
belief nor doubt hold any power, in which their unity is seen through and
transcended in favor of knowing what is, just as it is, directly, free
of labels, opinions, judgments and attachments of all kind.
In the absence of certainty, memes have no power.
But the absence of certainty is not doubt, as clever memes would have us
believe, but, rather, wonder.
True Believers and Debunkers stand equally secure in
their comforting "know-it-all" illusion that reality is easily comprehensible,
and that they, personally, inhabit its center, sure truth clutched tightly
to their skins. Their worlds remain small and manageable, confined
as they are within the sharp boundaries of limitation set by memes.
Wonder on the other hand, is the limitless bursting out
of our skins that we feel staring wide-eyed up into a starry winter sky.
Wonder is standing beside the ocean for the first time, our egos flattened
to pinpoints before its enormity and power. Wonder is the terrifying
inevitability of childbirth, the crushing humility of witnessing our struggling
newborn’s first breath, our ears pierced by that first primal cry, the
drum-beat pulse in our throats as we become, in that moment, true ancestors,
the blood of millions of years of human evolution rushing toward us like
a river, splashing through us to our progeny, flowing on through those
blue infant veins into an unwritten future…
Wonder is seldom comforting; more often, it is shattering
to our tiny, self-absorbed egos. But only wonder can carry us permanently
beyond the stagnant dreams of meme-induced sleep. Wonder is our birthright
as human beings, the natural state our minds occupy when not corralled
within memetic boxes of limitation and lack, every meme-free human brain's
innate response to reality as it is.
THE KEY QUESTIONS TECHNIQUE
The Key Questions that follow open doorways to wonder.
As you entertain them, neither believe nor doubt. Only question.
Witness what occurs within your mind as you refuse to accept any one answer,
and yet, simultaneously, to stop questioning. Watch the tension build
as your memes rebel, as the parasitic nature of your habitual worldview
first becomes obvious, then loses its footing, then pulls every trick in
the book trying to distract you into turning off the alarm, rolling over,
and returning to sleep.
Keep questioning. Grant memes no quarter.
Greet every shining temptation and panicked command to close down with
greater opening. Question for the sheer joy of questioning.
Let every meme-proffered answer drive you further from certainty, toward
ever-deepening levels of inquiry. Keep questioning until your mind
is transform-ed (metanoia), the power of memes is broken, your personal
meme-dream collapses, and you burst through to freedom, awakening and wonder.
Wonder, in this sense, is not a verb. It is not
something anyone can do. Wonder is a state of mind we enter naturally
as our persistent open questioning gradually, and permanently, alters the
normal conditions of our minds, converting them into environments that
inhibit, rather than promote, the procreative cycles of memes.
In the absence of certainty, memes have no "glue" with
which to maintain their parasitic control of our minds and lives.
Come "unglued," and wonder rushes in.
COMPOUND CONSCIOUSNESS
One crucial difference executive coaches and motiva-tional
speakers identify between a person who maintains the appearance of worldly
wealth by squandering a high salary on "conspicuous consumption" and someone
who succeeds in building a great and lasting fortune, however modest his
or her income lies in their disparate levels of understanding concerning
the importance of personal rein-vestment. If, every month, the fellow
with a good salary spends every dime he earns on fast cars, Rolexes and
inflated credit card interest, when the end of the month comes, he will
be no further from complete financial failure than a counterpart earning
minimum wage and barely scraping by – a "disaster distance" of exactly
one paycheck. The true wealth builder, on the other hand, understands
that escape from the limitations of a "disaster distance" lifestyle requires
him to reinvest a high per-centage of his earnings in the development of
his personal earning potential – education, training, the acquisition of
tools and skills, networking with potential business partners, etc. – thereby
transforming every paycheck into a stepping stone on the path to greater
future earnings, which will, themselves, be reinvested, feeding new cycles
of growth.
Successful work with the Key Questions Technique follows
a similar rule. As you succeed in disempowering small memes and memeplexes,
rather than squandering the psychic energy released by their demise, work
instead to redirect such energies back into the questioning process itself.
This protects freed energy from the machinations of competing memes by
making it unavailable for consumption because it has been reinvested into
new, useful activity – dislodging larger memes. Continual, conscious
reinvestment of reclaimed energy into an ever-deepening questioning process
can set off an exponential "Key Questions feedback loop" with the power
to dramatically accelerate your journey toward total psychic freedom.
By diligently reinvesting freed energy into activities designed to liberate
even greater energetic reserves, an explosive domino effect is set into
motion that can very quickly overwhelm general memetic controls, supercharge
your brain, and trigger personal enlightenment to full Stage Three awakening.
KEY QUESTION COMMUNITIES
The Key Questions Technique is far easier to describe
than it is to practice. The many thousands of years that memes have
controlled human experience may pale when compared to the billions of years
of pre-meme biological evolution on Earth, but our best informed efforts
to throw off our personal case of meme possession are mere moments, weeks,
months, or at the very most, years or decades in the making, and so inertia
is heavily weighted in favor of memes, and the persistence of the long-established
habits of human consciousness that have allowed memes to exploit and control
us.
We like closure, and being certain we know “what’s what.”
We find playing the lead role in reality’s grand drama flattering.
We hesitate to surrender a lifetime’s sweat-equity in being “right” and
“good” and “kind” in a world clearly demarcated into easy right/wrong,
good/bad and kind/cruel dichotomies. Perhaps most of all, we have
been trained from birth by our meme-controlled social, cultural and religious
programming to name the burning yaw unanswered questions open up within
our hearts and minds “fear,” “anxiety,” “trepidation” and “sin,” and to
extinguish such fires as quickly as possible by closing up, shutting down,
compliantly towing the line of our childhood training like good boys and
girls. Even when we successfully break away from the specific memes
of our youth, we maintain the deeper habit of finding anxiety unbearable,
of desiring always to rest in a steady state of surety, whatever our accepted
beliefs of the moment. Left to our own devices, the chances that
we will eventually desert our Key Questions practice for the warm embrace
of comforting meme-dreams is very high.
Key Question Communities – groups of two, four, ten,
a hundred individuals working together to mutually support each member’s
personal struggle to throw off meme-sleep and awaken to wonder – can increase
our individual chances of success a million-fold. Friends along the
path can help keep us honest, shaking us when we fall back into our personal
meme-dream, reminding us to struggle, cheering us on, and we can do the
same for them. Key Questions are easier to keep open in groups, where
exciting conversations can be pursued as spiritual practice, brainstorming
freely together, bolstered by a common agreement to eschew categories of
right/wrong, good idea/bad idea, etc., as well as to converse only for
the sake of conversing, and never to convince, cajole or conclude.
Key Question Communities can offer seekers an oasis of safety, comfort
and belonging without exacting the usual meme-imposed toll of psychic enslavement,
offering members an alternative value-environment in which the unconscious
pressure to conform that permeates the collective meme-dream can be consciously
offset by shared acceptance of awakening, and the valiant personal struggle
to attain it, as the highest measure of individual worth.
So where can you find your local Key Question Community?
A lot depends on timing. With the initial 2006
release of this first book in the The Simplest Path series, the work of
establishing local, national and globally-connected Key Question Communities
still lies in the future, presenting an exciting opportunity to every pioneering
individual reading these words. I encourage you to revisit the recommendations
outlined in the introduction of this volume for becoming a teacher of The
Simplest Path, and to get busy sharing these tools for awakening with your
family, friends, neighborhood, workplace, school, etc. By establishing
your own local Key Question Community group, you can help make this important
resource available to all who enter the path behind you.
Membership can be as small as two (yourself and one other
person), or as large as your initiative can muster. Once your Key
Question Community group is established, log onto www.thesimplestpath.com
and follow the links to register your group with the emerging The Simplest
Path global network of individuals and organizations working together toward
personal and global awakening. The website also contains a variety
of on-line forums and other community resources for sharing our struggles
to break free of memetic controls, for providing each other mutual support,
for participating in the development of future publications in this series,
and for being notified of The Simplest Path news, events, etc. But
membership in a physical group is a critical need for everyone seriously
pursuing psychic freedom, so please let the website be a tool assisting
your efforts to organize the real people around you, and not a mere "virtual
community" unto itself. The Internet has a valuable role to play
in the development of a global The Simplest Path network, but it is no
substitute for face-to-face human contact.
If you are reading these words for the first time in
2007 or later, there may well be Key Question Community groups meeting
regularly all around you. Start your search by logging onto www.thesimplestpath.com
and perusing the local listings for your area. If no groups exist
where you live, or you do not feel comfortable joining the specific groups
near you, you are always welcome to establish your own Key Question Community
group and link it into the network. There are no limitations on how
many groups can function side by side in any specific locale, but to register
a separate group you will have to bring at least one other person with
you, since one person, alone, does not constitute a "group."
Whether you join an existing community or start your
own, remember in all you personal and group work with Key Questions to
follow these basic "ground rules":
Aggressively question what you currently believe to be true, and question all possible alternatives with equal fervor. Accept no one answer as "definitive," "certain" or "true."
Witness your mind's resistance, its desperate struggle to restore closure, certainty, sleep. Refuse to name the tension generated by such memetic death-throes "fear," "anxiety," "sin," etc. Keep ques-tioning.
Hold questions open beyond your apparent psychic breaking point. Defy closure. Live the question.
Neither believe nor doubt. Instead, break through to wonder.
Reinvest reclaimed psychic energy back into the questioning
process itself. Ride an exponential Key Questions feedback wave all
the way to enlightenment!