In the preceding chapters, I have repeatedly labeled the
work we must accomplish in order to transition from Stages One and Two
sleep to Stage Three awakening the identification and elimination of parasitic
memes, and used words like die to describe the final state of memes so
eliminated. While such terms well-convey the emotional urgency driving
our quest for psychic liberation, in order to proceed further, we’ll need
to sharpen our focus and explore in greater detail what actually takes
place when we break the power of parasitic memes and memeplexes to control
our minds.
DEAD OR ALIVE?
Like their cousins, the viruses, memes can never really
“die,” because they aren’t really “alive” in the sense we mean when we
say that we, our pet cat, or a blade of grass is alive. Memes
are, by definition, patterns of information that use human brains both
as host environments and as vehicles for accessing and getting themselves
copied into subsequent minds, a mental modus operandi strikingly similar
to the process by which disease-causing biological viruses infect our bodies.
A virus is a nasty example of DNA gone wrong. Unlike
normal DNA, viruses lack the ability to copy themselves directly, so they
“highjack” the inner workings of their victim’s otherwise healthy cells,
causing them to generate so many copies of the original virus that the
cell walls eventually burst, releasing all those viral replicants to spread
throughout the victim’s body and infect more healthy cells. Where
illnesses caused by bacterial infection, such as Strep Throat, can be treated
with antibiotics that literally kill bacteria (which are living, single-celled
organisms), what makes viral infections notoriously difficult to treat
is that the DNA they are made from is a chemical (deoxyribonucleic acid),
and not an organism. You can’t “kill” a chemical. What you
can do, though, is interfere with its ability to reproduce.
Some antiviral drugs create reproductive interference
by preventing viruses from injecting their genetic material into healthy
cells. Others hinder the ability of the virus to attach itself to
the cell in the first place, or of viruses that do connect to destroy the
natural protein coat that protects cells from outside invasion. If
we are healthy, our immune systems overcome the invaders by crafting antibody
proteins tailored to the presence of specific bacteria or viruses infecting
us. Antibodies surround and affix themselves to the intruders, simultaneously
disabling their ability to harm us and making them especially “tasty” to
a set of immune cells called microphages which love nothing better than
to consume foreign materials they encounter inside our bodies – especially
when those materials are coated with antibody molecules.
ANTI-MEMES
Memes infect us by imprinting our minds with foreign thought
patterns that “highjack” our otherwise healthy brains, insinuating themselves
into our personal internal reality simulations as “facts” bearing as much
or more apparent validity as signals collected by our physical senses.
A consciously cultivated awareness of this pro-cess and its reality-shaping
power over our minds can provide a strong defense against the hypnotic
power of many daily, pop-cultural mind-invaders, such as the behaviorally
coercive memes proffered by advertising, movies, hit music, political speeches,
biased news reporting etc. Recognizing the veiled intent of such
meme-sources and maintaining focus in their presence on our own psychic
integrity can, in most cases, quite effectively block their infectious
potential. But overcoming the larger, more deeply embedded memes
and memeplexes that form the foundations of our personal meme-dreams –
such as our family of origin’s religious or political beliefs, our national/racial/societal
traditions and values, our learned sense of self-worth (or lack thereof),
the "rules" we accept concerning family or romantic relationships, etc.
– requires the application of powerful, consciously-designed "anti-memes"
metaphor-ically akin to the antiviral drugs described above.
The Simplest Path is one such consciously-designed anti-meme
with the power to shake loose and dispel the hypnotic power of our deepest,
foundational memes. Other well known, effective anti-meme systems
include Zen Buddhism, which, historically, owes much of its meme-countering
power to its unique, cross-cultural blending of Indian Buddhist philosophy
and meditation practice with Chinese Taoism, the Scientific Method, when
diligently applied to one's own mind and personality in addition to the
physical Universe, and the Toltec path to liberation as espoused, somewhat
obtusely (but, to be fair, most completely), by Carlos Castaneda, and in
it's simplest, most direct form, by Don Miguel Ruiz in his The Four Agreements
books. Like their medical anti-viral counter-parts, all true anti-memes
function by interfering in various ways with the internal and mind-to-mind
repro-ductive cycles of the memes holding our personal dream-worlds together,
culminating in the eventual collapse of the dream and our consequent liberation
from illusion. Without stretching the biological virus metaphor too
far, anti-memes can be said to break the power of memes by inhibiting their
ability to attach, or stay attached, as the case may be, to our minds.
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
This is not to say that memes so detached are physical-ly
killed or literally eliminated in the process. Coming to identify
our childhood religious training or our parents’ political viewpoints for
the memeplexes that they are, for example, will not erase our memories
of having once been True Believers ourselves, nor will it dull our ability
to understand or articulate the creeds that once defined our reality.
One central reason unweaving the memetic tapestry of our individual dream
worlds requires the application of external anti-meme systems like Zen
Buddhism, Toltec Shamanism or The Simplest Path is that, while there are
strong metaphoric parallels between biological viruses and viral memes,
nothing even vaguely comparable to our body’s complex natural immune system
has yet evolved within the human mind – and certainly nothing reminiscent
of those wonderful virus-eating microphage cells. Conscious work
with anti-meme systems can break the power of memes and memeplexes to define
our experience of reality, and thus to limit and control us, but the disempowered
mind-viruses left in the wake of such work have no place to go, and so
they remain, disabled and mostly impotent, in our minds.
The common Chicken Pox virus may present the best biological
example of this dynamic. In childhood, the Varicella-Zoster virus
causes the distinctive rash and itchy red spots most of us remember scratching
our way through sometime during our first decade of life. Upon recovery,
we assume the infection is forever behind us. But, even though battling
the illness has trained our immune systems toward vigilance against the
resurgence of symptoms, the virus itself never actually leaves our bodies.
The virus and our immune response to it have balanced out, and, under ideal
circumstances, though we will always carry the virus, we can count on never
again suffering its ill effect. Our bodies cannot permanently kill
the virus, which was never alive to begin with, but the continuing presence
of Varicella-Zoster-specific antibodies in our systems can prevent it from
ever again proliferat-ing to a level capable of producing symptoms.
Unless, of course, some major stress or autoimmune disorder
enters our lives to tip the scales of that balance in the direction of
viral proliferation. If we are children when this unfortunate shift
occurs, a second bout of Chicken Pox is not only possible, it is actually
quite common. As adults, the failure of our immune system to maintain
its cold war against the Varicella-Zoster virus allows it to resurface
as painful Shingles that can persist for weeks, months, or even years.
Memes, once disempowered by conscious work with an anti-meme
system, go similarly dormant, losing their power to be mistaken as facts
in the construction of our internal reality simulations, but they never
relinquish their instructions to keep trying. The result is a mental
detente in which we remain free of the symptoms of possession by specific
disempowered memes, and retain access to the psychic energy freed when
their power over our minds was broken, only so long as we maintain constant
vigilance against their resurgence. It often happens that Stage Two
“seekers,” having maintained years of freedom from the power of foundational
childhood memes, fall right back under their spell when hit by some major
life stressor (the death of a loved one, divorce, job loss, etc), regressing
under their influence all the way back to wholly unconscious, but, at least
tempor-arily comforting, Stage One sleep.
Such Varicella-Zoster-like memetic resurgences are tragically
common amongst Stage One and Two sleepers struggling to escape the controlling
influence of memes without the benefit of an anti-meme system like The
Simplest Path. With the advent of true Stage Three awakening
this dynamic is permanently changed, and the temptation to fall back into
the waiting arms of comforting meme-dreams is transformed into a dilemma
of legendary proportions, as exemplified by Christ's temptation in the
desert or Buddha's encounter with the demon-temptress Mara beneath the
Bodhi tree (a drama that will be explored in great depth in the second
volume of the The Simplest Path series). But as Stage One and Stage
Two sleepers, our predicament plays out on an ordinary, human scale, as
we struggle to “see through” and break the reality-shaping power of memes
to control our minds, while never relaxing into self-deceptive certainty
that the job is done.