Your perfect, beloved child, who you have nurtured for
her first five years of life to feel intrinsically loved and valued, deeply
rooted in tradition and family, and whose angelic features, bright mind
and sterling manners have long reflected back to you your own best ideal
self starts school. Outside your direct influence for the first time,
she begins to change before your eyes. Little sermons long ignored
when preached by you ("No running indoors!" or "Cover your mouth when you
cough!") come home embraced because that celestial goddess – your child's
first teacher – has at last made them compelling. Other beliefs you're
not so sure you care for – kindergarteners led in religious, New Age or
"politically correct" songs or activities, or taught to label your perfectly
legal cigarettes or wine with dinner "drugs" – drag home alongside the
"good" ones, flowing in a steady, daily stream from that same irrefutable
bully-pulpit.
By seven, peer pressure brand-consciousness sets in,
and your child who once thrilled over hand-me-downs and yard sale finds
now blanches at the site of clothing labels not directly tied to a "cool"
store in the Mall – even if she's never been to that store, or the Mall,
for that matter, in her life.
By nine, the words of boy singers and girl actresses
become the arbiters, not only of fashion, where their unblemished faces
seem to infinitely populate T-shirts, posters, tabloids, TV, etc., but
of morals, decency, and the rules for measuring social status and self-esteem,
as well. Words come tumbling out of your child's mouth that shock
or impress you, then hours or days later, while innocently channel-surfing,
you overhear the same words spoken by a character you don't like on a TV
show you consider too advanced or trashy for your child, and which you
have banned from viewing in your home.
Has she been watching the show behind your back?
Is she imitating her school friends, whose less responsible parents allow
them to imbibe such garbage and then parade offensive values in the classroom?
Is the teacher to blame? Society at large? Who stole your little
cherub and left this obnoxious and confusing alien being in her place?
Memes did it. In fairness, the angelic, mannered
five year old you so innocently entrusted to the public school system was
also a product of memes – your memes, the ones you value in yourself and
society, and with which you worked hard to systematically infect your child
from birth. What happened when she started school is a classic example
of Darwinian competition in action. Your memes encountered powerful
memetic challengers for the environmental niche of your child's expanding
mind, and for all immediate appearances, yours lost.
In the long run, the trend will probably right itself.
Statistically, the vast majority of adults the world over profess the same
basic values, like religious beliefs and political affiliation, as their
parents, while few would likely be able to even recall the names of the
teen stars of their youth, much less ascribe any lasting effects to their
influence.
But what new challenges will the fifth grade bring?
What of junior high and high school? How much more of this unpleasant
"competition" are you going to have to fend off? Who will protect
your child when she grows up and leaves home someday? How can you
teach her to stand strong against destructive memes and attain personal
freedom in a world of viral thoughts out to parasitize her mind…?
You must start by freeing yourself.
But before you can free yourself from the negative impact
of destructive memes, you must first acquire a general understanding of
what memes are and how they work. The rest of this chapter presents
a bare-bones Memetics 101 crash course which will provide you with all
the information you need to move ahead with this book, though, as a general
overview, it is by no means designed to explore every dimension of the
subject. I encourage you to launch your own course of study into
the finer details of meme theory, and have compiled an extensive recommended
reading list on the The Simplest Path website at www.thesimplestpath.com
to assist you.
REPLICATORS: GENES, MEMES,
PRIONS AND COMPUTER VIRUSES
Genes are the best known example of a very special-ized
class of entity in nature that scientists refer to as replicators.
What makes replicators so special is that they have the uncanny ability
to construct copies of themselves without diminishing their own material
resources in the process. Genes, memes, and other replicators like
prions, and even computer viruses “grab” materials outside themselves and,
in true god-like fashion, shape them in their own image.
Genes are comprised of long segments of double-helixed
DNA which "grab" proteins to help their spiral-ing, ladder-like structures
split right down the middle like a zipper – at which point each "unzipped"
half "grabs"
free nucleotides found in the nucleus of your body's
cells to "fill in the blanks" along each open row of “teeth,” resulting
in two identical copies of the original gene. The rare, but inevitable,
error in the copying process is called a mutation, and can lead to defect,
death and disease in the organism, as well as to successful biological
evolution, depending on how well the changes wrought by the mutation mesh
with environmental conditions. Most mutations are negative, jeopardizing
survival rather than enhancing it, most often disabling or killing the
effected organism before it has a chance to reproduce and pass the new
genetic pattern on to future generations. Only very rare mutations
that enhance survival get passed on and established, which explains why
biological evolution is such an excruciatingly gradual process.
Prions are chemically normal protein molecules that have
become twisted into a disease-causing shape – a shape into which they then
fold other healthy protein molecules they succeed in "grabbing" along their
travels through your body, thus replicating their function rather than
their substance. But the effect is the same. Where there was
one prion, now there are two, and the first is not diminished in the process.
It is free to continue its journey, copying itself again and again, as
are its progeny. Diseases caused by prions, such as Mad Cow Disease,
spread quickly and are nearly always fatal.
A computer virus "grabs" the memory and information processing
resources of your personal computer to carry out whatever nefarious task
it was designed to perpetrate, like erasing your hard drive or downloading
stored credit card numbers, and then again to copy and disperse itself
to everyone you know by way of your e-mail address book, shared floppy
disks, or other technological means.
And memes, finally, make sometimes precise, often profoundly
erroneous copies of themselves by “jumping” from brain to brain.
A pattern of thought in my mind makes a copy of itself in yours when I
express it to you with sufficient enthusiasm, anger, righteous indignation,
eloquence, promise of pleasure, etc. to “make an impression” on your thinking.
The original thought stays, undiminished, in my mind, while at the same
time synapses in your brain rearrange as if by magical compulsion to reflect
as much of my idea as you paid attention to and understood.
The more exciting my idea is to you, the more accurately
it will be copied in your brain, and the more likely you will become to
tell others about it, thus spreading the meme. Then, if exponential
dispersal of the meme sets in (as in the old TV shampoo commercial where
you tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on,
and so on…), it can explode across a town, a state, a nation, a gender,
a generation, or even the whole globe in an expanding “idea epidemic,”
referred to by memeticists as thought contagion. Such thought contagions
throughout history account not only for fads and fashions, but for mass
belief in general – for every religion, political ideology, economic system,
cultural custom, behavioral/moral code etc. since the birth of humankind.
Read the final sentence of the previous paragraph again,
this time making careful note of your subtle physical, emotional and mental
reactions to what is being said here. For some, the thought that
their personally-held religious or political beliefs might be the result
of contagion from an outside source is so repulsive that they have gone
to great lengths to ridicule and even quash altogether the study of memetics
as an empirical science. If the hairs on the back of your neck are
standing at attention and you find yourself growing irritable as you read
this chapter, you may be among their number. Others will accept the
concept of thought contagion with a thin smile and a smug nod of the head,
never acknow-ledging, even to themselves, how quickly their minds moved
upon encountering the idea to gently exclude their own most cherished beliefs
from the mix – “Of course, my beliefs are facts! But that crap everybody
else believes… Now those are memes!"
Remember this book’s core thesis from Chapter I – Nothing
that you currently believe about reality is true. It’s all memes,
hypnosis, illusion. All of it.
But it’s a very convincing illusion. It seems almost
impossible even to imagine what reality might be like, untainted by our
personal beliefs, our opinions, prejudices, likes and dislikes, even if
we intellectually acknowledge the proposition that shedding such imitated
“add-ons” may be the price we have to pay in order to awaken from our dreams
and achieve true personal and planetary freedom.
Reality just seems so… REAL…
As fellow replicators, genes and memes have a great deal
in common. But it is in examining their differences that we can begin
to see why our illusions might be so compelling.
WHAT GENES DO
For all their complexity, with roughly 30,000 genes combined
along three billion spiraling stair-steps in the human DNA molecule, the
genes that craft our bodies from zygote to old age are capable of impacting
us in only two ways – by shaping physical characteristics of our bodies
(including predispositions toward certain diseases, behaviors, etc.),
and by enhancing or interfering with the sensory equipment (eyes, ears,
nose, tongue, skin) through which we absorb information from our external
environment.
Genes determine our appearance, how well our organs work,
whether the chemicals in our brains are balanced or out of whack, how much
pain we can tolerate, the intensity of our sex drive and emotions, etc.
These are the building blocks of our internal physical environment.
They also determine how we will experience color (is
my "blue" the same as yours?), if we will see at all, the range of our
hearing, the sensitivity of our ability to smell and taste and touch the
world around us. Will we enjoy fine foods, or find everything bland?
Will a gentle touch excite us or cause pain? The senses allow signals
from outside the physical body to reach our brains as usable data for the
construction of our personal virtual simulation of reality. Sense
organs are the doorways to our internal sensory environment.
To use a computer metaphor, our genes provide us with
remarkable "hardware" – complex bodies capable of interacting intimately
with our environment, and big brains with which to process and internally
model sensory input. But they provide darned little in the way of
"software" with which to operate those big brains, beyond a fairly static
set of instinctual drives – hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, an aggressive
fight or flight response to perceived threats, etc.
WHAT MEMES DO
Back in Humanity’s prehistoric Golden Age, those genetically-programmed
instincts provided plenty of guidance for accomplishing such essential
tasks as plucking ripe fruit from the trees or curling up in soft grass
for a nap. But, as groups of humans began encoun-tering one another
and competing/cooperating over territory and resources, life gradually
became too complicated for basic instincts alone to successfully oversee.
Alternately, the leap from social simplicity to genetically-challenging
complexity may have occurred in an instant, measured in geological time,
as a consequence of rapid global climate change or some similar planet-wide
environmental disaster. Exact details of how the change took place
are lost to history, but there is little question that, sometime early
in our development as a species, a measurable transformation from simplicity
to complexity occurred, presenting emerging Humanity with a watershed crisis
of consciousness.
Continuing with the computer metaphor, human brains facing
this new level of complexity would compare to top of the line PCs, loaded
with memory, with modems, ports and floppy drives sticking out every which
way for absorbing information, but with insufficient processing power to
tell them how to use that data to construct a safe and sensible internal
model of the new environment. Instinct does a fine job of managing
our fight or flight response to the approach of an obvious predator like
a lion, but what if the “predator” is another human being, maybe one who
is smiling and offering food as he approaches, or, to use modern imagery,
a politician shaking hands, kissing babies, and making promises along the
campaign trail? Confusion in such moments can carry a high evolutionary
price.
Our senses channel a fairly narrow range of available
signals from our external environment to our brains, which then construct
internal 3D simulations of the outside world that we experience as physical
reality. As the complexity of our physical and/or social environment
surpassed our ability to accurately process incoming information, and therefore
to successfully model and respond to the outside world, memes "came to
the rescue," insinuating themselves into our mental processes as "software"
running on the genetically-provided "hardware" of our big human brains,
granting us a previously unknown ability to compare, sort and prioritize
incoming signals by assigning them, and the virtual products our brains
weave them into, meaning, both on the small and large scale. Memes
became the building blocks of our personal psychic reality.
WHEN MEMES COME TRUE
If we are honest, we have to admit that most of us live
our daily lives as if psychic reality does not exist. We each experience
the unique 3D simulation of reality generated inside our individual brains
as if it were physical reality itself, a separate, self-contained world
"out there" we move around within, but over which we have little or no
direct control.
The truth is that our individual simulations of reality
are at all times a mix of hard data we collect about the outside world
through our senses and what we think that data means, how it seems to relate
to past experiences, to things we've read or seen or heard others talk
about, etc.
When I look across my office and see an empty chair,
I see not only a boxy stick-structure of wood and cloth, but the concept
of "chair," as well, an object whose purpose is for human beings to sit
on comfortably. Its position beside the open office door adds to
that conception an element of hospitality and welcome; the chair is waiting
for someone to enter the office and sit down, perhaps to chat or do business.
It actively invites passers by my door, who share the "chair meme" and
understand its unspoken message, to stop in, sit down, say hello, start
a conversation, thus communicating something about my friendly, open personality
that a gray metal filing cabinet standing in the exact same place would
not. A large rock or whiskey barrel would work just as well to provide
seating, but neither would be appropriate in an office setting. They
would violate the "professional office" meme, and everyone who shares that
meme would recognize the inappropriateness of such an object in that setting.
Consider my office chair from the point of view of a
newborn infant, then a toddler just learning to walk, then a three year
old child. To the infant, the "chair" you and I see is not yet even
the stick-structure of wood and cloth referenced above, for "stick," "wood"
and "cloth" are as yet unknown quantities to its mind. To the toddler,
"chair" is an obstacle to crawling, a prop for pulling himself up to a
standing position, a place of "Mamma," "lap," "story time," etc.
The three year old knows "chair" much as you and I do, perhaps without
the subtle nuances of invitation and welcome. A chair is for sitting.
He sits.
All the elements that make up the adult understanding
of "chair" must be learned by a growing child, one at a time, through studied
imitation of the words and behaviors of older humans in the child's environment.
These elemental learned concepts are memes. As he acquires more memes,
the child's concept of "chair" will expand, and in some ways contract,
as well, as when "chair" ceases to be an obstacle to crawling because the
child now walks. Like a jigsaw puzzle, he will add, subtract and
rearrange the memetic pieces many times, with a remarkable mental dexterity
most readily available to us in our formative years, until his conception
of "chair" aligns closely enough with that of older children and adults
around him that no one notices any glaring discrepancies.
At which point, his perception locks into place.
"Chair," as he has come to understand it, becomes, simply, chair, free
of quotation marks. It becomes a steady component of his personal
reality, a rock-solid, totally convincing illusory mix of external signals
and internal memes he will seldom, if ever, be called upon to question
again. By the age of five, he will have forgotten all the work involved
in acquiring his present conception of "chair," and there will simply be
chairs in the world.
MEMES WITHIN MEMES WITHIN MEMES
My office chair is an example of an individual meme, with
it’s own separate life and influence, but it is simultaneously a memeplex
– an element of our physical/psychic reality mix which, under closer examination,
can be subdivided into a variety of smaller memes, much the way compounds
are composed of linked molecules, which are, themselves, made up of combinations
of atoms, which can be further subdivided into protons, neutrons, electrons,
quarks, gluons, all the way down to the spookiest phantom particles of
quantum physics. The “chair” meme allows us to identify furniture
intended for seating in almost any environment. But the "chair" memeplex
is, itself, composed of "sticks" plus "wood" plus "cloth" plus "sit" plus
"comfort" plus "welcome" and on and on and on, each of these elements memes
in their own right.
Dozens more individual memes are involved in the making
of this single object, some of them wholly unique to me or to the person
entering my office for a chat. The "chair" I offer a visitor may
include, in my personal “chair” memeplex, great feelings of pride and love
because, as a small child, I often stood on chairs to help my mother chop
vegetables and roll cookie dough on the kitchen counter. The "chair"
my visitor accepts may, in his personal "chair" memeplex, include large
helpings of fear and frustration, reflecting his mother's long struggle
to control her child's natural exuberance with frequent banishings to the
dreaded "time out chair." While our adult conceptions of “chair”
will likely be sufficiently compatible that we will both, without hesitation,
agree that I am offering him a seat and he is accepting, his "chair" and
my "chair" are really not the same chair at all.
In exactly the same way, the “me” he has come to speak
with is not the “me” I know myself to be, sitting across from him.
The “him” I see before me bears little resemblance to how my visitor experiences
himself in his own reality simulation. I have entered into his dream,
and he has entered into mine. Once he is comfortably seated, we are
going to have a conversation and make decisions together that may dramatically
impact the future success or failure of the company that employs us, maybe
even the fate of whole nations or the globe, if we are world leaders.
Imagine now every object, person and institution in your
life – book, house, car, movie, computer, clothing, phone, spouse, child,
boss, friend, neighbor, stranger, pet, career, all your political, religious,
social and cultural affiliations… Each of these elements of your
personal reality is as internal and illusory as my office chair.
The world you have, until this moment, labeled “real” is almost entirely
composed of memes, not things. What every human being calls “reality”
is, in actuality, a highly-individualized personal memeplex composed of
smaller memeplexes and individual memes wrapped like the shell of a mammoth
oyster around a tiny, glistening pearl of “meaningless” environmental information
taken in by our senses – “meaningless” in the sense that our eyes and ears
and nose and tongue and skin relay raw data to our brains, free of judgments
or prioritization. Our senses read the “plain text” of our environment
within the physical boundaries set by our genes. Memes and memes
alone spin that text into a story.
TO SERVE MAN
You may be thinking, at this point, “What’s so bad about
memes? Sounds like we couldn’t even think without them!”
You’re right. When we use the word “think,” we
are most often referring to the act of comparing one memory to another
or measuring present moment perceptions against past observations -- Does
this idea make sense in the context of other things I already know/believe?
Is this new situation like one I have experienced before? How did
I react then? Should I repeat that response, or try something new?
– and without memes, we couldn’t do that. Remember Richard Dawkins’
connection of the word meme to memory. In much the same way
that an armory is a storehouse for arms and other military equipment, human
memory can be viewed as a storehouse for memes. Our personal memories
reflect the millions of memes we have absorbed during our lifetimes, and
which link together in multilayered, interlocking memeplexes to create
our individual dream worlds. “Thinking,” as we normally conceive
of it, is a memetic operation, centered in memory and the consequent illusion
of our lives as a single unbroken story, with a unique past, present and
future, a meaningful beginning, a middle and an end.
Without such illusions, our dreams would dissipate and
we would likely find ourselves eternally “stuck in the present” – which,
it seems important to point out, is exactly where most schools of religious/spiritual
mysti-cism are designed to lead us, beyond the “thinking trap,” back to
the present moment, to mindfulness, awakening, to being here now!
Without question, the physical evolution of the human
species has selected in favor of meme-susceptible brains. The ability
of such brains to generate fully-engaging, three dimensional internal story
worlds, with their possessors as the focal character, has enabled our species
to adapt with lightning speed, compared to the snail’s pace of genetic
evolution, to changes in our physical environment, and to create a social
milieu allowing frequent opportunities to gratify our instinctual sex drives,
and for our offspring to survive to do the same, thus advancing the cause
of our genes – proliferating into future physical generations. The
ancient, symbiotic relationship of genes and memes seems, at first glance,
to be an obvious win-win for human beings.
Until we factor in that we are not players in that relationship.
As replicators, genes and memes have an agenda all their own – getting
copied – that has nothing to do with us as individuals. Being “taken
over by desire” and copulating against one’s better judgment (the oft-heard,
“…it just happened…”) shows genes manipulating the individual, through
instinct, toward their goal of genetic replication, with potentially disastrous
personal and social consequences for the individual. A terrorist
suicide bomber is a good example of memes sacrificing their human carrier
in the service of reaching potentially thousands or millions of fertile
minds when the event is covered on TV news, publicly condemned by politicians,
or applauded from the pulpit.
These are obviously extreme examples, but if we examine
our day to day, ordinary experiences closely, we can quickly discern dozens
of daily memetic interferences draining our energy and diverting us from
the pursuit of our ideal experience of life. We may stir up bad blood
with our spouse or co-workers by parroting political ideologies we’ve heard
discussed on the radio or TV, without ever questioning why we suddenly
find ourselves so committed to viewpoints we had never previously considered.
We may take offense at an overheard conversation in the workplace concerning
religious values, sexual mores or a “hot button” political issue like abortion,
and find ourselves alienating our coworkers by interrupting to insist on
the righteousness of our own view, or changing our behavior toward the
speakers by, say, avoiding someone who might have proved an important ally
in the advancement of our career goals. Our idealized “perfect man”
or “perfect woman” meme may be our chief roadblock to achieving real human
intimacy. Abused children frequently carry the “trust no one” and
“love equals violence” memes well into adulthood, often recreating in their
adult relation-ships the very chaotic family dynamic they longed as children
to escape.
On a global scale, memeplexes shared by large numbers
of people – religions and political ideologies toping the list – too often
lead those under their influence to wage Crusades and Jihads, to perpetrate
genocidal “ethnic cleansing,” or to unapologetically design, create and
stockpile “doomsday weapons” like hydrogen bombs or wildly virulent germ
warfare agents in mad attempts to “win hearts and minds," or in hopes of
wantonly destroying as many human brains infected with competing memes
as possible.
Good, bad or indifferent, useful or destructive, there
is no escape from the simple fact that memes serve memes, not human beings.
Like genes, memes serve the singular goal of their own replication, without
regard to the happiness, health or well being of their carriers – US.
This is true of all memes and memeplexes, large and small, whether they
lead us to success or destruction, to riches or poverty, to comfort or
chaos.
And when we go unquestioningly along for the ride, blindly
confusing our meme-generated dream world with “reality,” our beliefs with
“facts,” and labeling our altruistic or destructive meme-programmed behaviors
“choices” – or worse, “callings” – we are serving their goal, as well.
NOTE: The heading of this section, To Serve Man,
refers to a classic Twilight Zone TV show episode from 1959, in which visiting
aliens are naively embraced as having Humanity’s best interests in mind
because their “Holy Book” bears the very flattering title “To Serve Man”–
but only too late is it is discovered that “To Serve Man” is, in fact…
a human cookbook! What a great metaphor for the real-life relationship
between memes and human beings! Don’t be fooled by appearances!
BEYOND MEMES
While it is true that we cannot think, as we have come
to conceive of “thinking,” without the help of memes, and that our gene-driven
physical evolution as a species has selected in favor of meme-susceptible
brains, we should not necessarily conclude that such “thinking” is therefore
a natural or ideal human state, or that the product of such “thinking”
– the apparent inviolability of our individual and collective dream worlds
– is as close to an unencumbered experience of reality as we can hope to
achieve.
At some early point in our species’ long evolutionary
journey, a watershed increase in social complexity, rapid changes in our
physical environment, or some similar event genetic evolution was just
too slow to handle created a situation in which letting memes do our “thinking”
for us became advantageous to our physical survival. This triggered
natural selection to favor meme-susceptible brains over those capable of
a very different mode of thinking altogether – a meme-free, wide-awake,
directly-perceptual present-moment mode of cognition which I propose remains
to this day the natural and achievable birthright of every human being
who is willing to do the work necessary to reclaim it.
In designing our big human brains, genes provided “hardware”
for experiencing a much larger, more vastly complex reality than anything
our dream worlds can even begin to hint at. The primeval “unholy
alliance” between genes and memes surely allowed us to survive physically
into the present, but at a price beyond imagination – the exchange of the
real for the illusory, of clear, awakened minds for groggy sleep, of the
organic “wild” freedom of direct perception for the “tame” and externally-imposed
domestication of human culture.
The core hypothesis of this book, and of the The Simplest
Path as a whole, is that there exists in real, physical, biological reality,
beyond all the cultural, religious, ritualistic or sentimental New Age
trappings in which whispers of its existence have been smothered for millennia,
a mode of human brain functioning – which includes the total mental, emotional,
spiritual and even physical dimensions of our lives, as these are all directly
controlled by our brains – that is in every way different from the ersatz
meme-dream we have accepted in its place.
I further propose that the attainment of this secondary
available mode of cognition, which has been referred to throughout history
by such terms as “enlightenment, “satori,” “salvation,” and “sainthood,”
and which for the purposes of this book I label simply “awakening,” has
been reported amongst global human population, throughout time, in every
clime and culture, with sufficient frequency that we can consider its existence
to be, at the very least, highly probable and potentially verifiable.
The Simplest Path is my attempt to clarify the concrete, real-world steps,
stripped of cultural memetic embellishments, by which individuals can verify
the reality of enlightenment for themselves by personally attaining an
awakened state of consciousness.
My third and final conjecture – and this one is pure
speculation, as I know of no means for verifying its truth in the present,
though it seems very likely to me that it will be proven out by our future
evolution as a species – is that the aforementioned long-past moment when
allowing memes to do our “thinking” for us became advantageous for our
physical survival was a temporary crisis in the face of which memes allowed
us to successfully adapt in the moment, but which culminated in the long-term
derailment of our natural evolution as a species. Whatever those ancient,
dramatic changes were, when the environment stabilized and life returned
to normal, we not only failed to throw off the influence of our parasitic
mental “saviors” and return to our “right minds,” we became so deeply and
hypnotically captivated by the flattering, self-indulgent dream worlds
our memetic handlers made available to us that we forgot about their existence
altogether. Whether by choice or simple weakness, we were transformed
in the aftermath of that fateful crisis into a parasitized host species.
The reclamation of our birthright, and of our true evolu-tionary destiny,
depends on our remembering now what was then forgotten, on our winning
now the battle our ancestors lost, or simply failed to wage.
You don’t have to take my word for any of this – in fact,
I encourage you not to! You cannot escape the bonds of meme-sleep
by simply adding more memes to your personal grand memeplex, or by championing
any one meme – not even The Simplest Path – as superior to all others and
following it blindly. Such efforts can only embroil you more deeply
in the drama of the dream, carrying you further and further from real awakening.
I encourage you, instead, to accept the hypotheses above,
not as facts, but simply as possibilities worthy of consideration and experimentation,
and to apply your own efforts to carrying out the awakening exercises outlined
in this book and future volumes of this series. If the hypotheses
prove correct, you will verify them for yourself, experientially, by achieving
personal awakening and gaining freedom from memetic control. In your
awakened state of consciousness, you will enter a new path of evolution,
and find yourself uniquely positioned to lead others toward this same bright,
alternate destiny, to the benefit of all Humankind. If, on the other
hand, the hypotheses prove false, you will have read a few books and wasted
a little time – time that would have passed anyway.
You have nothing to lose but illusions, and a literal
new world to gain. Are you ready?
The work of achieving liberation from memetic parsitization
begins with the intentional and systematic release of memes from our brains,
and the gradual loosening of their power to shape our experience of reality.
Acknowledging that we are, in fact, asleep and dreaming, and choosing to
consciously restore the quotation marks around every “certainty” we have
to this moment held dear is the first step toward achieving this freedom.