Do memes exist? Or are they fictions?
by Jon Rappoport
April 6, 2016
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
There was a time when words like “slogan” and “motto” were used frequently. They were good solid terms. But then something happened.
The new, dreamy, utopian, educated, tech class wanted a mystical item for their new “information culture.”
So meme came along in 1976. Thank you, Richard Dawkins.
“Slogan” comes from the early 16th century Scottish Gaelic: sluagh (army) and gairm (shout). An army shout. A battle cry. No mistaking it. Bang.
“Motto” is just as good. The Latin gives us muttum (a mutter, a grunt).
But now, from the Online Etymology Dictionary:
Meme: “1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in ‘The Selfish Gene,’ coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai “to imitate”…and intended to echo gene.”
Dawkins writes: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’.”
A unit of cultural transmission. Sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ A replicator. Heavy pseudo-tech overtones.
With “meme,” we’re into different territory. We’re encouraged to believe (and even celebrate) that key words and phrases and images “automatically” transfer from person to person—a cultural phenomenon. As if there is a contagion factor beyond anyone’s control. As if genes are being passed along. Or viruses. No one is really responsible. It just happens.
This absurd notion is, of course, entirely in line with collectivism —“the things we’re all thinking at once.”
We’re supposed to believe that ideas “happen” in the group, the mass, the Glob. They just show up.
They especially happen on the Web, where these “memes” of the collective (all hail!) sweep through the brains of millions of people like a dust storm—because that’s how reality should work in the Great New Epoch.
The individual is nothing more than a link in a chain. Electrical impulses pass along the chain. Or genes do. Or viruses.
No choice is involved. It’s a wonderful cheese-melt infection and contagion. The group knows. The group twitches this way and then that way. This is the heraldic future. Sizzle, twitch, sizzle, twitch.
Independent individual consciousness? Choice? Never heard of it.
But let me quote the well-known British psychologist, Susan Blackmore, because she lays out the “meme-philosophy” in an unmistakable way:
“Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.”
Boom. There is no such thing as consciousness. It’s just a grab-bag of contagious memes. And if this isn’t enough, here is her foundation:
“Memetics appears to have a lot of implications that we humans are machines, which people have never liked. Of course we’re machines, we’re biological machines. But people don’t like that. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. People don’t like that. My view is that if these things are true it doesn’t matter if we like them or not.”
I see. We’re machines. There is no freedom. In fact, there is no self. So Blackmore, I presume, is just another collection of memes talking to other collections of memes—and she’s not choosing to do so, because choice doesn’t exist. There is no “she.” There is no you. There is no me.
Perfect.
Transhumanists must love her. They push the narrative that humans are merely biological machines, too. Therefore, since “no one is really there,” any changes to the machines are acceptable, especially if introduced from above, in order to create a far better future. Naturally, these transhumanists define what that future should be. They decide how to re-program all the billions of defective biological machines on Earth to fit their vision.
Plant countless numbers of memes; modify genetics; beam electromagnetics into skulls; rearrange hormones; insert images directly into the visual cortex bypassing the usual mode of perception; prescribe drugs that radically alter brain chemistry; replace body parts; hook brains to computers that supply answers to all questions and problems; create human clones; establish hatcheries for synthetic births.
You know, that sort of thing.
Rewire all the sizzles and twitches of the universal collective.
In Brave New World, Huxley was presenting a future in which humans would opt for the pleasures of sensation and belonging, and in return they would sacrifice whatever they might dimly remember of a different kind of life.
All the suffering of the past would be the rationalization for making this new world, where suffering would be absent.
The memes that refer to this trade-off are still in the infancy stage, but you can bet they will proliferate. And they will not spontaneously arise. They’ll be inserted, as part of the ongoing psychological operation to carry us forward into a shadowless society of happy bio-machines.
A few memes that have come and gone and resurfaced—the meanings change as well: “Spaceship Earth, biosphere, infosphere, going viral.” Depending on the usage, you can see, creeping in at the edges, the Collective We, as if the “I” is simply a remnant of a bygone era of monsters…but now, thank goodness, the human race is being re-educated to the correct frequency.
Meme-metaphysics emphasizes what the Internet supposedly proves: all is information. Life is information. Flesh, blood, desire, passion, high ideals, achievement—these and other “older” terms are now inappropriate and meaningless, because we know that organisms, including humans, are actually only houses for information-flow and transfer.
This essentially soulless view coordinates well with transhumanists, who would say of their projects to reshape all humans, “Well, we’re just directing information in new ways. No harm in that.”
No harm, if you want to let loose soulless surgeons to drain the life-force from everyone they can, because underneath it all, they have no life left of their own.
No harm at all.
You’re a machine. I’m a machine.
You sitting there, reading these words, understanding them, knowing that you understand them at this very moment—that’s all some kind of synaptic boondoggle. You’re not conscious of this moment. How could you be? You’re just information.
You’re composed of 5000 memes. I’m composed of 5000 memes. We’re memeing. That’s all.
This is being sold to (and by) the educated class step by step.
It was once called philosophic materialism, before that term was deemed clunky and aged, before it was dropped like a hot potato—because it characterized too well and too purely the titanic campaign to erase the individual and his unique consciousness.
Replacing the unique and irreducible individual, we have the notion of a “soft infection” of memes. They are now the particles of existence. They spread endlessly. That’s the new philosophy.
It’s utter nonsense, of course.
It’s an op.
It’s designed to take language, and therefore thought, out of the hands of the individual.
The designers are betting you won’t notice, that you’ll waft with the tide of the elite info-nauts and eventually wind up in their placid beds of the Brave New World, sizzling and twitching with minor pleasures, bereft of what you once were.
Their culture is a rank fraud.
And cultures only exist when people decide to enlist in them. They don’t happen by uncontrollable contagion. If you buy the contagion myth, you buy a fluffy puffy fairy tale that, sooner or later, leads you into a dark wet dead-end alley.
They’re essentially claiming they can reprogram you to believe the alley is a bed of delights and never notice the broken bricks and the decay and the debris.
You have the power to reason and analyze and imagine and create and invent futures and realities of your own choosing, out of your most profound desires.
There never was and never will be a meme for that.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Memes exist as concepts in the minds of individuals, and in the collective consciousness. Santa Claus is a meme, and Santa Claus surely exists. I received many presents from Santa Claus, when I was a child. But now, as an adult, not so much…. Please stop with the false dichotomy of “either/or, but NEVER both”…. It’s USUALLY, both, Jon….
A problem I have with memes is that, as an umbrella term, it lessens understanding. I understand what images, mottos, slogans, ideas, styles, behaviors…are. The only thing that’d stop these from being “memes” would be if only the originator was aware of them, but this would keep them from being _anything_. ///The implication that we have no choice whether or not to have Santa in our lives is false, & would be frightening if true.
Try Richard Brodies’ “Virus of the Mind ~ the New Science of Memes”. And, you MIGHT have a choice to keep Santa out of your life, but you can NEVER get Santa out of your mind. Your mind is now permanently imbued – infected – with the Santa Claus meme….You HAD TO write that!
And, “images, mottos, slogans, ideas, styles, behaviors” were ALL invented before 1975 – they can’t possibly be memes, because they pre-date the creation of memes….
1/Santa, along with a seemingly infinite number of whatever you choose to call them, is almost never *on* my mind. Whether or not it’s “in” my mind is subject to debate: The fact that I recognize the word when you post it is hardly the same as it lurking in my subconscious. If actual viruses were as un-noticed by the recipient as this mind-virus is by me, they never would’ve been known or named. 2/How is Santa not an idea? How was Santa not invented before 1975? The *word* “meme’ was invented in 1975, but as far as I can see, the things *called* memes already existed, by other names. If a meme is truly that which cannot be described by any previously-invented word, that didn’t exist before 1975, I’m going to need a better example of a meme. 3/One’s descendants might not live on, while one’s ideas might. Why does this need to be re-named “genes” & “memes”?
There is an aspect of mind running subconscious that receives impressions of association and retains them. In its positive effect it leaves attention free to enjoy and embrace the physical reality experience without having to attend every detail of its basic orientation, and so it holds certain aspects or fundamental routines in place as an autonomous conditioning – triggered by association – as a conditioned sense of thought and reality-response. In its negative sense it will just as readily hold and respond with negative conditionings reinforcing and witnessing to a sense of fearful, invalid and threatened self – that is then auto-masking with all kinds of social and personal habit pattern.
Once a pathway of association is imprinted by repeated act of attention and reaction it runs as part of ‘who you are – and may seem to have a will of its own if you seek to change because it won’t conform or communicate to coercive or conforming thinking that seeks to invalidate or override it, but rather to a new set of conscious thoughts and responses from a fresh decision – which is an outcome of a true process of communication and not a rebranded makeover of trying to persist in the same behaviour that brings that same unsatisfactory outcome.
As to what is ‘in our lives’; Infinite possibility – at least for each within the range of current probability available, and that is not random or happenstance so much as outcomes arising from the use to which we put our mind. I posit you that Everything imaginable already exists as a timeless and infinite Idea – but that the unfolding experiencing of being and discovering it is a freedom of focus and attention in which the individual expressions of the Idea that recognizes Itself through extension as relational communication – is love creating. Now it wont seem like love creating through the lens of the idea of focusing in and identifying with… who you are not. For each of us is a unique vibrational presence that recognizes itself – and enlivens – along the lines and in the particular frequencies that are relevant and resonant to the themes we are exploring as this focus of experience.
What is not given attention, but disregard, fades from non use. While what is – even as a ‘negative’ attention -is strengthened and reinforced resulting in a negative outcome.
Consciousness responsibility involves re-wakening as consciousness – the true presence of you – from which and as which to accept only what is aligned with the true of you – as an act of true self love. Clearly a habit-pattern is already running of a range of conditionings that effectively run as a place-holder or overlay of strategies of coping with a negatively or fearfully defined sense of self – for we all meet lovelessness coming into the human conditioning that then covers over a direct feeling and knowing of being for a complex and convoluted masking of social demand.
Because, truly, one is not IN or OF the world, but consciousness in which the experience of the world is held in focus, one man be someone who has never had the past that is not being lived from now. For the personality structure is not a fixed or abiding ‘you’ but a construct of definitions, feelings thoughts and behaviours through which you participate in shared being. It is a SENSE of disconnection arising from identifying exclusively with the personality structure. This occurs as readily from attempting to conform or coerce it either by inflation or limitation.
The simple key is to choose to use what is in our consciousness and experience of the world to serve a truly positive or re-integrative outcome. Simple but so easily overlooked or neglected in an already running reaction taken as ‘self’.
So the willingness to pause and listen or feel for true desire is not to conform to any structure of idea as to how or what love or you should be – but open to what you are being within a willingness of more clearly aligning with what is moving in you. The fear and hatred of fighting believed evil keeps this willingness in such denial as to cage or kill it.
Santa or or indeed Satan has the roles and functions you give it for you. Imagination grounded in integrity is not a runaway train crash. Who you are not can play a very clear role in the recognition and acceptance of who you are. When the forms of Life are mimicked and manipulated as if they are life – they become false presents that may look glamorous or powerful but are hollow packaging, and gripping so tight to the mask that it becomes you does not add depth but renders everything superficial. The apparent escape from depths in which fears lie hidden plays out as the power to assert and define everything cause-less – so as to remove or conceal all evidences that point back to the feared exposure in which such ‘power’ is ‘lost’ to a true account.
To persist in what we don’t want as if we do want it is to actively deny our self for the sake of a perceived and believed gain – or to avoid a perceived or believed loss. Perception and belief have to be held to true account or the runaway train crash continues. As long as we are trying to steer out of a skid we have no traction – but the moment we steer into it – a reconnection with the road restores a sense of knowing how to meet the condition and respond with it rather than overriding it and losing communication. The principle here is sound but living this willingness consistently is perhaps the remit of the new epoch – for those who are focusing in such probability. The runaway imagination of action-reaction without true acceptance for consciousness may be a default choice for those who feel more aligned with persisting in a dream of power over Life – or indeed the escape from life that a withholding of living presence paints it as.
your argument proofs Jon right. But I guess you didn’t understand this.
Der Memmen* Rache ist das Meme,
An denen die für sich einstehn;
Die nicht mehr an der Mutter Brust
Sich nähren, sondern voller Lust,
Den Wirklichkeiten Kinder machen
Und über Memmen – einfach lachen.
*ger. eine Memme is in eng. a milksop
Thank you Jon!
Sorry, “urkeramik”, but I’m hyper-mono-fluent in Modern American English. Nein schprecken zie deutsche! Yeah, I know I mangled that “German”! LOL -*are you saying that “Memme” in German means “milksop” in English? I can *sorta* read the German poem/ditty, but if you could hear me pronounce it, I’m sure you’d GROAN!…. I think sometimes, Jon R. gets carried away with the whole “individual vs. the system” thing, but that’s his thing. I still enjoy the intellectual exercise! Thanks, “urkeramik”!
Quite a few years ago I started reading a book by Susan Blackmore. In the opening pages she made the startling pronouncement that humans are distinguished from animals in their ability to mimic/imitate, which animals lack (according to her). I kept reading for another page or so but it bothered me so much I finally closed the book and threw it away. I saw no reason to waste time on someone who spouts off on things she has clearly never investigated. Couldn’t help wondering how many similar statements were carelessly thrown around in her little book.
I can strongly recommend Richard Brodies’ “Virus of the Mind~ The New Science of Memes”, as a MUCH better book than Blacmore’s….. And also see my (gentle) critique of Rappoport, above…
Thank you for the recommendation
I haven’t read virus of the mind – but the idea of a loss of presence in which a parasitic, alien or destructive intent works its own agenda as ‘my thoughts’ is aptly inferred by the defence against such attack. You can see this pattern in the war against terror – cancer – or indeed anything – because the seemingly justified attack is the propagation and persistence of the seed idea it presumes to ‘eradicate’.
This is the trick my which a mind splits to war within itself – and power struggle undermines or distorts all communication in asserting and enforcing a will – that is in fact the denial of true willing, for it does not communicate within and as a balanced outcome of free association – but coercively conforms to a rigid or fixed sense of self and life that imprints forcefully as identity in concept – or indeed in self image that then resists and seeks to control and exploit change – in terms of the fixed sense of self and its reality experience.
While the uncovering of the force of feeling associated with hidden fear and masked rage can serve awakening to a living presence of free willing acceptance and restored communication, it is closely associated with being triggered to attack, deny, withdraw and hide.
The triggering is not the ‘evil’ so much as the original imprint of survival amidst a framework of confusion or partial and incomplete understanding. The identifying against and in fear of evil (within) by hating it (without), is an en-trance to the focusing in conflicted sense of self/reality and the lens through which to engage physical experience in exclusive terms.
My sense is that the latter came first as the desire to focus in a specific idea/experience by disregarding alternate ‘reality perspectives’ and that confusion of identity arose within the conditioning feedback of such exclusivity – where the personal sense through which we extend and experience our Soul in this way – becomes imprinted with the urge for power over, rather than balanced cooperation with, along with its attendant experience of denial, deprivation and pain of exclusion that becomes the validation of such power to a dissociated sense of disconnect from any real relationship.
This is off at a tangent no doubt from the virus idea of wolf malware running in in the sheep’s clothing – and I don’t say this to mean ‘sheepie’ – but as the currency of forms of accepted communication. I feel it is the sleeping in the FORM of communication that invites and perhaps necessitates the wolf to wake up the flock from ‘sheepiedom’ to flocks of free and true association.
Pests reveal where the breaches or compromise is. If one addresses the FORM of the pest without the underlying correspondences, then that FORM of pest control becomes the perfect hiding place for the parasitic intent to operate through – and it may not think itself such to operate personal or private agenda at the EXPENSE of the whole, of integrity, or genuine communication.
So the net-bot operates a collective of compromised individual nodes within a larger relationship – of a controlled collectivism, and once set up to run code ‘unconsciously’ or as undercurrent reality denied conscious acceptance – aligns to undercurrent power in any triggered event.
Sweeping the moneylender out of your template consciousness is not a political act but a reclaiming of true presence and purpose. And rage of illegitimacy is appropriately serving this turnabout within by fully feeling it – but not propagating hate that masks the underlying hurt – or pain will recycle itself in ignorance and arrogance of reactive conditioning.
Speaking truth to power is a political act that can only come from the capacity to receive and extend presence – for all else is a presentation seeking validation – be that seeking to regain lost power or lost love. Both are part of our human conditioning and both are sought in ways that operate against fulfilment and become co-fused with each other in self-destructive negative definition.
Freedom truly resides in the power to accept idea and run it while it serves the movement of your focussing desire. If the idea is actively manifesting in your reality, it is serving some purpose for you or you wouldn’t give it the time of another moment. Communication acquires layers of coded pain in attempt to attract a sympathetic outcome or ward off a sense of violation.
Discernment is a quality of communication that is both native, simple and direct – but denied by the masking of and attempt to escape pain – in whatever form of identity that takes in each of us.
Our core beliefs and definitions are not on our sleeve but hidden because they are conflicting or fearful to uncover. So we create or discover ‘permission slips’ that work for us as a way of getting in touch with what we already knew but didn’t allow, acknowledge or act from as our true self.
The more light, the more that which hides is revealed – and comes up not to damn us but to be undone or healed. But the ‘light’ of cold analysis is an unloving light. If you feel, you will simply know – but to truly feel, the thinking must be paused from running that ‘tells you how to feel’.
Pausing the triggered reaction opens a space in which another perspective can ‘voice’ for you – if you are even a little willing to listen there. THAT is the issue. Finding willingness and recognizing your own life amidst emotion-backed thinking that was made to keep it hidden – for reasons that don’t apply now – because – your willingness has found you.
As an informational portal it held no value for you, so – of course – you put it behind you. But noticing what bothers me can open a deeper quality of insight than the story on the page. And perspective upon something uncovered within myself means I truly put something behind me rather than meeting it again (or meting it out again), and again because the insight wants to ‘come home’.
Isn’t it so that we are each in the specific and unique configuration of who we are currently accepting ourselves to be – and learning from it? Perhaps learning is an eventual outcome of transformation and I should rather say ‘experiencing the fruit of it’.
I wondered at your quote of S.B’s and came up with my own:
Humans distinguish themselves by differentiating in thought from the Life that lives them as all within and around them. What they think, becomes their unique perspective within a presumption of a disconnected sense of power-struggle that operates in absence of Felt Connection.
This sense of disconnected thought begets itself as the idea of un-feeling memes.
A wish-fulfilment for idea of acquired immunity, untroubled by relational communication from the unfit. Vax them with memes to undermine capacity for receptivity and response!
Automata to be biotechnically upgraded or replaced with AI upgrades.
Beam me up Scottie!
Ive been waiting for someone to tackle this annoying term and Jon you have done a wonderful job many thanks
This concept here given reference is today represented in our world where no individual is responsible for his or her actions. They are simply products of an uncontrollable social environment. So how can they take responsibility? Alas we are all victims, so they suggest. Yet even though we may be victims of creations, physics, and/or realities, look at what human reason has done to temper that condition.
Materialistic monism..one ring to rule them all , one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the area of “spirituality” this is the only view pushed
In the area of “enlightened science” this is all the buzz on TEDtalks.
In medicine you are your genes
in psychology
Or in Psychoneuroimunnology the parsing the soul.
Maybe Icarus flew too close to the sun…then again maybe his wings were just too sticky from all the spitballs lobbed at him by the muddobbers peering into petri dishes.
This is in essence, science in it’s blind arrogance assuming it has the right to encroach on the territory of philosophy which is actually laughable.
“This is in essence, science in it’s blind arrogance assuming it has the right to encroach on the territory of philosophy which is actually laughable.” It’s nice to know, now, that I’m not alone in thinking this way… There was a time when the only choice was between arrogant Religion and arrogant Science. This is good thinking here.
I like that word, meme. If I say it slowly, one syllable at a time… “meh… meh…meh… meh. Yes, exactly what a sheeple sounds like.
When you were born, you knew very little. You knew how to swallow and cry and had skills that does not require a conscious mind like breathing. You used your skills to maximize what you predicted to be pleasurable and minimize what you predicted to be painful. Your experiences have created your reality. You created a model of reality and you have updated the model as you have learned from your experiences. Your model of reality is used to predict future events. All of the ideas in your mind come from: your direct experiences, your indirect experiences, ideas that you generated, and ideas that others have conveyed to you.
Feeling pain when you touched a fire is a direct experience. Watching somebody else scream when they touch a fire is an indirect experience. The pain of a slap on the hand when you went near the fire is a conveyed idea.
An example of a generated idea is when you change your model. When you felt discomfort, you cried and somebody came and removed the discomfort. But one day you cried and nobody came. You eventually had to change your model of reality.
Much of the modern world is directed by ‘experts’ who convey ideas to you. They pose as authority figures so you will accept the ideas without fitting them in the conceptual structure of your mind. The result of this non-thinking is that most people have fractured minds. They know that there are inconsistencies and conflicts but they don’t know where to begin to resolve the conflicts. So they rely on other experts to make sense of the world. They accept some people try to convey ideas as smart and others as evil. The smart experts are trying to help you and the evil experts are trying to help themselves.
A meme is an idea that you can accept without having to change the conceptual structure of your mind. It is a tool of dis-empowerment. Once your head is filled with disparate and conflicting thoughts, you think that everybody is as confused as you are. They think that no information that doesn’t come from an authority could possibly be valid. They are trained to see all those who haven’t been domesticated as weirdos. They also do not want to be seen as a crazy person so they avoid processing information from non-authorities. They don’t want to be seen as a bad person so they avoid all subjects that the experts have deemed to be hurtful.
Your neighbor may look like you and dress like you but see the world radically differently than you do.
Well said and a pleasure to read.
A desire to assert and believe ‘self-evident’ idea or ‘authoritatively provided’ idea as the escape from or mitigation of a fractured or split sense of self, is a defence that encodes fractured meanings upon idea by virtue of the use to which they are being put.
And so the words another uses may seem to be the same words you use – but embody meanings that subvert or render meaningless as ‘fractured meaning’, and offer ‘witness’ to a disparate and conflicting world while unaware of calling forth or perpetuating conflict by seeming to escape it.
I hold that we always automatically seek pleasure and avoid pain as we each define our self and function to be, in relation to any event. Experience of separation trauma, ‘imprints’ a sense of self that persists until and unless such definitions are brought into awareness rather than denied and protected from exposure by functions of survival. Hence rage asserts a survival force amidst a sense of entrapment and threat that is not wrong to feel, so much as mis-identified and thus misdirected.
Finding – indeed imagining ways to approach that invite a process of communication rather than trigger the defensive ‘attack’ or withdrawal, is of course a willingness to notice and align our own mind to communication rather than attack.
Can mind fear or attack itself? The belief we are divided within and against our self is such a fear and our experience of our world offers reinforcement for the definition we are holding dear – even though everything else in us may seem to be operating to mitigate or escape the pain of it – and thus seem righteous, necessary or compulsive.
Communication is natural or already moving, but willingness for communication has been ‘captured’ by a survival mode that has no antecedent to trust communication – having been hurt AT the level of love that is Communication in a way it cannot bear and will not allow to re-open.
The evils that we ‘love’ to hate in others are our perception of others choosing a lesser pain or terror amidst insanely framed choice, of the mind that ‘knows not what it does’. One cannot reason with a mind inflamed – but one can embody or extend presence of sanity to the one who may thus more easily recognize their own willingness from the fearful or tyrannous thinking they took as their own.
I only dropped in to write the first line – but the sense of joining with you brought more forth. That is also an important factor; opening relationship brings forth fresh inspiration and perspective from which to live. Judging ‘others’ uses relationships to re-enact and reinforce past conditioning. Not that that is ‘wrong’ or blameful, but that when we see and own this in-act, we are instantly free to align with where we are and who we are… Unless we don’t see when we define such freedom as the beginning of a long and painful difficult process of ‘working on our blocks…
But we meet where we are coming from.
There may be need to create or discover stepping stones of transition in releasing fear of loss and pain as ‘guide and protector’, to embrace a native or original communion and communication within being. But the context of any such processes or paths is presence in action – in relationship, whatever the apparent forms of the act. Choosing for our joy – with integrity – and without demanding fixed outcomes. For the act derives its authorship and authority from its purpose, and true or unified purpose is not serving a conflicted and conflicting fear and guilt agenda by attempting to overcome it or eradicate it.
The way out of a mind-trap is to see that you are not in it. Noticing mind-trap is the discerning of false or self contradicting ‘meanings’ – which no longer ‘operate’ as accepted currency because they are ‘seen through’ rather than used to ‘see through’.
Off topic.
But, since Merle Haggard died today on his 79th birthday, I tought it would be nice to listen to one of his song that brings a bit of sanity and humanity to this world..
Listening To The Wind ( Merle Haggard )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWJNqLY9bzM
Good post, Jon
If you don’t recall, this is what I think of Richard Dawkins (who has a special place in my heart)
https://ozziethinker.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/denial-and-apathy-will-restrict-and-ultimately-halt-human-ascension/
I don’t agree “slogan” or “motto” have too much bearing on what “meme” has become. Slogans and mottos are personal and impersonal at the same time, deep but contrived. They are “best of breeds” sound bites geared to enhance the trivial, in all its power. Proverbs might also be called mottos on occasion, for instance.
Memes, in my opinion, are closer related to agendas. “Agenda”, of course, stems from the Latin, agere which means “the act of doing”. Yes, you can bark orders at trans-humans and “make” them do stuff, but the way they “act of doing” is quite individual, uniquely personal, subjective. You cannot be subjective without being selfish, and meme is the précis to an agenda.
An agenda has become more than the “act of doing”. It is a selfish plan of action. Memes are representative echoes.
The rather more perplexing question for the Dawkinites is, “where and what is the separation between ‘being’ and ‘doing'”?
A machine simply does, as Descartes identified. Could a machine work out (without being specifically programmed to do so) it existed without being conscious of the fact? Wasn’t that the unanswered, unscripted question of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey? Only death of the computer prompted the realisation it was alive.
Best
OT
Szatz asked; does mental illness exist – and his answer was no. A relational conflict is not an organic illness residing in the body or brain of one individual – though the State can and does assert and impose ‘treatment’ on such peoples whose ‘reality’ does not fit or who are induced to fit to a pathological ‘reality’ in order to ‘treat’ themselves. That doesn’t mean there are not relational conflicts where communication breaks down and leaks out in behaviours and ‘phyicalised’ conditions that are then experienced without understanding their call, and their context.
The idea of autonomy or self-existing, self-creating, self-directing, is the idea of a thought separate from Mind or an individual separate from its relation. A ‘me’ of self-concept whose image is protected against loss of face, and loss of power as a function of differentiation within awareness that is consciousness of Existence through self-differentiation. It is generating a conception, feeling, and perception as experiencing within All That Is – within the fact of being integral to All That Is – as an individuation of Infinity.
The idea of self is the same as the idea of god or soul, mind or spirit – it is the First before time and space from which all else derives as the embodiment of Self as self.
But Self without an object cannot know or feel or experience itself existing and does not will to be alone but goes forth and multiplies as the sharing of the knowing of being that IS expansion, creation, and evolution of Idea.
The idea in mind goes forth and multiplies – not because it has power in itself – but because You give it power of energy and attention – which is love. You therefore also give it meaning in terms of the purpose it serves you – and thus agree or choose to be bound by your own power along the lines of your own thought. Logic is not applied or ‘added’ to mind but inherent as it.
To be curious and to play in ideas of separation is an ‘as if’ perspective. “What if I was different than I Am and believe it with such force as to generate an experience unlike Full Open Communication”? And so ‘creating’ through limiting as a segregative sense of self – over and against the Fully Open Conscious Communication – goes forth and multiplies limitation, lack, conflict and threat in the name of a god of specialness, set apart and judging over.
The god that asserts itself and lords it over is not the First – but a derivative from an adulterated currency of Idea. However, it has all the power and meaning we give it – regardless of any form it takes. “An idea that is self-replicating’ is simply a variation of “Look what you made me do!” – which is the victim play of a hidden mind in serious play in its own sense of conflicted self.
The reversal of Consciousness – where effects operate in place of true Cause, is giving power – the power of your acceptance of Will – to that which limits, denies and kills the Will.
How far down the rabbit hole of crazy is it your defined joy to accept and endure?
Thank God for Richard Dawkins! It is remarkable that certain maggots can be used to cleanly and completely remove dead tissue in wounds that would otherwise be extremely open to infection.
There is much in the ‘spiritual’ bandwagon that ‘adds’ or overlays magical beliefs of association that may have roots in actual relational intimacies – but which pass on as currency of wishful and therefore weak, ineffective and divided thinking – which is very effective as false currency of adulterating and usurping the true relational felt quality of shared being.
So memes are part of the movement to invalidate or get rid of Consciousness excepting as conforms with the god who lords it by judging and asserting its judgement true – or ‘controlling the narrative’. Fighting over the control of the narrative is always the pyramid of power – for power is upstream and here you get to look at mind-control because what is going on – in the Idea of Separation running ‘as if’ with great force – is… mind control. But who is fooling who?
In cartoons the critters can run off a cliff and don’t have any problem until they stop to look down.
The force of the imprinting of the separate self sense is a fragmentation that will not stop until there is a pause in which to notice or stir as a wakening of original being. There is a grace to the quality of such existence that is unspeakable.
But to anyone who now has another foundation than conditioned self-survival thinking at their very core – there is now a freedom to use the world and all abilities to serve a fresh purpose – for the hateful that was hidden is ‘outed’ and recognized to NOT be who you are. This may be covered over in the reaction to the habitual momentum of conditionings that are not re-chosen or aligned with who you are – but the nature of the devices of ‘covering over’ becomes uncovered because you have a basis on which to challenge and question their belonging in your choice now.
The movement of mind-control includes it reactive shadow. It takes two to tango, and the idea, counter idea and transcendence was usurped by going upstream to ‘win’ rather than a true transcendent embrace of all perspectives as a result of true hearing and speaking. Full and open communication is NOT mind control – but the opening – in its perspective – of all the ‘evils’ it seeks to kill or hide.
But the rewakening of original being is from another place and brings another perspective within the same. Meanings are not set in stone – but nor is manipulating or rebranding the same old power trip to seem superior or knowing amidst sown confusion meaningful.
The idea whose time has come is not a specific form, being timeless it can use all forms but for restoring true communication. The idea of conflict is always associating forms with meanings that are not true – in order to play the game of judge and having the last word as your private mind.
The movement of a re-integrative Consciousness is not in separate individuals – for there is no such thing. Right relation is a creative dance of feeling and knowing yourself in relation to the other – not a mono-cultured homogeneity. This is feeling. Not emotionalism of suppression of true feeling but a quality of being without which life is flat, featureless and may as well be a munch of memes running in software loops on some machine that have no belonging in a Living Earth while so militantly denying Her Life. Our Life.
Upstream thinks its thinking is creative – incepting ‘memes’ and downstream takes the pain. If You Really Are First – then nothing can ever contradict you. Any alignment with original being brings this Home. So contradiction means ‘against your word’. Self-contradiction goes forth and memefies a war of cause on effect in which effects seem to fight back!
Wake up in a true idea that is truly shared. It’s time is willingness, not circumstance. Has a time of willingness come? It’s not just an idea – it is a living active call and receptivity to the movement of being – and faking or mimicking it becomes a self-betrayal that serves not to feel good. But at least you can still feel and move with acceptance of feeling to align more truly with who you know you are – without having to first define the form it takes.
No shared idea is assured to be truly shared with common understanding. The words that are used to agree, themselves may have crucially different meanings to each of us. The good feelings had upon reaching an agreement border on hallucination. When such commonality has no concrete goal, the hallucination may go on for eternity. When there is a concrete end-point, someone’s always left wondering : “what the heck just happened?”.
Re; common understanding: your exaggeration the truth of the matter.
Then I can only say to you that you have not expanded beyond the confines of conceptual thinking and don’t know what I’m talking about. Or you are acting devil’s advocate to insist that communication in fact impossible and illusory – which is actually closer to the truth of identity in self-concept – for it ‘hears and sees’ only as it concept dictates and allows.
The key to shared thought is shared purpose. If you engage with another or others in truly shared purpose you will experience life differently than in private thinking.
It is not necessary for what I define my meaning to be to agree with what you define the meaning you receive to be. That is a false god of having to justify or indeed apologise for our communication and our self – and it makes us all sinners or in modern parlance, sick and lacking technological correction.
Consciousness itself is not really ‘shared’ because there is no separation – that then gets back together, so to speak. Being moved as one is a shared experience of synchronicity – as is getting the same thought at the same time – or an aligning of need and true answer. Our terms are very limited, for they grew out of a limited and limiting consciousness. The limited consciousness believes it is in effect alone within its skull – and that others are effectively separated entities – each operating autonomously and competing for power and privilege for their self – including collective systems of limiting everyone (except the administrators of the system) so as to shift all real power to the state – as if that is safe, sane or in fact ‘sharing’ anything but limitation in exchange for ‘state given rights’ that again shift all power to state control.
True individuality draws authority from its Author – or Source Nature. And those who extend true presence can be felt by a like kind in others and communication occurs as needed. A false individualism is actually an egotism that believes it creates itself in its own image and seeks validity and reinforcement from others in asserting such persona presentation as a way of denying and avoiding intimacy of ‘shared being’ or Communication.
The Feeling of one’s integral and unique existence is wholly natural to us – and yet most lose this in early childhood or even before. The fact that it is held deeply and wordlessly within does not make it unreal – it simply indicates a lack of safety and trust in bringing such presence forth.
So of course when everything is fragmented and compartmentalized – barely a trickle of miscommunication gets through that can come to mean almost anything to anyone. But the sense of threat or danger around revealing our true nature publicly indicates that SOMETHING has communicated universally to traumatize and stunt the unfolding of love in the human experience.
That Life still ‘leaks’ through is testament to a love that is not manipulative or contractual.
Regardless our differences – you are present in this moment in some shared willingness with me. I am happy to trust that whatever comes through for you that is helpful for you – if only to ignore all of it – is what needs to communicate now. For context is everything – without which content can mean whatever it is re-contextualised to seem. It isn’t the content that I am intent on communicating – but the context. It is called ‘reading between the lines’.
Being able to feel the spirit or purpose in which something is written is no great mystery. You may say – but I might be imagining it and I say – that too is a synchronicity and resonance of communication. In fact Creation can be aptly called Total Communication. Hence to entrance ourselves into such a density, we have to use devices that seem to fragment. limit and focus in a tiny facet of Totality – so as to experience this extraordinary sensing of physical existence – that the ‘mind’ almost completely ignores in attending its ‘comforts’.
I think a Google Images search of Susan Blackmore tells you everything you need to know about the agenda behind “memes.”
Oh yeah, the rainbow-lesbo-buzz-cut. I forgot I google/image’d THAT, yesterday! LOL
Maybe I need new batteries in my meme-machine! *ROTFLMFAO*
….and I STILL don’t believe in the God that Susan Blackmore doesn’t believe in, EITHER! lol
Yikes!
Although I feel the agenda behind memes – I have my own – so I can use them – if I want – to serve my agenda. Language is not frozen.
Top down memes are injected and even astroturfed into the collective narrative of those who suckle unmindfully. True grass root ideas and movements are subverted to serve power agenda. But that’s someone else’s agenda – not mine. I’m living my life – not theirs.
If unloving agenda comes into my life – its my opportunity to use it to locate and address the correspondence – which is a nice term that means both a message and a resonance of frequency.
I love language that opens many facets at once within what it is to behold existence.
Language reflects and generates the mind that uses it. So use it on purpose to hold meanings that serve your joy in life – or abuse yourself and wonder what hit you!
@Bin
*Laughing very loudly* Very funny Bin. You have the abvility to get to the point very quickly, I see. For while there, I thought this fellow likes words, leave him alone he likes to play the colors on his palette.
That was a quick and painless thrust. Point well made. Is that your shortest comment? just curious!
Query: could you say, gives us one of your best personal memes. Something to lighten the day even further; spring has sprung, and the flowers have riz.
Something not reminescent of a passing coldness of winter.
A meme that might helps us laugh at the outrageousness of the Panama Papers…I like, “Language reflects and generates the mind that uses it.”
Do you write poetry? You would be good at it.
I don’t have my own ‘memes’ I have my own purpose.
Far from the idea of self forming, self existing, self replicating ideas, I feel for the movement of being in which and of which everything is – and so I look and listen there rather than run in loops of seemingly autonomous thinking. Movement is a time and notion word – but I mean the threshold of the movement of desire and attention. Do I therefore write anything – or am I moved and willing to embody what moves me? Insofar as the words I use are chosen or accepted to feel attuned to the meaning felt – its all poesy.
If I joined in the idea of memes it would be as a way into reflecting something of the nature of consciousness as an observation rather than as ‘more thinking’. The ‘me-meme’ thinks its thought is consciousness, while it operates to usurp and deny consciousness. This pattern is readily observable in others… perhaps as a device of not noticing that we are not really beholding others but running a thinking that self-reinforces or ‘me-memes’ without really hearing, seeing or feeling anything.
That thinking is invoked to rationalise such thinking and justify the withholding and withdrawal of presence from communication is instead of reflecting to the heart’s knowing.
In computing terms its a loop – and in processing a task, a hang, but its conflicted thought can crash or demand a force quit or reboot. But where in computing terms the operator intervenes, in awakening is a noticing or rising of awareness that is not thinking – but observing and feeling thought. This is upstream – and if the term ‘me’ is used here, it refers to prior and pervading qualities to whatever is ‘going on’ – simply because they are your current experience of existence itself rather than identifiction within a model. Existence itself is both and. No matter what levels or dimensions – there is always another in which the others are embraced. From certain perspectives existence looks like a mathematical al geometry or meming of unfolding idea – but that is one facet of an Infinite Crystal – and so it doesn’t need denial – but nor does it merit exclusivity – unless of course you are moved in your desire to explore that perspective experience for your own reasons – and to do that you have to temporarily deny others. Your experience is yours because it is your gift to the whole – but from denial perspectives it will seem your experience is of denial and coercion – being run by robot thinking that seems more real that you are. Now that is not so far removed from Earth experience today is it? Some sort of loveless machine thinking that has no feeling for anything and only mimics emotionality as manipulative ploy. It feeling my be rage against a sense of lost perfection that life inherently brings to the worship of dead concept.
I see Consciousness as the Projection and Reflection of Idea – and so whatever is held in the focus of an energy of desire and intent is automatically and instantly reflected. The idea of receiving different from what is given, is the idea of a gap in which time replaces or ‘frames’ eternity, and in the gap a sense of self in power to fragment negatively or segregatively, as a forgetting in which true power is lost to the gap. While an illusion of power as the sense of separation from Life fulfils itself in death or ‘power over Life’. However, you get prompts to check in that you are in fact one with your choice because separation from Life is not actual – or there would be no basis upon which to have the experience. Thoughts never leave the mind that thinks them but the attempt to get rid of or deny judged thought by putting it OUT – is actually the way to KEEP them. Hence the ‘autonomy’ of feeding the very situation that you believe you are escaping. It runs indefinitely through whatever form-changes until there is a breakdown in capacity to believe it.
The belief in the need to escape in form is denying the rising of perspective. Everything depends on the perspective from which it is perceived or beheld or created. Then add to the mix that consciousness shift perspective billions of times per second and that the illusion of changing in graduated steps is just one facet of representing the idea of experiencing the nature of creation in slow motion – so to speak… where in truth every instant is a perfect creation – but to feel this is not within the mind of the gap in its power to judge all things to confirm itself.
Therefore I don’t seek for myself but open within relationship – because the former is the loss of power to truly feel and know Life here and now. Not to think about life or think about now.
It isn’t more or better thinking, its the release of thinking in shift to feeling. Then if thinking serves, it is given. But it isn’t accorded the role of running the show! Nor the burden.
ON THE VIRUS
The increasingly common perception that humans are a virus on the Earth is part of the engine for ‘population control’. The virus idea is itself a mask over the idea of an oppositional and violating evil. But whereas Religion started out with the recognition that wholeness was sanctity, the corruption of the idea of a lack of wholeness in conflicted purpose to ‘sinner-hood’ transferred to organic sin of germs that could then be eradicated but of course the honeymoon wears off but the scam remains. The scam is in our own thinking – for it is false thinking that deceives and operates destructively – not humanity as such.
Addressing our thinking is of course what the scam refuses to allow – and we all play a part in it while operating from a conflicted sense of self that seeks to prevail over the ‘shadow’ or scapegoat others. While such roles are in place, no communication is possible – so communication must occur within our own consciousness – as a deeper honesty than we would otherwise allow – because we too have refused to allow or open feelings and thought that is deeply distressing and triggering to strategies of escape that may not be honouring of others and from a clearer perspective, not honouring of ourselves. Without extending and sharing in honour, we carry self-hate and cynicism – that poisons our lives and leads to seeking validation in self-righteous reaction that conveniently hides our own part.
The scam is always a blame game. True responsibility is always a perspective of clearing the air and stepping forth in fresh willingness. Taking on responsibilities that are not ours and then trying to live up to it prevents us living that which forever is ours. The ability to respond is the ability to feel and know, recognize and accept. That which operates to block or distort communication is that which has to be recognized and released to see clearly how to be – in any given moment.
Pride comes before a fall – but the fall – embraced in willingness for truth – transforms humiliation for a true humbling that under-stands the true power of Life and aligns with it rather than presuming to speak for it! Tripping over is part of learning to walk. In this metaphor, learning to prove one will never walk is the insistence of guilt and blame as the guide for thinking.
Without allegiance, the feelings of such take on a different purpose. It feels like shit – but also reveals hidden information that in time becomes a living sense of acceptance for being exactly who we are – as a always unfolding and evolving recognition of Life – rather than its ‘controller’. Not that control is missing – but is a balancing function within wholeness rather than a presumption to coerce effects as if outside the Flow.