Your world is dominated by the invisible. And the invisible is like muddy water, every shyster has their hand in it, stirring it. 1
But this article will be about you. About your chances of being able to live a life worth living. Largely. I mean worth living most of the time.
Why not all the time? And why not gloriously?
It is too much to ask. But compared to the tasteless, joyless, have-to life you now live, a life worth living, for most of the time, is an amazing thing…
So what is the invisible part, the muddy water, that dominates your life? That makes you not enjoy life, that makes you want to go to sleepwalk, to not feel, to not be present?
It is the memes, partially, and it is you, partially.
You have no distinctions…
Let me give you an example that will shed light to what distinctions are, and why they are important.
Let’s imagine that you prepare for heart surgery.
The doctor and the nurses wash in, you get an injection, but you don’t fall asleep. You hear every word they say.
You hear the doctor call out to the nurse: give me that shiny thingie with the curved blade…
oho… you think, I should get up and run… but you are tied down.
Then you feel as the doctor is trying to cut open… and says… I didn’t mean this one… give me a bigger one.
You now really want to run, don’t you?
And finally they are in… and the doctor says: I am going to cut this pulsing thing, it is driving me crazy…
That is the last thing you hear before you die.
The doctor didn’t have distinctions to perform heart surgery… and the patient died.
Your life, your job, your health, your fulfillment, your happiness are in your hand, as if you were a heart surgeon. And you have no distinctions. You don’t know how to tell one thing from another.
And your life is half-dead, your health is half-dead, your fulfillment never had a chance, and happiness? What is that?
You learned what you know from words. Other people’s words. And you never made anything your own experience.
When I tell people to taste their food, they say they do… but people who taste their foods are different from you.
So I ask them to be able to tell which part of the mouth they taste which taste… They do it for a few days, then fall back to “business as usual” and shovel food in their mouths and swallow without being present to any of it.
Werner Erhard calls this: eating the menu.
Words displaced the experience. But what makes life worth living, and what makes life lived powerfully, is being present to life… not the story.
The words floating everywhere, like a 24/7 broadcast, barely audible, find their way, like subliminal messages, are what we call memes.
You fish out the memes that resonate with you, that create the monster person you think you are…
And then you relate to everything through that monster person’s Frankenstein monster self… you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you are, you only know that it’s horrid.
Memes, words, create the context for you, for everything you do, and no matter what you do, the memes win out… unless.
In my work of attempting to take some humans to the next level of evolution, human being, it is mandatory to be able to tell the difference between reality and meme reality… between the food and the menu, between real and unreal. Between different modes of speaking, between word and word.
For you, that is the work of distinguishing. Distinguishing is the ticket to evolution.
The world is pulling against it, by the way. Your best friend, your spouse, your parents will try to pull you back into the bucket of crabs.
And it takes vigilance.
It is not something you do for a week and then you are done. It needs to become unconscious competence, so you don’t have to think about it.
Like breathing. Most people breath with their chest, and every negative emotion makes them not breathe… or not breathe deeply.
Then someone teaches them to do diaphragmal breathing and when they remember, they do it.
But if they practiced it long enough, like I have, it would be the only way they breathe… unconscious competence.
Of course the memes tell you that understanding is enough. Or being able to do it once is enough.
Of course the memes, behaving much like entities with a brain of their own, just like virus! will say that. Because becoming unconsciously competent about telling a meme apart from reality, from you, for what is going on, what is true, is like death for the memes.
You’d stop being a carrier, you’d stop being a host.
You are an infectious host now! And you tirelessly spout the memes, teaching your children, your students, or anyone who is forced to listen to you. Ugh.
I have one student, ONE, who has been tirelessly practicing.
I have many who tried once and got smug: I can do this, and stopped.
I may even have a few who explain and teach the idea, but themselves don’t practice it.
Sigh.
The rabies virus is the most observable of all viruses in the way it makes the new host suddenly want to go out and be social.
The virus is interested in infecting more and more carriers.
This is why so many people want to be coaches. Teachers. Want to write a blog. A book. Want to be preachers.
The virus, thought virus, meme, is sending them out to spread the “word”… aka meme.
I have contracted a virus infection that has manifested first this past Monday. It made me change my behavior. I am starting to notice.
- It makes water taste yucky. My cell hydration dropped from 70% to 30%.
- It makes me ignore my body’s signals of being chilled, or having to go to the bathroom.
- It makes me want to stay up late… eat late at night… talk on the phone…
All behaviors that make me weaker, and make me less resistant to the infection. Sneeze… infect others! Yaay… that is the virus speaking.
But because memes work exactly like viruses, they do the same. Weaken you, change your behavior, and send you out to infect others.
When you first start distinguishing reality from the memes, distinguishing memes for what they are, all the memes in others want to keep you in the “family”…
You’ll get surprise visits from parents, and such.
I always felt that this is the main job of family… to keep you in the bucket of crabs.
It feels to the new, more conscious you, as your lifeblood is being sucked away… and it is.
Context is decisive, and memes are context creating words. They tell you want you can do and what you can’t. What you should, need to, have to, or should want.
Desire, the desire I measure, the desire that the more you fill it the bigger it becomes, are created by memes.
Memes, undistinguished, suck you dry and spit you out.
I am 70 years old.
My old high school class is meeting on the second Saturday of every October.
Last year everyone was there. We were only 69 years old.
This year 19 indicated that their health doesn’t allow them to climb steps: the meeting room is on the second floor, no elevator.
70 years old is a meme. You get sick… says the meme.
You stay at home… says the meme.
And they do…
I remember my mother succumbing to this meme. I watch other people succumbing to this meme.
But when I poke them, it is a lie. They have the energy to dance, to laugh, to be young. Even if some parts of the body hurt…
You can reclaim your life. But it takes work… the four letter word everyone wants to avoid and do as little as possible of.
This is really interesting, meme is also four letters.
And the choice is between these two four-letter words: work or memes… It is up to you.
Life is also a four letter word! Dead is also a four letter word. You need to choose.
- No matter who you are, you are infected with memes. Being able to distinguish pieces of knowledge, words, as memes, gives you an opportunity to choose.
Some memes are more restrictive than others.
Kabbalists, Werner Erhard, great philosophers… no one is an exception. The less you allow memes to create a fixed universe for you, the more innovative, and the more “real” your view becomes.
The meme of the kabbalist, the consciousness based teaching seems very freeing and useful… until you add some “Creator” into the mix… which would make it religious…
Some, so called Kabbalists, like Yehuda Berg, has incorporated modern New-Agey memes into his teaching, rendering it quite harmful.
