Humanity is infected with memes. The infection accelerated when the internet began, and is now almost 100% with smartphones in every hand.
But some people didn’t get infected. What is their secret?
OK, let’s start at the beginning.
- What is a meme?
- What is the mechanism of a meme?
- What does a meme do?
- Who/what benefits?
- What counteracts?
- What cures?
So, what is a meme?
A meme is a virus. A thought virus.So what is a virus? The virus is an incomplete vehicle for a gene…
What is a gene? A gene is a string of proteins… Simple.
Genes, in the original soup didn’t have vehicles, but then they started to build communities to join forces to crowd out other genes.
A gene’s only purpose is to take over the gene pool… and that’s that. Competitive, and single minded.
So how do you take over the gene pool: you multiply faster than other genes… and eventually you’ll be the only game in town.
Warning: my language is not scientific. If you want scientific, read Richard Dawkins’ books, especially The Selfish Gene, which is, to my taste, the only readable book he wrote. I have read, suffered through, several.
Later… billions of years later, genes have moved to a stage where they have a vehicle to do their bidding, to serve them, to move them around, in contact with other vehicles that help propagating the genes.
This part is too complicated for my small brain, but…
Some gene-like fragments of proteins, fragments that lack the ability to propagate, use other genes to multiply themselves.
These are the viruses… they enter a cell, and reprogram it to build the virus instead of itself.
This is how a cancer is most like a virus infection… by the way.
Cells, supposedly, have filters to screen out the virus, to block its entry to the cell, but the virus is smarter…
It’s a lot like your hearing… you cannot avoid hearing a sound, unless you block out all sounds. But in the Amish Horse Training Method you learn, you train your brain, to discount certain sounds without blocking all sounds.Essentially doing the Amish Horse Training Method and blocking out memes has the same mechanism. You are good at one, you are good at both. You aren’t a chump for the memes, and probably aren’t a chump for virus either.
What is the mechanism of a meme?
Memes are thoughtforms… sounds, words, written…
They thoughtform, the meme, enters the same way a virus enters a cell. Tricking it. Tricking your brain.
It sounds titillating, soothing, pleasant, sweet, spicy, beneficial, so your brain is duped into believing it, and it allows in.
Sometimes you have to hear it once… and it’s in. Other times you have to hear it and hear it and hear it… and then you let it in.
All memes are only for themselves or for their creators.
god is a meme.
angels are a meme
spirits are a meme
afterlife, karma, reincarnation are all memes.
royalty, castes, are all memes.Some memes open the “door” for a slew of other memes to enter.
This is how you are a puppet on a string… there is no you… it is just memes pulling your strings.
What does a meme do?
Sometimes it is obvious what a meme does. When it is infecting another. Being pulled into a cult, whether it is religious, spiritual, or food/exercise cult, you can see that the infected person will suddenly or gradually abandon their previous life and start living following different ideas…
The idea that infected them, the idea that demands the exclusion of other ideas is a meme.
The organization-organism may not know it is a cult… but the observer does.
For example, Landmark Education or its predecessor the est Training, according to this characterization, is a cult that infects you with memes.
The new ideas take over, make you feel special, make you feel like the in-crowd…
The Landmark Education memes are not very strong, only about 10% of people get “infected”, and become a vehicle for the Landmark Education memes. I was one for 25 odd years.
Landmark Education’s memes are not as harmful as most… they are actually on the side of Life… although mix it with other memes and they make the infected haughty, exclusive, robotic, or campaigner… those are bad behaviors.
Who/what benefits? Who/what do the memes serve?
Memes are all created by people. Mostly groups of people.
I have read a book for marketers on creating your brand like a cult… It teaches how to create memes.
Or I did a course a few years ago on Mass Control… and it uses meme creation, or abuse of already established memes.
In some ways cognitive biases are memes. Cognitive biases that have a click-whirr automatic effect on your brain if you are infected.
What counteracts the memes?
I am hesitant to write it… because we are all one… right? That is also a meme. We are NOT one, and in some ways we are not even similar.
It is obvious from my observation and from my muscletesting. The Starting Point Measurements is a great way to see how not similar we are.
The difference is due to memes, or to our meme exposure.
Cultures with strong memes that are Life-affirming are more resistant, but not immune to other cultural memes.
But even inside one family, one may be different in this regard.
I have two brothers, I am the middle child. My younger brother is six years younger than me.
My older brother and me are readers. My little brother isn’t… The necessity of reading is a meme in the Jewish culture. People who read are exposed to a lot of different infectious agents, and their brain becomes more intelligent in discerning what is a good thing and what is not so good… Whereas people who don’t read, or who only read “the good book” are, like the sanitized, protected children who develop allergies because their bodies can’t tell friend from foe.
The saying “for you everything is the same as everything else, except that not always” applies to non-readers, non-thinkers.And that leads me to the spiritual capacities. They are really intangibles. For example being able to tell the forest for the trees is one of those… or telling similar things apart… or recognizing patterns… or curiosity…
The more of these you have active in your DNA, the more resistant you are to meme attacks.
Staying away from extremes… that’s another meme… Both in ideologies and in behaviors.
I have a hunch, that being resistant to diseases, having a strong(er) immune system, having healthier habits, may also express itself in resistance to memes: being more aware of what belongs and what doesn’t.
What cures a meme infection?
Now, this is the million dollar question.
I have no idea.
In essence, this whole Grand Experiment is about that. Seeing if anything can restore Life as the main principle for living and thinking.
So far I have produced great results with people who had a good foundation. And temporary results with most others.
So the jury is still out, I haven’t stopped looking and experimenting.
And, it seems, there is a new meme that works against what I am trying to do.
Yesterday I had an insight that PEOPLE DON’T WANT WHAT I HAVE. Instead of being totally bummed out, I asked more questions.
People are swayed by memes… war, easy unearned riches, etc.
The mood is, as far as I can discern, at least in America, is like it was in the years directly before the Great Depression, or maybe at the time of The Titanic… impending doom.
Let’s have fund before the other shoe drops…
My “stuff” is for long term, and few are interested in long term under the effect of the “impending doom” meme.
They still want to feel good, thank god for that. And they still want to sleep well… double thank god for that.
I am getting great feedback on my sleep help stuff…
I even surprised myself. I have been playing with the silk sleep mask… and my results are stunning.
I sleep a lot deeper. And when I wake up in the middle of the night, I go right back to sleep. No waiting.
Last night I made another observation: I removed the mask at 4 am… experiment. My dreams from that point on were troubled, busy, exhausting. Whereas the previous nights I didn’t dream, or didn’t know I dreamed.
I am going to sleep with the mask from now on. I am seeing that it works.
And when you sleep well, your immune system is strong, so you repel infections, whether they are physical or memes.
Hey, it’s so easy.
Everything is a meme. It spouts memes. you think in memes. your principles are memes. your values are memes.
I am planning on writing an article about a particular meme that is very sticky, and makes me want to kill myself: YOU HAVE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE! Landmark is very guilty of spewing this meme. I don’t remember having this one before i started Landmark in 1985.
It brought a whole new level of misery in my life. I struggle with it daily. If I didn’t have my Sunday calls, I would live 365 days a year as if it were true. But it is a meme… it is designed just like the meme “love your neighbor as yourself” meme, or “don’t even think about sex” in Christianity… The purpose of that meme is to make you feel guilty… Guilty people can be bullied into doing anything, paying anything, because that guilt makes them vulnerable to manipulation.
So this one meme is hard to get rid of…
I bet you have it too. And thousands of others.
In fact, there is probably nothing operational in your life that is not a meme… I wrote an update to your soul correction today, read it. I didn’t write it there, but the meme that underlies it: getting caught is bad… lol
Here are some memes or meme-like ideas that I am living with. There’s at least one for each domain of Health, Wealth, Love, and Happiness (Fulfillment):
1. Spirituality is good. (“I am spiritual, not religious”).
2. You need a job.
3. Women want to be with successful men.
4. Flossing is good!
5. Take your vitamins!
6. Do what you love and the money will follow. (Follow your passion. Don’t follow your passion.)
7. You have to bring something of value into the world, and exchange it with other people…for money, or other goods.
I’m not certain these are all memes. Or even that they are destructive. I think some are useful and instructive. But these are the main thought-forms that I am aware of that are floating through my mind.
I have some other, non-supportive talk coming from “It.” Hmm…not memes exactly, but another kind of programming?
I can imagine that some of the most destructive thought-forms are ones that I cannot yet see.
You are very sweet Kawa. Thank you for taking the time to share.
By the way, I bought a bunch of those, so I can ship them out fast to people in the USA. Normally they come from the manufacturer.
My wife loves the sleep mask. Here is her feedback:
“Thank you Sophie. These mask are great. My son wakes me up several times per night. I love it when he wakes me up twenty minutes before my alarm goes off and I can just put them on and sleep that extra twenty minutes I couldn’t do before. That twenty minutes is so precious…”
I think parents would love this sleep mask Sophie.