meme:
an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture
harmonic:
component frequency of a complex wave (as of electromagnetic energy) that is an integral multiple of the fundamental frequency
entrain:
to draw along with or after oneself
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Memetic infection is necessary for language to develop, and since language provides us with a distinct survival advantage, memetic susceptibility is universal. This supplies the basic method by which religions are adopted as a set of ideas and symbols.
Socialization is another form of susceptibility to memetic infection. It enables an individual to merge into the community - particularly, the ability to adapt to society- to adopt pre-existing community morals, taboos, and problem-solving techniques. Failures to adapt or adopt make it difficult to survive and reproduce. The reason that those who do not conform are allowed to exist, is that without cultural diversity, whole tribes can be extinguished by environmental or competitive developments which deeply engrained social rules are unable to deal with. The biological survival of the masses is not possible without continuous renewal of individual diversity. Since the reverse is not true (individual survival does not rely on survival of the collective), the importance of free thought is self-evident.
Repetition of sensations and of actions is also effective at penetrating the defense mechanisms of the mind and building memes. When memes are used to control, an individual is led by some means to repetition, once this is achieved the individual has become infected. When memes are used to heal and expand consciousness, repetition is done inducing trance states.
Mystic faith and fear of death are perhaps the two most powerful ``super-memes'' (broadly dispearsed memes) that have poisoned human civilization since its dawn. The effect of these memes has been the erosion of human rights, autonomy, and potential, wherever they spread. Very few people are naturally immune to, or develop an immunity to, these auto-toxic memes. Those who do are outcasts, at least in mind, and often in social circumstance, and live in fear of bodily destruction at the hands of the diseased masses. Consider the words of the papal emissary Arnald Amalric of Citeaux, on the occasion of the sacking of the city of Beziers in 1209 AD. Soldiers asked him how they could distinguish the infidel from the faithful among the captives. His response: ``Kill them all. God will know his own.'' Thousands of innocents died horrible tortured deaths.
This poisoning of the human meme-scape did not end with the dawn of modern times and the advent of technology. Instead it has flourished within our political media conglomerates who employ it in their memetic engineering. That is, they rearrange the experiential patterns of the cultural landscape. Thus, they are able to establish a new reality that is then projected by movies, television, etc. This relays the meme subconsciously and embeds itself into the reality tunnels of the “socially shared” experience. This rearrangement is done in such a way that it remains sponser friendly, eliminating or at least greatly reducing the effect of "undesirable" social and eco justice memes while drowning the masses in a sea of bland repetitive consumer memes. These consumer memes pull our consciousness away from our natural synchronization, and lead the masses to believe that consuming products produced by the corporate/religious state is a necessary part of life.
Creating reality tunnels and sense of identity may not be so difficult. Researchers in both the East and West are reporting increasing evidence for the existence of empathic entrainment and psychic fields that can influence each other at a distance. During beta consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of our brains usually generate differing or asynchronous patterns. Alpha consciousness is accompanied by increased synchronization between our hemispheres. Laboratory studies in Japan and China on Qi-gung adepts suggest that right/left synchrony synergizes psychic energy and enhances the ability to feel and influence the environment. The Qi-gung masters were not only internally synchronized, when they gave clinical treatments their patients also showed identical EEG patterns.
In the 1930s physicist Heinrich Schumann discovered a permanent standing wave in the atmosphere, resonating between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere. This wave, known as the Schumann Resonance, "Gaia's brain wave" or simply the Earth Wave, is fed by lightning discharges and the planet's internal electromagnetic activity. By a rather stunning coincidence, its frequency fluctuates slowly between 9 and 12 cycles per second - right in the heart of the human alpha range.
The Schumann Resonance thus offers us a common global reference, a planetary harmonic, if you will, that is hundreds of times more powerful than the electric fields within our bodies. If, as studies show, we are somehow able to attune ourselves to the much more subtle wave signals within other persons, tuning into this all-pervasive frequency of the Earth should be relatively simple.
Moreover since our brain waves reflect and influence fluctuations in our subconscious energies - including our breathing rhythms, entrainment with the Earth Wave may allow us to achieve indirectly a true global harmony.
This Earth entrainment is prevented by the memetic engineering undertaken by the media conglomerates and tyranical dictators who thrive not on harmony but on power and wealth. The auto-toxic memes propagated by corporate robber barons and fascist states lead us to become dependant upon their products and their police by convincing us that they will satisfy the emptiness we feel inside. This emptiness is a direct result of disharmony with our enviroment, thus we are never able to feel fulfilled by our consumption of corporate products or through the "protection" of the military.
In order to regain this harmony, we must first recognize the need to protect ourselves from these diseased memes. This can be done either by avoiding the authoritarian media, or by internalizing the anti-authority meme which is that the only interest that these tyrants have is making you dependant upon them. Once you internalize this meme you will see all corporate advertisements and political propaganda as attempts to take away your freedom.
The next step is to harmonize yourself with the world around you. This can be done through careful observation and meditation. Remove all of the distractions imposed on you by society and allow yourself to flow freely through life. This does not mean forgeting about your responsibilities, but rather stop thinking about your responsibilities and do what you have to do. Do with your entire being, allow your actions to flow in harmony instead of forcing everything in the same manner the diseased memes try to force you to consume.
Once you feel that you are comfortable in this begin to express your harmonic meme. Know that even though you have freed yourself from the auto-toxic meme spread by commercialism it is still the most prevelant meme in our world. The way it has become so omnipresent is through repetition. Entrainment naturally occurs when one harmonic is constantly being espoused all around, this is what the media has become, the repetition of the consumer harmonic. The only way our planet will be able to overcome this force is if we heal ourselves and help to heal others. This is why it is so important that we express our own memes in order to create both a defense of planetary harmonics and an offense against the auto-toxic memes which are destroying all we have created.
In closing I would like to urge everyone who reads this to join me in a discussion which will be held in the twentythreevolve chat room on Sunday December 2nd, 2001 at 17:23 EST (USA & Canada GMT -5:00 to see how this compares to your time go here). The planned topic will be memetics and the Meme-Matrix. Please pass this message along to anyone who you feel may be interested. |
