Memelessness and Meditation
Today I found an interesting fragment of discussion in Journal of Memetics thread way back from 2001. It is available below in a .png form and here is the source link. What the mentioned discussion did was that it managed to fill another gap in my understanding of memetics.
What triggered the way towards experiencing that 'little source of enlightenment' was a simple thought stream that led to a notion of something that would oppose a meme. Since I usually think spacially I immediately thought of a memeless space, how one would look like, how would a person interact with such a place.
I googled 'memeless space' to see if the net had some interesting information and there it was. Between some random meme-related Reddit entries, 齋藤 孝 x 梅田 望夫 and a blog of Christian Real Estate Professionals, which looks like a scam website, I found a memetics discussion list archive.
I immediately devoured it and contemplated for a while...
I realized I haven't actually followed the whole conversation going on about 'toggling nature's auto-erase' but that little snippet was just enough for me to reach understanding of an element that kept me in a 'fluid, uncertain space'.
I am talking about meditation.
I've been thinking about it as a method of stress-relief due to my day-to-day uneasiness and a way to obtain a creativity boost through clarity for quite some time now.
In the past I have briefly looked into Buddhist and New Age methods of meditation but never decided to follow up on them. I was bouncing between gathering information and trying to figure out on my own how to do it but it would never turn into an actual activity.
It is also worth mentioning that recently I attended a local introductory meeting to Transcendental Meditation, which was fairly intriguing, however due to financial instability I was not willing to participate in it.
There is something off-putting about charging incredible amounts of money for simple beneficial knowledge.
Trailing back to the main issue: reading Robin Faichney's response in the mentioned thread reawoken my intention to learn meditation, however using an entirely different perspective.
Never before I have thought of it as a way to clear myself of actual memes and temes. A way to stray away from the path of meme replication and a method of restoring an unobstructive view for the mind.
According to memetic theory everything you think at any given moment either comes from a meme that has been started long time ago or is a new meme in its own right. Including the meditation in the equation enables us to keep a distance and see a much larger picture. A clarity to create emerges and we become conscious of the origin of the swirling memes.
Now that I connected the dots it all seems clear and fits perfectly with the memetic verions of reality. Thank you Robin Faichney from 10 years ago for your insight into this matter.
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