9) Energy: The Meme: What and Why We Are

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9) Energy(introversion / extroversion)

[You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife]

{You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass or anything that is your neighbor’s.}

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We will begin with a quote from Sigmund Freud from his general introduction to psychoanalysis at the conclusion of his eighteenth lecture.

     

“Humanity, in the course of time, has had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages against its naïve self-love.  The first was when humanity discovered that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system hardly conceivable in its magnitude.  This is associated in our minds with the name “Copernicus,” although Alexandrian science had taught much the same thing.  The second occurred when biological research robbed man of his apparent superiority under special creation, and rebuked him with his descent from the animal kingdom, and his ineradicable animal nature.  The re-valuations, under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors were not accomplished without the most violent opposition of their contemporaries.  But the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the “I” that it is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life. 

We psychoanalysts were neither the first, nor the only ones to announce this admonition to look within ourselves.  It appears that we are fated to represent it most insistently and to reconfirm it by means of empirical data which are of importance to every single person.  This is the reason for the widespread revolt against our science, the omission of all consideration of academic urbanity, and emancipation of the opposition form all restraints of impartial logic.  We were compelled to disturb the peace of the world, in addition, in another manner, of which you will soon come to know.”

The ninth and tenth commandments are concerned with the jurisprudence over thought-crimes.  One is not to want to have sex with another person’s spouse.  One is not to want another person’s property.  This would lead one on the surface to wish to be content with what one possesses, but like all prohibition this inflames human-want.  The commandments desire our desire, want our want.  The commandments taunt our want.  Without these the condemnation and corresponding control are less feasible. 

The Meme fires its kiln in our want.  The anti-Meme is to be present, to allow.  Our desire resides in how we approach that which we intersect in the flow of the universe.  In the anti-Meme we accept wanting is futile distracting illusion.  In a derivation of Yoda, do or do not there is no want.  The energy spent wanting takes us away from the moment we are in, the now. 

We may find ourselves focusing on obtaining objects, building knowledge, developing relationships as a form of growth.  The crux of the anti-Meme is not that we cannot imagine our future or next step, but that we reside in how we are using the canvas of the now.  Maybe we read a book upon the path, take a note, make a phone call.  Where we get lost is when we over indulge in having to know how it ends or if we will complete. 

Think of knowing a favorite sports team’s final record before the season starts or the conclusion to a novel.  The Meme wants to stuff us full of expectation, of false-knowledge answers, rules on what to do and what must be.  The Meme wants us to fixate on the fear of everything that might happen to disrupt that spoon-fed expectation.  The anti-Meme is to be in what is happening, what we are doing.  When we are in this we are: doing love, doing learning, doing growth.  In this we are not wanting, but vibrating alive in the moment wanting nothing but to be exactly where and what we are.

I will attempt to subdivide the ninth commandment to the concept of energy inside the self related to thought crime and the tenth to the idea of prejudice as a measure of human judgment taking on the role of god on Earth.  However the two pieces are the most inter-related as in some iterations of the Ten Commandments the two are entirely combined. 

The goods of the other become the subject of desire as immediately when one is forbidden from sexual relations with a person or imbibing a drink one is left to ponder why is the prohibited desirable.  The story of the apple as a metaphor for the vagina and the evolutionary origin of man as an animal shrouded in Genesis is the original biblical iteration of the ninth commandment.  The original sin of humanity and the ultimate banishment and cascade of patriarchy is the result.  The horrendous patriarchal precedent that females are a form of property of males or that temptation brought by the female upon the male is the original sin that characterized maleness as victim is the ultimate sheath by the Meme to distance humanity from volition and is carried forward in the ninth commandment’s use of the word wife. 

Guilt, regret, and in turn desire become great tools of the Meme.  The wanting makes thieves, killers, and adulterers into sinners.  Sinners are needed to sprout fear.  Fear is needed to instill control, which brings obedience, which brings order. 

We are drawn to an object as innocuous as a piece of fruit for the potential ignorance possessing it might obliterate.  What is it like to insert one’s penis into that vagina?  What is it like to drive that vehicle?  What is it like to enslave and whip that man?  What is it like to own that land and charge rents or interest on debt at such rates?  What is it like to be the controller instead of the controlled? 

In wanting we see the desire to be atop the Meme.  We see the energy shift from the internal to the external.  We see our native volition as inadequate compared to the communal power of a manipulated society in which if we make specified elections and oblige various parties we may in time be privy to be a decision-maker instead of a decision-follower.  We become a manner of god. 

This all occurs in our thoughts.  We elect to see the power of wanting present in others.  Crowds can be drawn like to the aroma of poppy fields to various crafted stimuli to play the game.  This is how one is taught that the Meme can be so beneficial and possibly attainable to an individual even in a low actual likelihood, when the perceived likelihood is so tantalizing.  This controls the Poor.

The Christian meme uses Christmas and Easter as reinforcement tools for wanting as described under commandment three.  Toys and chocolate set the permanence of wanting while faith is sufficient before mental acumen assembles.  Ritual passes the Meme through generations.

Tradition and ritual bathe humans in the comfort that the group is conforming and continuing to conform to a set of expectations that are serviceable to eliminate the eat-or-be-eaten threat.  The collateral infringements upon humans brought about by the hypocrisies and fallacies of obtaining these assurances are palatable because the alternative risks a reduced likelihood for survival.  The anti-Meme can only prevail with a replacement alterative through open acknowledgement of the Meme and consistent and broad communication of humans accepting the substitute.  This relationship focusing on outward communication highlights the arbitrary nature of almost all traditions and rituals down to the necessary root of why we chose them in an interdependent universe.

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The Meme’s externally communicated cultivation of what is expected in society encouraging energy towards extroversion over introversion.  Humanity is estimated to contain approximately two-thirds of primary-extroverts compared to introverts.  This varies based on the dominate iteration of the Meme.  The United States is maximally extroverted.  China is more introverted, but still predominately extroverted.  This correlates with China’s greater adoption of atheism. 

The biological psychological predisposition for introversion comes from an over-active amygdala in the limbic system.  The amygdala processes threats as humans as animals evolved to react to unfamiliar objects, sounds, smells, tastes, and sights.  It is tied to our facial reactions and pliability to enter, navigate, and process novel social situations. 

This tends to make the human more sensitive to the stimuli in his or her environment.  This can be confused as introverts being misanthropic, but this is ultra-sensitivity and awareness to the depth of stimuli accrued from social interaction presenting an influx to compute, decipher, sort, document, and analyze.  This brings introverts to questions and dilemmas which may bypass extroverts. 

Introverts tend to be less reward driven from social status, sex, money or prestige.  This comes from the interconnection between our ‘old-brain’ where the amygdala is stored with the pleasure-center mitigation controls with the nucleus accumbens in the neocortex or ‘new-brain,’ which in part regulates dopamine along with the medial orbitofrontal cortex.  The buzz or kick from rewards tend to register less in introverts.  Extroverts tend to suffer more addictions and help explain the profit-now mentality of Wall Street.

This level of internal analysis is the primary reason why introversion is anti-Meme.  The inspection’s relative absence in extroverts replaced with varied notions on pride, status, achievement within a group is why extroversion is most often pro-Meme.

The Meme evolved as a social-asset to bring humans together in societies for a better chance at survival.  The Meme does not want outsiders, loners, or quiet.  The Meme is escaping the chaos of nature.  The Meme is attempting to control nature through order.  Introverts breed unpredictability, questions, and potential rebellion or the scattering of the tribe.  

The Meme will display rage at a man attempting to unchain humanity from the Meme.  Purported psychological maladies are directly correlated with the dysfunction created by humans not being able to accept what we are (animals.)  Introversion risks humans seeing this humans-are-animals link.  The Meme might collapse and have to establish a new paradigm of order, which could result in the extinction of humanity depending on the ensuing panic.

In Freud’s quotation, we see humanity first confront our place in the universe as non-special.  Second humanity confronts the implications of evolution as our species is not special.  Third we confront the idea that our animal status, combined with manipulations humanity has chosen to mask it, has hijacked our psyche.  Freud’s psychoanalysis forces the inner-animal with its sexual and kill or be killed urges to the forefront, which makes psychoanalysis anti-Meme.

The parasitic emissaries of the Meme enter our psyche to manipulate our understanding of our identity and individualism.  Freud speaks of the third and greatest irritation posed to humans is diving into our psyche to where we see how our volition has been compromised and sacrificed in so many iterations to the Meme.  We feel like we are making choices, but we are actually capitulating to the foundational choice to follow the Meme.  By following the Meme we operate more like a computer operating system with predictable reactions, responses and elections all meant to avoid accepting death and our animal life.

The idea that a quiet human out of nowhere could disobey society’s rules and rape a human not out of instinct, but choice is one assault on the Meme.  The idea that a man’s wife and another human could decide to engage in sex and there be no recompense to the husband is an assault on the patriarchy.  Reverse the gender of the adulterer and one more plainly sees the role of volition and the psychological penchant for the Meme to remove the unspoken as much as possible in clear public communication of expectations, roles, rules, and consequences.  The anti-Meme accepts that no matter the public communication the only true variable is volition. 

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We will examine popular culture and humanity’s iterations of positive versus negative body image in context to the Meme.  The Humans-are-not-Animals meme is paramount in guiding various activities, hobbies, and elements of social nuance to veil the animal and promote order.  Popular culture’s foremost contextual prism is sexual reproduction.  It may be helpful to first find how sex applies and then the Meme is easier to spot producing this type of programing throughout our societies to sway our volition.

Men support their inner animal in competitions of physical dominance to replace two deer thrashing antlers in a glade, walrus tusks on a beachhead, or gorillas pounding pectoral displays.  See football, soccer, basketball, boxing, hunting, wrestling, UFC, fishing, and body building etc. 

Biologically the shame of a six-foot five-inch male in a hypothetical world of eight-foot alpha males would detail that size is relative to the perceived difference in the available potential mate selection by the fewer-larger gamete gender.  This drives the Meme toward the valuation models that have little to do with productive aptitude in a demonstrated or demonstrable sense, but in a mathematical formula of assumptions, inferences, and illusions. 

The mind favors perceptions due to expedience.  A peacock’s tail is an illustration.  The human-female breast is another.  Humans are our own apex predator; therefore unlike animals lower on the food chain, the display-based (lure-based) sexual role of the species has substantially swapped from the male to the female in humans. 

In nature the male cardinal’s crimson feathers risk a greater chance of being noticed and eaten in exchange for a greater chance for mating.  Humans do not face this conundrum, therefore women wear more cosmetics.  Men still lift weights as a physical strength display.  Although this is less critical given the advent of the microchip, but still ingrained in the human psyche.

The Meme makes wise work to devalue the prioritization of cerebral faculties in comparison to quickly-communicated instinctual surface-level triggers.  Since we are animals these physical triggers are less costly to communicate and more effective because they can supersede context.  The use of alternative internal variables correlates with a complex-organism’s evolution of the mind against the Meme.

This is why non-physical beauty (i.e. ugliness) often correlates with an individual making internal investment.  Nerds, geeks, and dweebs who are limited in expedient external-attraction potential more readily divert time and energy into scholastic and philosophical pursuits like mathematics, science, and psychology.  A beautiful-human need not shift paradigms to the internal if external avenues can meet the needs of the inner animal and the Meme.  This is not absolute, but it is a macro-level trend.

Intelligence is primarily a genetic inheritance of capability.  A person can be both sexy and smart, but sexy takes less work, particularly for males.  The Meme presents a more ridiculous labyrinth for females to achieve the often obtrusive definitions of feminine beauty used to establish patriarchal control.  When one is blessed with an optimal eye circumference to face ratio, facial symmetry, curvature, figure, pectoral physique or height, one simply genetically is or can approximate a beauty-ideal with less natural effort say to socialize and make friends than to obtain a graduate degree in physics. 

Maximization of aptitude can vary in an environment due to a human choosing partying or studying.  However if one is dateless, inner exploration can become one’s solitary option.  This is one reason the Meme attempts to keep humanity preoccupied with the sexual pursuit.

A breast or a bicep is explicit.  Comprehension of empathy, science, finance, and self-esteem require more work and self-reflection.  This leads to reciprocating vulnerability.  These computations are more common in long-term rather than short-term mate-selection.  Therefore the game plan of the Meme is to capture young adolescents and cascade forward based on the external rather than the internal.

Females also compete in sports, but females primarily support their inner animal in competitions of mate attraction through physical beauty, the lure.  Waist size becomes a common female contest, counting calories as if units of character to induce a male given the nature of body image and the Meme.  A pretty-young-thing walking into a room makes the males stare in desire and the other females stare in jealous-hatred.  Older-females see their death and inability to remain competitive in the younger female’s smooth cheeks and perked bosom.  This correlates with the evolution of a crowd of smaller gametes being filtered and striving for the larger gamete. 

Preoccupation with crash and fad diets is pro-Meme.  Miracle diets represent a search for an answer other than basic biology, which is the inner-animal.  Nutrition, genetics, and exercise appear too simple.  Humans want a savior, which can be processed similar to the Meme, like a pill or a thought which does the thinking and active volition for a person.  One either chooses to consume a given food or not.  One chooses to move one’s limbs or remain idle.  One does not choose genetic composition, but one’s denial of immutable biology leads to such futile Argonaut quests.  

Males hold the bulk of fat reserve in their abdomen.  Females hold fat throughout their body and not so disproportionately in their abdomen to accommodate a womb.  The Meme persecutes females for this weight by attempting to market females to be as small as possible.  Males are often praised for their girth.  The patriarchy of the Meme is jealous of pregnancy and seeks to control.  The Meme wants women to be smaller, seen less, heard less, less offensive, and reduced in almost every conceivable manner as a measure of this control resulting from the psychological womb jealously because a womb is chaos.  A woman could be given a man’s sperm and go make a baby and he has no control to stop her.  Most of the misogynistic patriarchal creations of society are the result of this deep part of the id. 

Heart disease is the number one cause of death for men and women.  Men tend to have large artery blockages.  Women tend to have an overall fattening in the artery in correlation with how women hold fat in the rest of their body.  Each produces restriction through different means.  The majority of dollars in cardiovascular heart attack prevention have been spent to combat the first form, because women’s bodies are not valued equally by the Meme.  Studies of gender-based biological differences in women are often not prioritized due to the hormonal cycle effects menstruation can have on research.  The Meme would often rather make the assumption that what is good for males is good enough for females and the determination of what maximally benefits males shall take precedence. 

Inside the realm of body image and body control is the abandonment of jurisdiction over all decisions.  If one’s body mass index and percentage of body fat begets victimization rather than recognized culpability for an organism to make or not make decisions to affect one’s health, a person can default to the Meme in other arenas.  Fast food drive-through lines are an observable interface of this Meme dynamic.  The ideas of Weight Watchers and diet fads are pro-Meme.

Work ethic, discipline and education can spiral downward into apathy, lethargy, and callousness.  One can see the effects of such default to the Meme in the audiences of the Jerry Springer show, Ronco infomercials, pro-wrestling events, Tony Robbins self-esteem seminars, Golden Corral buffets, or most places of worship.  Basically the Meme is at work in any place where people are lining up to indulge themselves in why the bad thing is not an individual’s fault and requesting a quick solution or commiseration through the illusion of a fantastical diversion.

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In these veins the gallery of Cosmopolitan and other fashion and cultural sex-obsessed magazines parade female jealousy of stolen mates and insecurity for being the abandoned.  Humans are explained what to feel guilty about and what to absolve self-criticism in context to the Meme.  Male magazine like GQ, Esquire, Muscle and Fitness, and Sports Illustrated do the same thing under a male paradigm.

Make-up and clothing are akin to male height and muscular bulk.  The orgasm principles, previously mentioned under Commandment Six, release powerful bonding and happiness hormones which are discussed like a mysterious power in such magazines, but rarely the why behind the biology that females have multiple orgasms and men generally do not. 

The Meme would rather humans replicate, want, and purchase while avoiding science.  These two strands of gender identity dominate one’s attraction to the opposite gender.  Each communicates gene quality most directly.  In so doing, the influence to mask the Humans-are-not-Animals meme becomes blatant. 

A woman is afforded the equivalent of one-hundred percent assurance that the fertilized embryo inside her uterus is a byproduct of her, a man is not.  This is why males have more certain but singular orgasms with ejaculation and women have less certain, but potentially multiple.  This male paternity-uncertainty prompts misogynistic laws in context to adultery, historical stoning of women and the entire double-standard by gender as the foundation of patriarchy.  This emblematic array of male-dominated, male-engineered society and Decalogue instituted via the physical dominance and larger body size is associated with the smaller higher-numerated sexual gametes associated with male versus the larger single-celled sexual gamete egg of female. 

Evolution from a microorganism level led humans and most all complex life into one group to replicate in such ways.  The many smaller-gamete members (males) are to mate with as many of the fewer larger-gamete members (females) as possible.  The males are less selective than the females, who bear the bulk of the cost of gestating the progeny.  Species have developed successful strategies for replicating the genes including males continuing presence during progeny development to maturity or complete abandonment post-fertilization.  Humans are no different in these calculations as we discussed in the penguin example under Commandment Six.  

The Meme has popularized books like Fifty Shades of Gray and Twilight and shows like True Blood to capitalize on the taboo of sex to females inside the Meme.  Women want sex, but are told not to want sex.  Females want to win, beat each other at sex as much as males want to demonstrate physical stature and prowess for sex.  These storylines express the female sexual desire to be taken, dominated, to unleash vulnerability and bloom like a flower whether it is to bondage in a bedroom or the pierce of vampire fangs emulating penile penetration.  This is healthy as long as it is within a range of safety and does not cross the border into rape.  A female is vulnerable to the male with her body, but maintains her volition in entirety.  Consent is anti-Meme.  If the sexy vampire or werewolf is told to stop, he or she stops.  

The Meme clouds the idea of female volition in such ways.  The mixed messages and misunderstandings between male and female roles make the submissive and dominate roles taboo.  Male-society commands women to repress and express animal sexuality in a comfortable paradigm for men.  This creates inequality as a wound in the social system.  This creates neurosis (eating disorders, insecurity over appearance, etc.) and conflict in society.  This is not a measure of the depravity or innocence of gender, but linked to the animal evolution of our gametes, the roles these push into society and our denial of why we do what we do through the Meme. 

Afghan and Saudi women are jailed due to the conjecture of infidelity.  Fundamentalism makes sex the enemy.  Sex has power and the Meme must control sex.  Females face the specter of the slut-label, while males are seen as admirable for the same activity.  Look at Saudi Arabian female driver’s license laws.  This is all related to the inner-animal and the Meme. 

Psychologically this is linked to human obsessions in the oedipal complex transitioning through adolescence.  The Meme denies this natural awakening and complicates puberty through false-knowledge and repressed truths. 

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The Meme wants to control desires through prohibition.  Polygamy and polyandry are banned by the Meme.  Polygamy causes chaos and is overtly animalistic like a lion and his pride.  Polyandry, a female with a harem of males is almost incomprehensible as a sustainable construct in mammals based on the innate violent competitive-to-the-death instructional genetics of the male gamete.  However, one only need look at a bee hive or an egg laying bird as alternatives.  An alpha-male mammal with a preponderance of females is common.  This occurs in humans.  This makes sense biologically since a single-woman in the presence of multiple males can only produce one offspring at a time, while a harem of females and an alpha male can create a mammalian colony.

However, when the societal ordering tool of marriage is applied, the Meme rejects the chaos.  When a male is casually dating and fornicating it is the ideal of the dominant-male inside the Meme.  This hypocrisy is a threat to the Meme.  Therefore the Meme avoids inspection by emphasizing the importance, solemnity, and glorification of marital rituals.  This is where commandments six and nine come into play.

Women prior to the current generations were denied formal education at expansive rates compared to men.  This disparity continues in the Third-World, where the Meme has relinquished less control in context to gender.  The Meme attempts to use gender as leverage to create dominance, which it has done masterfully. 

As the First World progresses towards shedding the Meme, women control more of the Meme.  So the Meme must relinquish these tools over time.  The exploitation of the Poor mirrors these logical correlations.  Any uprising by the masses in the Third or First World originally accomplished based on sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, or any easily accessible stereotype becomes more difficult to repress.  The absences of such tools will be discussed in Commandment Ten.

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The Meme through popular culture prompts us to value our individuality, yet conform to orderly standards of behavior, appearance, and compliance.  The Meme installs a vague irreplaceable status to our identity, which is to grow and truncate further thought after gene replication.  Life-long learning might jeopardize the inter-generational transfer of the Meme.

The Meme would like us to imagine our unique individuality is eternal rather than a rearranged version of a copy.  The Meme would like us to believe at fertilization we are historically-marked with a soul in the eternal.  This selfish craving for individuality leads to protest abortion.  The cells developing are recorded at the impetus and like our notch cannot be undone in the annals of the Meme’s reality. 

To abort a child is killing a developing animal.  However, there was no record, not for the aborted fetus, not for us nor for any of the potentially fertilized chickens who perished to form our drive-through nuggets.  This is disheartening if not devastating to the Meme, but to register the depths of our non-uniqueness, our lack of eternal individuality deflates some manner of exclusivity the Meme provided as a measure of pride.

We face the debate if this is all we are and are we enough?  We never needed an after-life or a past-life to be relevant.  No one ever had or will.  Such potential destinations are indeterminable lagniappe.  Life is enough and more powerful once one can live beyond the current dominance of the Meme.  

We are forced to confront our conceptual goodness, who we are and why we do what we do, and if we should feel guilt or not.  This sort of confrontation leads to an internal repression and a passive aggressive external socialization costumed in a mirage of: rituals, social institutions, avoidance, piousness, jealousies, sycophancy, and loneliness mixed in a pot of celebrity to find identity through human-symbols rather than innate organic realities.  This leads to the Meme.

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The Meme discourages people to look others directly in the eyes.  This is an inherited trait of the fight or flight response.  Prolonged eye contact is understood as an act of aggression or sexual dominance.  Humans who cannot look others in the eye often have difficulty accomplishing the figurative or sometimes literal task of looking at their self in the mirror.

The Meme senses the animal inside and avoids such encounters.  Direct eye-contact might prompt a rival to theft of physical assets or mates or to become a mate.  Prolonged eye contact says I want to fuck you or I want to kill you depending on the gender, sexuality, and context.  Both ways it is overtly animal and anti-Meme.  These are highly animalistic urges which are repressed to encourage distancing of rashness and encourage order. 

Acknowledging that we are animals does not sacrifice morality or a healthy notion of civility.  To the contrary acknowledging that humans are animals brings morality and civility as inclusive to the domain of the animal kingdom.  Altruism exists in our previous notion of animals as under the Meme as it always has in humans. 

This is related to humans asking “how is it going?” or “what’s up?” when greeting to instill order into initial confrontations that could prompt chaos.  The very greetings, “How are you?  How are you doing?” are pro-Meme.  The obligatory functional response is “Ok.”  Detailed or elaborated explanations are not expected or encouraged by the Meme. 

In the vast majority of the population the interrogatory is actually a declarative sentence.  It is asking to demonstrate an image of the internal externally.  The Meme does not wish to dive internal or to discuss that mental space.  The charade is referring to it, but not talking about it.

This is a check; are you a threat?  Fellow animals are you about to kill me?  Are you friend or foe?  The security is fake.  We always have the option of human deception.  Lies are intended in the ritual.  When asked, “How are you doing?”  If the person is truly sad, the respondent often still says, “Ok.” 

When someone asks, how is it going; how about this weather; what’s up; or any derivation of innocuous assertion inquiry to assess friend or foe, the anti-Meme response is one that sheds all preservation of ego; the response is clear, wonderful, outstanding, I am alive damn it; I am not done and I am here in this now with you participating.  This is not false optimism, sugar-coating reality; this is an acceptance of reality and knowing that whatever suffering the self or those loved by the self may be incurring or endured the response is focused on the present moment to see the beauty in how to treat the present moment. 

The present moment can be a stage to exalt the now which can so often inspire others not to sink into their own ego.  This avoids pity parties of commensurate ego-indulgence.  “Oh you had that bad thing occur, well let me tell you my version of your scar or my brother or my mother’s version of your cancer.”  Yes empathizing is applicable in some cases but one must be wary of where the ego is present in to distract one from what can be felt and done in the now. 

The Meme’s theater prompts surface-concern to replace true concern.  The Meme can encourage the First-World to treat the Third-World the way it does in related imagery.  The anti-Meme often wants to answer, “Actually I am having a horrible day, my brother died, but you are asking for you not for me.  My true answer does not fit the dynamic created through the Meme.  Therefore I am frustrated that you even asked because you have now made me out to be liar, by giving you an ‘ok’.”  This on a grand scale, allows us to smile, say everything is fine, avoid diving into interrelationships, or to start revolutions to disrupt the Meme’s order.  Overt honesty personal and bare, often shattering the comfort of social convention to risk a human seeing another human internal as a divine member of the collective universe is the anti-Meme.  “I thought of killing myself today.  My daughter is anorexic and I do not know how to help her.  A woman I have a crush on rejected me on a park bench.  I’ll get over it, but it will take a few days.  I am thinking of my deceased fill in the blank.  I was held up at gunpoint.  I address my depression through pot.  I think I’m shit.  Can you just hold me?”

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Another form of human communication behind a non-threatening distance is music.  Depending on the genre the themes can trend pro-Meme or anti-Meme.  Understanding the Meme’s role in music can help illustrate why certain music tends to be popular with different groups of people.

A human’s love affair with music tends to erupt with sexual awakening.  The collective hum of the universe is heard in the first chords of one’s biological call to procreate.  Love, fear, isolation, interconnection, and the tribal drum beat all become prominent in our consciousness as we begin to taste the Meme’s politicking through music. 

Pop music is the definition of pro-Meme.  Top-forty songs slathered in bubble-gum lyrics and dopamine releasing melodies and measures which do not have to make logical sense, but typically toy with the sexual-meme, but do not dive into the internal or social issues are the pro-Meme’s music staple.  Pop-music is designed to sell radio advertising.  The art of the musician is secondary and often commandeering through repetition even the artist probably resents. 

Adult easy-listening also does this to mitigate being offensive as no one really forms an opinion other than an understanding that a threshold of humans agrees this is what is popular.  The sentiment of going along with that opinion is the goal of the Meme.  It doesn’t matter the genre of Wall Street radio: adult contemporary, pop-country, hip-hop, etc. the group-think is the goal.

Examples of pro-Meme artists include: Elvis, Madonna, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, George Straight, Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney (almost all modern pop-country), Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Electronic Dance Music, Jimmy Buffet, the Bee Gees (disco), Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra (big band music), Justin Timberlake, Gene Autry, Poison (glam-rock), Eminem, Kayne West, The Rolling Stones, Maroon Five, Kirk Franklin (gospel), New Kids on the Block (boy bands: Nsync, One Direction), and Brittany Spears (pop-princess: Miley Cyrus, Tiffany, Rihanna etc.).  None of these are absolute.  To a large degree it is the marketing of the artist, not necessarily the artist that conveys the pro-Meme.

Clear-Channel corporate playlists on auto repeat on generic radio cultivate the Meme.  Listeners are dulled into passively absorbing the same sounds over and over without asserting anything beyond the smallest volition to click the radio on.  Commercials airing are digested with the same level of rejection. 

Humans who avoid the radio and utilize an iPod or Spotify to prepare specific playlists or compact discs to assert volition over artistic and auditory options are anti-Meme.  This at times can be the same exact song, but consumed through varied paradigms.  Certain bubble-gum music and draconian synthesized beat patterns are correlated with opiate releases in humans that are common tools of the Meme to spread and retain itself and sell products. 

Dance music like Spears, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Madonna dangle the Lolita-nymph meme, which would appear to be anti-Meme, because of the overt sex but it is often done so without substance to retort the empowerment of an internal volition.  Dance club music teaches repetitive action and phrases to assert what is allowed and acceptable.  Line dancing is a particular vile form of the Meme.  Rihanna and Katy Perry are often fuck-me STD-training kits.  Elvis and Justin Bieber are male versions.  Each supplies sex without intimacy.  One is to copulate, not find the universe through love and interconnection. 

Dance music lyrics are generally lacking to maintain volition behind the veiled prostitution of selling sex in melodies and beats.  Elvis sold sex with a gospel foundation to veil the theft of African American music and to show adherence to the Meme.  Madonna’s crucifixes and Spears’ school uniform did the same.  Beyoncé’s Girls, is farcical empowerment.

Disney, a champion of the pro-Meme, bought Justin Timberlake, Spears, and Cyrus to turn cute into fuck-bait on a song hook for profit.  Boy bands are a reverse Lolita-fantasy that uses a congregation of males to diffuse overt female lust.  Female individuals like Madonna can be lusted at more overtly under the Meme.  Brothers can masturbate looking up at the posters of Brittany in their sister’s room and the sisters can name their vibrators Justin. 

The modern-country iteration is fueled by religion and patriotism.  Drinking and having it First-World-hard, soldiers, flag-worship, and war are common themes to Tobey-Keith kick-ass.  A salt of the Earth, family-first comfort akin to Jesus’ the last-shall-be-first message is a comfortable frame to ensnare the Poor.  Anti-Meme songs like Garth Brooks, “We Shall Be Free” occasionally come around.

Jimmy Buffet is non-threating grab a drink, be happy, and don’t think too much music.  Disco was the same.  The Rolling Stones may appear to be anti-Meme, but for the most part the Stones are a party-band that straddles the border of the Meme.  Other party-bands like Kiss are a louder version of disco with musicianship serving a similar purpose for the Meme.

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Some powerful artists twist both sides of the pro and anti-Meme.  These artists understood or understand that a fun pro-Meme type song can allow musicians dexterity to spread anti-Meme songs to the public.  The Rolling Stones did this, especially with their blues influences, but the Beatles were the masters. 

Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s partnership can be seen as the ultimate musical combination of the pro and anti-Meme on a global stage.  McCartney could fuel “And I saw her standing there” and “Birthday.”  John Lennon could fuel, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life.”  Almost all Beatles songs were written in collaboration between the two.  Despite who may have sung the lyrics on the track, the message of the Meme is clearly subdivided and evidenced by the inevitable breakup of the band and the comments and lives of each.  Lennon’s pull towards chaos and the Meme’s grip upon the band blew up the Beatles.   In some ways the question of “Who is your favorite Beatle?” can explain one’s Meme allegiance (John and George on the introverted anti-Meme and Paul and Ringo on the extroverted pro-Meme.) 

Lennon showed the basic call for love we all have.  His absent mother and father, distance from his own son, the drug battles, and of all the partners he could have chosen he chose Yoko as an artist to try to confront the Meme on a global level in the wake of Vietnam, eventually leaving Britain in 1971 to get murdered on a sidewalk in New York.  John Lennon was a flawed man, but that battle is revealed when one could have the whole world in one’s hands and one is still empty except the only thing that makes any sense is love and interconnection.  Lennon called out the Meme on his Plastic Ono Band album by narrowing down the Meme into the rawness of the anti-Meme. 

Lennon’s “Mother” echoes the void of parental love severing a self.  “I Found Out” acknowledges the fallacies of Jesus, Hare Krishna, drugs and fame.  “Working Class Hero” points out the Meme’s lies to Labor.  “Isolation” confronts just being with the self, the fear we all have of being present in the alone.  “Remember” the fifth of November is Guy Fawkes Night.  “Love” is direct. 

John Lennon’s influence on the planet is unparalleled in his overt atheism while exiting the Beatles.  The Meme may even have led to his murder.  His song, “God” may be the greatest full frontal assault on theism in the Meme in the history of music given who Lennon was.  If “God” had been done with the full complement of his Beatle band mates the ramifications would have dwarfed any previous umbrage over comparisons of the Beatles and Jesus.  Lennon’s “Imagine” and “Working Class Hero” are more palatable iterations of the anti-Meme.  “Imagine” could be considered the anthem of the anti-Meme. 

“Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky

Imagine all the people, Living for today, Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion, too

Imagine all the people, Living life in peace, You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you will join us, And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world, You, you may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you will join us, And the world will live as one”

There is a reason Sgt. Peppers is considered by many as the greatest album of all time and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” may be the greatest American song.  Dylan presents a human like a vagabond animal out on the street being dared to peer inward.  The Beatles explore disconnecting from society, cultural norms and asking the inside to come outside.  Each is a full assault on the Meme.  Sgt. Peppers peaks with the line, “He blew his mind out in a car.  He didn't notice that the lights had changed. A crowd of people stood and stared. They'd seen his face before. Nobody was really sure if he was from the house of lords.” in “A Day in the Life.”  Dylan’s belts, “How does it feel to be on your own?”

Anti-Meme musical artists include: Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, Nirvana, Michael Jackson, Nine Inch Nails, KRS-One, Green Day, Wilco, Sam Cooke, R.E.M., John Prine, Public Enemy, Fugazi, Rancid, Miles Davis, Metallica, The Clash, Pink Floyd, Muddy Waters, Fela Kuti, Brian Wilson, Etta James, Lead Belly, Leonard Cohen, Amanda Palmer, Phil Ochs, Tom Waits, Billy Bragg, Rage Against the Machine, The Roots, Pearl Jam, U2, The Avett Brothers, Sage Francis, Indigo Girls, Ray Charles, and John Lennon etc. 

Mike Love served as McCartney to Brian Wilson’s Lennon in the Beach Boys.  See the playful “Surfin’ USA” to the inch-away depressive suicidal awe of “Hang on to your Ego” and the genus that is the anti-Meme album “Pet Sounds” inside Wilson’s psychological struggles.  Michael Jackson although the ultimate pop star, reclaimed his childhood and anti-Meme through songs like, “Man in the Mirror”, “Heal the World”, “Will You Be There”, “Black or White”, and “Beat It”.  Sam Cooke was founded on gospel like Elvis, but found the anti-Meme through confronting racism and systematic injustice in songs like “Chain Gang” and “A Change is Gonna Come”. 

Black music tends to be more anti-Meme for this reason.  The blues founded by artists like Robert Johnson and Lead Belly, rock n’roll founded by Chuck Berry and Fats Dominio, hip hop with artists like Run DMC and Public Enemy, and reggae founded by artists like Bob Marley all possess a sense of rebellion, smile for fear of crying, and introspection to sense an internal pain from the Meme which the Meme seeks to suppress.

Hip hop is broad.  Pro-Meme artists like Jay-Z can dominate in the billions spouting the use of women as sex objects and the glory of wealth and gangster status as recurring subthemes.  Anti-Meme artists like Mos Def, Public Enemy, and Sage Francis exist in hip hop making less money, but far more poignant commentary for humanity.  Albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”, Francis’ “Life”, and Mos Def’s “The Ecstatic” are Meme effrontery.

The blues echo slavery and the hurt of poverty.  Lead Belly, Etta James, and Ray Charles can voice human loneliness from the grips of both love and injustice.  Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, “Get up, Stand up”, “Exodus”, “Buffalo Solider”, “War”, and “Coming in from the Cold” etc. do the same.

The folk genre was founded by Woody Guthrie with songs like, “Tom Joad”, “Pretty Boy Floyd”, “I ain’t got no home in this World Anymore”, “Jolly Banker”, “Do-Re-Mi”, “Two Good Men” and the eponymous “This Land is Your Land” as a retort to “God Bless America.”  The chain from Guthrie goes to Bob Dylan with entire albums showing Dylan’s battle with the Meme as he goes from anti-Meme folk and blues to pro-Meme Christian and country.  Dylan’s “The Times They are a Changin’” is the strongest anti-Meme assault folk album ever recorded.  

Bruce Springsteen adeptly bears Guthrie’s torch in hiding the anti-Meme in plain sight behind a typically pro-Meme topic of patriotism in his “Born in the U.S.A.” album.  One of the most glaring examples of the Meme is a pro-Meme listener chanting the refrain without listening to the other lyrics of the title track.  Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” albums break at the loneliness of the soul and begs for human connection to shine through the dark reality of the American dream.  Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” is homage to Guthrie along with his “Nebraska” to echo the dustbowl desperation of the Poor written by Steinbeck’s protagonist in The Grapes of Wrath. 

Springsteen wrote a modern update to Guthrie’s consciousness after 9/11/01 with “The Rising” and after the 2008 economic collapse with “Wrecking Ball”.  Bruce Springsteen covers up his assault on the Meme with fun rock n’ roll songs, but the anti-Meme is the substance.  Springsteen and Dylan understand that if one does not combine the candy of the pro-Meme the anti-Meme music is less likely to penetrate the population.

Johnny Cash was like Elvis and Sam Cooke with a gospel foundation.  We all put ourselves in Folsom prisons.  Cash was more like Cooke than Presley as music made to his death struggled with his concept of god ultimately covering Trent Reznor’s “Hurt”.  Reznor is the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails.  His album “The Downward Spiral” is a modern industrial anti-Meme update to Dylan’s “The Times They are a Changin’.”  It rampages through herd behavior of conformity in humans, animalistic sex, atheism, suicide, and human loneliness.

The punk genre was sprouted through the anti-Meme of The Clash with the political flare of rebellion in the albums “London Calling” and “Sandinista”.  The Ramones’ disaffected formula claimed the outsider role.  Modern punks in Operation Ivy’s “Energy” led into Rancid with albums like “Life Won’t Wait”, “Indestructible”, and “Let the Dominoes Fall.”  Green Day transcended from sophomoric pop-punk to a full anti-Meme war with the global impacting “American Idiot”, followed by “21^st Century Breakdown.”  Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia” is the update to Lennon’s “God”.  Green Day has recorded covers of Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, and the Clash’s “I Fought the Law”. 

If one can imagine a Mount-Rushmore of the pro and anti-Meme for English-language musicians, the pro-Meme would have Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé.  The anti-Meme would have John Lennon, Bob Marley, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie.  

Many musical artists are actually introverts as for a non-shy introvert performing in public may actually be less daunting than an extrovert concerned with the audience’s judgment.  When we can syphon music based on the Meme in such ways we see which musicians are likely to bring substance over gloss and which are likely to find radio play or not, particularly in a modern area of large corporations like Clear Channel controlling playlists with advertisers taking priority.  The volition and active engagement to pull a vinyl record out of a sleeve and placing it under the needle is anti-Meme. 

Music has the ability for the public to acknowledge what humanity dislikes about the Meme.  Humans will sing refrains in concert against the Meme chastising the authoritarian establishments of government, war, commercialism, religion, fundamentalism, racism, and violence, but then go right back to living the Meme.  Other songs will document the inevitability of discord and the inescapable minefields of poverty correlated with violence in communities.  One can see this Meme-differential in the cost of a Fugazi show as less than a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt and why Tom Morello now has a divergent solo-career.

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Writing, television, film and cult celebrities present similar paradigms.  Rather than exacerbate a similar pro and anti-Meme disparity I will list a few of the limitless candidates as example.  The Pro Meme includes: any Pope, Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, Henry Kissinger, Rick Warren, Ayatollah Khomeini, George Bush, Joseph Stalin, Bill Clinton, JFK, Joseph Goebbels, Barak Obama, Osama Bin Laden, Jeff Foxworthy, Steve Harvey, Larry the Cable Guy, Ward Cleaver, Archie Bunker, Penny from the Big Bang Theory, Homer Simpson, Monty Burns, Fonzie, Rush Limbaugh, and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

The anti-Meme includes: Albert Einstein, Christopher Hitchens, Jonas Salk, Noam Chomsky, Charles Bukowski, Salmon Rushdie, Al Gore, Mahatma Gandhi, Harvey Milk, MLK, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Maher, Dave Chappelle, Larry David, Morgan Freeman, Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, In Living Color, Russell Brand, Lisa Simpson, Monty Python, Louie C.K., Joe Rogan, and South Park.

Neither of these are absolutes as with the musicians; we are all both, but these names are used to present the general idea through characters to show a greater trend.  Comedians help us to laugh at the darkness within us, to shed the pieties of political correctness and religion.  Writers scribe on the table of our consciousness to illuminate the world within to the realm of the tactile. 

The back and forth internal conflict with craving the Meme’s comfort in the bastions of hope, faith, religion, solidarity, and community, while raging against its false promises and inhibiting constructs is common.  Many times artists and listeners do not connect the two extremes as part of the same whole.  This is in part why and how humans hunger to have a source to blame and will accept any solution.  Even if the solution is not empirically proven or likely to be a productive avenue for reprieve it has done the internal contemplative work for us and is therefore preferable for the Meme. 

We will vote for a token candidate with name recognition for her or his ability to be elected, not the ideas proffered.  This truncates our responsibility for taking action, as our passive vote reflects our resistance to contemplate and attempt to live without the Meme.  We will engage in endless rabble debate over the rhetoric surrounding a topic to facilitate a theater of make-believe that we are doing something about a “problem” without actually doing.  Given the timely and detailed analysis the Meme discourages we might see that either side of the debate is a feckless appearance of action unlikely to change the root cause, but likely to win public favor in the arenas the Meme is most concerned: popularity, symbolic gestures, and sound bites.  These political candies are less likely to be criticized because each was not linked to logical recourse at the impetus.

All of these are iterations of thought through speech or song which represent the crime of thinking anti-Meme.  The introverted practice of burrowing into the hierarchy of thoughts that hold our global society from chaos and secure profits for some and desperation for others is inseparable from the ninth commandment.  The Meme wants to avoid this conversation entirely.

Humans need to accept all the facets that make us human, our choices, especially the dark ones like suicide.  Otherwise when we search for motives, it is not to pilfer benefit to the deceased or victim of a crime, but to shield ourselves from the idea that we could be in the deceased’s stead.  We could be the cremated dust or glob dissolving in a casket.  We could be the one shot in the face on a sidewalk over the idea that we have a wallet with currency in our cache or once sang of atheism. 

We are left with the notion that we can be condemned simply for a thought-crime.  Psychoanalysis or introspection becomes dangerous.  If commandment nine makes our desires into evidential matter for sin, then the contents of our minds become the property of god and thus the Meme.  We create false assurances that others will be subjected to similar examination when they repudiate thought-culpability through volition.  

The anti-Meme wishes to reclaim jurisdiction over our thoughts.  We can want freely.  It is the path to our actions which determine our morality.  These actions are independent of consequence and are good or bad based on the method of contemplation, not the result.  A man meaning well in war is still a murderer.  There is wrong in the act, but the method that leads to the act is the evil.  An act can be both good and bad.  A bullet killing may take and give, may be both evil and good.  We must accept this dichotomy and expunge the absolutism of godly pardon as if we ever possessed such authority.  Otherwise what do we make of two soldiers at war catapulting bullets into each other’s lungs?  The injury is to our whole, not canceling like a proton and an electron, but a detriment to the whole that the murdering need exist. 

Any possession is a fleeting parcel in the mirage of time.  We hide from these long-Decembers coming due.  We fail to appreciate the other three seasons as if the fourth will never come around.  We conjure mythical eternities to partake a never ending spring time, a recycling veil of childhood as if the waters of the womb could wash us in regenerative fluid in commensurate measure with our faith.  These are the pleasure islands of the Meme leaving one with elongating nostrils and hopes that one is not a real boy.

We create heaven to absolve ourselves from seeing the duality of our actions and thus ourselves.  We are animals.  We kill to continue to survive.  The suffering of others so often produces a measure of our benefit.  This is never truer than in the disparity between the Third and First Worlds.

The Meme makes it more comfortable to avoid consideration of the energy passing through our internal thoughts to manifest this reality of our complex interconnected human super-organism.  One is pushed down for the other’s head to rise above the limited surface.  Once we peer inward and accept what we are and why we do what we do, then we can accept the task of our continued evolution.

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The anti-Meme asks us to shed the ego.  Shed pain.  Shed worry.  Drink the universe.  Drink the idea that we are more than our self and by helping and loving others in the best ways we are performing a manner of self-care.  That is all one can do to get out of the ego without the assistance of choosing to go in there and love one enough to help pull ourselves out.  One has to climb out by starving our ego.  Obliterate our ego.  Ego is an illusion, a manifestation of space-time like a hard drive for our biological cells.  Our ego is not our thoughts, our intentions, or our volition ricocheting inside a single interconnected universe.  When we choose to move the universe shifts.  When others move we move. 

Only we can do it; only the individual can shed the defensive armors of the superego to obliterate the ego.  Therapists can sit there and listen, offer suggestions here or there, but risk jarring the patient by curtly alerting the patient that despite what the universe has presented beyond the control of the individual, the individual aids and perpetuates the depression, angst, stress, grief, and psychic pain by assuming their ego is worth protecting. 

Let it go; let it beyond; usurp the ego as an illusionary component of a whole.  One should not bear weight of the past so heavily in the present.  The nature of humanity is that the past and future shadow alteration into the now.  In the workbench of the now, only the now truly conducts the spiritual energy pertinent to our concurrent journey.  The past and future are lumbering distractions.

Meaning we can change it all; all of it in a single moment; ruin it, save it, resurrect, destroy, be ok, be satisfied, or be distraught.  All of these possibilities are available in the now.  The growth is diving into the self to let go of the self and find the universe.  That’s it; that’s the job. 

So many people aren’t ready for that; to hear that; to accept that all these hoops and structures of self-worth found in identity found in how hard the ego has had it; to how powerful, to attribute beauty and goodness to what the self has done.  Neither our blessings nor our curses are really just ours or really just the self or the ego.  It is always more complicated; this does not absolve blame or credit, but the ideas of blame or credit are irrelevant.  They are only relevant to the ego.  Since the ego is pointless blame or credit in this sense of self identity of past is irrelevant.  The ramifications of destruction or betterment we have produced in both the physical atomic and the spiritual energy have flowed somewhere in the whole. 

The universe shifts with such decisions, but the universe is only the single moment of now resonating in and of itself.  So no matter how bad, event Hitler concentration camp or KKK bad, there is the now to do what can be done by those who choose to do.  That is all that is relevant.  The pain, the pride, the hurt, the pleasure, the joy; they have a place, but that place is an arena of the egoic which is basically irrelevant to what truly matters, to why we are truly here, which is the choice we make in the moment. 

For we must see all others and our self in the same whole, whatever joy or pain we have done to that whole.  The ego puts up borders and indemnifications which are false.  The ego builds temples and misguides what we worship as a function of the self.  The ego goads our focus.  Faith, worship, absolute truths are dangerous paradigms.  The further away from the ego the closer to being, just being.  It is all about just being present in the moment.  If one begins to try to lose time, shed time, the drape costume of time and see all that ever was, is and will be is seen through human consciousness through this illusion we can be in the moment beyond the illusion of time, beyond the illusion of self. 

Shedding time in this away allows the self to see everything that ever was, is and will be in a single instance of now like a constant tone sounding in an ungraspable present.  All we can insert into that tone is our intention, our focus.  What we choose to do with that moment is everything all at once accumulated with all tones from the entire universe.  This is the true music.  There is no severable ego in that, no self or selves, only what is, always has been and always will be in the is of the now.  Being in that moment, being in the now that’s everything; that is all life is.

With the anti-Meme, we question what we want things for, what things are really doing, how we define their purpose, their purpose for our ego, for our species, for our society, for the universe.  That is one way to identify the useless shit that is a layer we created to function together, but in the end is arbitrary, could be something else entirely. 

Sometimes it is not even that important that we change what we are doing, it is just important that we understand the arbitrary nature of the action, that there are so many other options available.  Most of the time the best option is just being in the moment, accepting the flow of the universe, matching one’s energy with that flow, accepting it and seeing the beauty in it.  There are often many ways to make that happen; it just matters how open a mind is; that is where it starts.

The Meme says to sit there like a sad sack of shit saying poor me, why me, why me (god?), when is it my turn; fuck that.  Fuck our turn; we might get a turn, we might not, but we have choice.  Every moment we are still god damn breathing we have a choice and that is all that matters.  When we choose to pamper our ego we are like an atom being still, out of work, out of commission, idle, failing to grow.  When we shed the ego and recognize the rest of the universe around us it is the best shot we have to losing that loneliness, that spiritual isolation. 

We can’t make someone love us.  We can’t make someone choose differently.  We can’t bring back the dead.  We can’t make a failing body regenerate to a healthy vehicle in many cases.  All we can do is choose.  We can fight for what we believe.  We can express it.  We can make art.  We can breathe and go out and stimulate the universe around us and see what comes back.  Maybe all we get is shit in return, maybe we get lucky.  Maybe that shit is a blessing later; maybe it is pure horrid.

It is not about karma or justice or fair.  Fuck fair.  Fair is the concept of the ego.  Working our ass off for justice and getting shot like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, or John Lennon is the universe.  Did any of them get fair?  Sometimes some other fucker or fuckers cannot take the honesty of someone shedding their ego so blatantly like walking around naked in front of everybody else with their pussy or dick flashing what we are.  Some people are going to hate us for giving it all way, figuring some small bit of it out, or doing shit they feel they could never do or do not want us to do because it might create change in their power, comfort, or assumptions. 

Losing our ego is the first step to growth, to maturity, to the point of it all.  When we get that, well that is the start of feeling what we are, the universe the two journeys all of it.  The Meme is just a roadblock to slow us down from extinction-inducing panic; it’s not the road; it is not the journeys.  Worrying about making up for the injury of the past, what daddy didn’t do, what he did, a divorce, an abortion, a death, those are just opportunities to peel layers.

 

Peeling layers is the human endeavor.  We start putting layers on when we get a name and add every time we want to feel loved or special, or indulged, or basically survive.  The struggle to survive in this physical and biological form inside the atomic adds what we need to get rid of to understand when we give; we receive more in a paradigm beyond the laws of the single journey.  There is balance in each giving and taking between the two journeys.  When we hate we do not take away from our spiritual journey we simply sit idle.

The anti-Meme asks us to quit trying to plan it or to control it.  We can’t and if one thinks one can one is even more fucked.  The universe is reactionary.  We are reactionary.  The only reason a person feels she or he is not is because of the illusion of the ego.  Yes we have volition; we make choices, but how we react is only the place volition exists.  We can choose to do, but we cannot choose what occurs as that choice ricochets inside the universe.  We can only choose how we react when the constant ricochets bounce off the position in physical reality we identify as self. 

That is all we can do; sports team wins or loses, minute to minute in a concentration camp, trying to make it through the end of an eight hour work day, march for freedom under tyranny, wrapping birthday presents, listening to Elvis, we choose how we react to the stimuli. 

The anti-Meme shows us that impatience is the tabernacle of the ego.  Thinking we will run out of time, that things have to get done.  Nothing has to get done and there is nothing that is all up to any individual.  We do the best we can with the opportunity of the now before us.  That’s it. 

We can plan; we can try, but we have to accept the limitation of the self given the majestic power of the interconnected timeless universe we are also included.  Loneliness can devour us; make us feel miniscule and distant.  Suicide and depression lurk like wolves of the ego wanting to indulge in gnawing on the raw to feel the self.  The unawakened mind feels this as numb, the way a drug addiction does in the beginning before the body adapts and the high is elusive, extinct, like it was from the beginning.  It is an illusion of the ego nesting in the body as if it was all about the self, all about what our skin feels or our eyes see.

The body is a shell, a boat and the time we are in it is just an option of how we react to what we choose.  Life is what runs into our body as we make our way through a constantly churning ocean of is. 

The anti-Meme says boredom, fuck boredom; no one should ever get to say, “I’m bored.”  If we are breathing, if we can think or do something, boredom is monstrous.  Look at Stephen Hawking and Steve Gleason, fuck look at all the Steve’s what excuse are we going to really use to say we can’t do something with the moment we have, before our body is dust and our atoms are swaying around in the ego-less physical universe again and all concept of memory of who and what we did is just a force pushing out. 

It is not about regret or accomplishment or some pride or guilt; fuck that.  That is for the Meme to try to cheat us out of the good stuff.  The good stuff is just being, just being in the now, awareness, absorbing it all.  Absorb it in the god damn moment of the now that we have; live it, drink it; share it; celebrate it; cry over it; devour it; be.  Just be passion and zest, and humble and patient for the limitations of the form we are in, but if we are sitting there waiting for our life to start, to exit this prison for her or him to call to enter our life, to love us back, to get that job, to learn that degree and be, we have got it all wrong. 

Sure there are milestones, measures of accomplishment that will push our growth forward, to expand, but getting there is not the point.  Maybe we get there, maybe we don’t.  The universe is about the reaction to all the motion going on and us relinquishing our ego, our expectation and arrogance of control over it, ultimately the idea that there is an us.  We are to release the idea that we as an individual need to be an individual, that our pampered emotional core is loved and that love only hits us. 

When one truly loves the self, when one truly loves others, the universe is loved.  Love is given without expectation of return to the ego; one loves knowing the self is in the other and one is getting more than what one is giving.  That is the miracle of the universe.  That is how plants grow.  That is how stars are born, how one tiny atom in a physical sense can hold all that god damn energy, it is the nature of conversions. 

When true love exits a being it creates an explosion in the universe so god damn big the old terms are dead, the ego, the self, the limits of the old paradigm are just all fucking gone into frivolous meaningless over in the corner on the floor like swept away dust no longer of our concern.  We enter the big room, the one where we are aware of the simplicity surrounding us, flowing through us everywhere in totality.  That everyone we have every met and will see is a component in it and we feel god damn stupid and childish and infantile for not seeing it before, and we begin to grow. 

The Meme is a million miles behind us.  We sit in each moment almost giddy that we get to live and what will we do with the marvelous opportunity that is a day.  Yes just a day, a god-licked day that we get to pilot and what we could do with it. 

We are on these two simultaneous journeys, the atomic as an illusion of forms, the spiritual as constancy in a common form flowing, always flowing.  We get in our human heads that life is about achievement, a destination of getting somewhere, of being who we struggle to become like some big race.  For fucks sake there is no one to compete against but the love and fear inside our intention and choice.  So many of us keep trying to get somewhere, to barge into some paradise, or get back to Eden for some reward. 

There is nowhere to go, nowhere to exit out to find.  You are here now.  You are where you have always been and will always be.  The perspective shifts as we trade conceptual ideas of what self is, but that self is just a shifting illusion in the now.  If there were a door whatever we thought we would find, we might be like fuck I was there the whole time I was in the place of possibility, the master creative furnace to weld the elements and grow the seeds.  I was in the place I thought I was trying to get.

The struggle of accepting that and still doing, focusing on the now, becoming aware of the illusions self and space-time present and to be, accepting how little control we will ever have over the whole fucking thing, how little control we have over our life is what makes us hide our minds under cotton and sugar and digital entertainment.  Art, books, charity, music, meditation, self-less love, dance, tattoos, intimate sex and disclosures of the heart, those are as close as it gets to being in the now, releasing the ego to share with the universe.  The other shit is a distraction, a pitfall rabbit hole to believe there is a door, another place to go, a wonderland or a wonder-hell.  We lose focus and sacrifice our greatest asset: volition in the present moment.

We could evolve the Meme.  We could stop a war, birth a child, make someone smile, laugh like a parade, work to survive, build a house, see a new town, ride a bike through the grass, play music, do yoga, give a hug, pet a dog, what, what do we have?  What did we do in a patient humble way to balance the two journeys: the physical and the mental/spiritual?  What are we doing in this now; yes right fucking now.  That is what is about; always; that’s it.  The anti-Meme asks us to meditate on that; live in that now.  Getting lost again will be a hell of a lot more difficult.  Sure it’ll bite us; we’ll wander off, but paying attention to that; keeping focus to be in the now making what we can at the table and what’s before us in each moment, that’s it; that’s why we are here to flow that energy into accepting what we are. 

To Commandment Ten: Prejudice