My nights have been full of dreams lately and the pages of my journal reflect crocodiles, sunken ships, adventures, and mysteries that I unconsciously encounter each night. I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down something that I didn't understand at all. "How many femes are needed for manhood?" I thought that was the question posed to me by an unknown entity in the dream, but I wasn't sure about that word "femes. The first letter could have been an 'm' a 't' or something else. When I went to the Eck center the next day, I was greeted by Henry, an old devotee of the religion who gave me a cup of tea, lots of space, and free reign over the library. Before I left I asked him if the word memes was part of his religion. He said he'd never heard of it, but that often he will find that the meaning of mysterious dreams will become clear within a few days. He sent me off with more literature on Eckankar and never put any pressure on me to join his religion.
I forgot about the femes in the midst of my wanderings around San Antonio. Thomas Merton's book "Seven Story Mountain," has had me questioning the worth of protestantism as he argues so convincingly that the Catholic Church is the one true Church. I've also been regularly attending Sunday School and Worship at the San Antonio Mennonite Church. There I've been contemplating questions of intimacy, sexuality, and relationships with friends and members of the congregation. I've been wondering about the place of individuals within community, what kind of community I want to be part of, and whether any community will encourage my growth in love and truth like the Divine Love community in Australia. So, I've got four distinct faith paths vying for my attention at this point: Catholicism, Anabaptist Protestantism, Eckankar, and the Divine Love Path. Then I met Oscar Alvarado.
I was meandering around on my bicycle last Saturday, enjoying the beautiful weather, when I saw a striking mosaic sculpture in a front yard where a man and woman were talking. I stopped to say hello and inquire about the art piece, and within a couple minutes the artist, Oscar, asked if I wanted a job. He is starting an online business selling 3-speed vintage bicycles and needs someone to help clean up and repair the bikes. "Cool, let's go." So, I had a job for the afternoon. I worked a couple hours and made a little money while Oscar told me about his life as an artist, a building contractor, and an atheist. He argue convincingly for atheism and it didn't take long before I felt his words working their way into my mind and thoughts.
That evening a friend placed a TED video in front of my and I watched a woman talk about the importance of thanking others in the ways they need to be thanked. It wasn't very convincing, but then the mystery came full circle. I watched this video of Susan Blackmore explaining "memes" and her idea of "temes." http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html
Here's what Wikipedia says about memes: "memes identify ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another. The concept comes from an analogy: as genes transmit biological information, memes can be said to transmit ideas and belief information.A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures."
In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes." (Wikipedia).
All the religions and ideas that have found their ways into my mind can be thought of as things that want to be replicated. Regardless of whether or not the individuals within the religion want to spread it, the very existence of the religion as a concept is what seeks replication. It's unclear why some memes take such a prominent place in our society-suits and ties for instance- and why others die out-- like Beanie Babies. I'm also left wondering about how much choice I have in deciding which memes will be replicated in my life. Will I spread the teachings of one of these various religions or choose to believe in a purely scientific view of the world? For today, the only meme I'm spreading is the meme itself.And just to offer some balance to this meme machine, here's Wikipedia's note on the uncertainty surrounding the concept: In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar questions the memeticists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes. He sees memes as an abstraction and such a reduction as failing to produce greater understanding of those ideas. The highly interconnected, multi-layering of ideas resists memetic simplification to an atomic or molecular form; as does the fact that each of our lives remains fully enmeshed and involved in such "memes". Lohmar argues that one cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes. The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.[24]
In other news, I'm planning to stick around San Antonio for about another month. I should be making my way to Indiana by early April, just in time for some warm weather and garden planting.
