The Meme Machine (45 page)

These kinds of practices begin to wear away at the false self. In the present moment, attending equally to everything, there is no distinction between myself and the things happening. It is only when ‘I’ want something, respond to something, believe something, decide to do something, that ‘I’ suddenly appear. This can be seen directly through experience with enough practice at just being.

This insight is perfectly compatible with memetics. In most people the selfplex is constantly being reinforced. Everything that happens is referred to the self, sensations are referred to the observing self, shifts of attention are attributed to the self, decisions are described as being made by the self, and so on. All this reconfirms and sustains the selfplex, and the result is a quality of consciousness dominated by the sense of ‘I’ in the middle – me in charge, me responsible, me suffering. The effect of one–pointed concentration is to stop the processes that feed the selfplex. Learning to pay attention to everything equally stops self–related memes from grabbing the attention; learning to be fully in the present moment stops speculation about the past and future of the mythical T. These are tricks that help a human person (body, brain and memes) to drop the false ideas of the selfplex. The quality of consciousness then changes to become open, and spacious, and free of self. The effect is like waking up from a state of confusion – or waking from the meme dream (Blackmore in press).

This kind of concentration is not easily learned. Some people are naturals and can do it relatively quickly, but for most people it takes
many years of practice. One of the problems is motivation – it is hard to practise consistently just because someone else tells you this is a better way to live. This is where science can help. If our scientific understanding of human nature leads us to doubt the inner self, the soul, the divine creator, or life after death, that doubt can provide the motivation to look directly into experience; to try living without a false sense of self or false hope. Science and spirituality are often opposed but they should not be.

I have described these practices as being done for a few minutes while sitting quietly, but can all of life be lived that way? I think so, but the results are somewhat unnerving. If I genuinely believe that there is no ‘I’ inside, with free will and conscious deliberate choice, then how do I decide what to do? The answer is to have faith in the memetic view; to accept that the selection of genes and memes will determine the action and there is no need for an extra ‘me’ to get involved. To live honestly, I must just get out of the way and allow decisions to make themselves.

I say the result is unnerving because at first it is odd to observe that actions happen whether or not ‘I’ will them. I used to have two possible routes home, the main road and the prettier but slower lanes. As I drove up to the junction I was often torn by indecisiveness. How could I decide? Which would I enjoy most? Which would be
best
? One day I suddenly realised that ‘I’ didn’t have to decide. I sat there, paying attention. The lights changed, a foot pressed the pedal, a hand changed gear, and the choice was made. I certainly never went straight on into the stone wall or bang into another car. And whichever way I went was fine. As time went on I found that more and more decisions were like this. It brought a great sense of freedom to let so many decisions alone.

You do not
have
to try to do anything or agonise about any decision. Let us suppose you are in the bath and the water is beginning to get cold. Do you get out now, or snuggle under the water a bit longer? Er … um. This is a trivial decision but, like getting out of bed in the morning, can colour your life. Knowing there is no real self to choose and no free will, you can only reflect that this body either will or will not get up, and indeed it does. Getting up decisively turns out not to be a matter of self–control and will–power, but of letting the false self get out of the way, and the decisions make themselves. The same is true of more complicated decisions; the brain may turn over the possibilities, argue the case one way or the other, come down on one side or other, but all of this can be done without, in addition, the false idea that someone inside is doing it. Rather the whole process seems to do itself.

Desires and hopes and preferences are probably the most difficult to deal with – I hope he’ll get here in time, I must pass that exam, I hope I’ll
live to a ripe old age and get rich and famous, I want the
strawberry
one. All these hopes and desires are based on the idea of an inner self who must be kept happy, and their occurrence feeds the selfplex. So one trick is just to meet them all with a refusal to get involved. If there is no self then there is no point hoping or wishing for things for the sake of someone who does not exist. All these things are in another moment, not now. They do not matter when there is no one for them to matter to. Life really is possible without hope.

The result of this way of living seems somewhat counter–intuitive; that people become more decisive rather than less. On a second look this is not so surprising after all. From the memetic point of view the selfplex is not there to make the decisions, or for the sake of your happiness, or to make your life easier; it is there for the propagation of the memes that make it up. Its demolition allows more spontaneous and appropriate action. Clever thinking brains, installed with plenty of memes, are quite capable of making sound decisions without a selfplex messing them up.

A terrifying thought now raises its head. If I live by this kind of truth -without a self that takes responsibility for its actions, then what of morality? Surely, some would say, this kind of living is a recipe for selfishness and wickedness, for immorality and disaster. Well is it? One of the effects of this way of living is that you stop inflicting your own desires on the world around you and on the people you meet. This alone can mean quite a transformation.

Claxton describes the effect of giving up the illusion of a self in control. ‘The thing that doesn’t happen, but of which people are quite reasonably scared, is that I get worse. A common elaboration of the belief that control is real… is that I can, and must control “myself”, and that unless I do, base urges will spill out and I will run amok.’ Luckily, he goes on, the premise is false. ‘So the dreaded mayhem does not happen. I do not take up wholesale rape and pillage and knocking down old ladies just for fun.’ (Claxton 1986, p. 69). Instead, guilt, shame, embarrassment, self–doubt, and fear of failure ebb away and I become, contrary to expectation, a better neighbour.

In fact, we could reasonably have had faith in this from our understanding of memetics and of meme–driven altruism. Also, if it is true that the inner self is a memeplex and its control is illusory, then surely living a lie cannot be morally superior to accepting the truth. But if the self is a memeplex and can be dismantled, then what is left when it is gone? There is a human being, body, brain and memes, that behaves according to the environment it finds itself in and the memes it comes across. We know that the genes are responsible for much moral behaviour – they brought
about kin–selection and reciprocal altruism, love of one’s children, one’s partners, and one’s friends. And the memes are responsible for other kinds of sharing and caring. These behaviours will all still go on whether or not there is a selfplex cluttering the mind up as well.

Indeed, the selfplex can be blamed for much of the trouble. By its very nature the selfplex brings about self–recrimination, self–doubt, greed, anger, and all sorts of destructive emotions. When there is no selfplex, there is no concern about the future of my inner self- whether people like me or whether I did the ‘right’ thing or not – because there is no real ‘I’ to care about. This lack of self–concern means that you (the physical person) are free to notice other people more. Compassion and empathy come naturally. It is easy to see what another person needs, or how to act in a given situation, if there is no concern about a mythical self to get in the way. Perhaps the greater part of true morality is simply stopping all the harm that we normally do, rather than taking on any great and noble deeds; that is, the harm that comes from having a false sense of self.

Memetics thus brings us to a new vision of how we might live our lives. We can carry on our lives as most people do, under the illusion that there is a persistent conscious self inside who is in charge, who is responsible for my actions and who makes me me. Or we can live as human beings, body, brain, and memes, living out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and environment, in the knowledge that that is all there is. Then we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free – not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel.

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