Memes and Karma

Since we've been talking about reincarnation a bit lately, I've had some correspondence from a couple of listeners who have wondered about this idea of karma because, as I say, it's your karma and your meme bundle that influence your next incarnation, or even your escape from this material plane and back up to the ethereal plane. So I would like to explain today what I mean by both memes and by karma. Your karma is one of those huge topics that people can write dissertations on. In my Simple Explanation way of looking at things, what I do is I go to the meta level of all of the smaller concepts. Meta means above. So when I simplify I'm not dumbing down, I'm rising above. It's really the opposite direction. The more profound a concept is, the smaller and simpler it can be stated. When I was for a time an academic at the university level and I would go to conferences where people are expected to present their papers and, you know, these research papers that are generally presented at conferences, they aren't really generated by the person in order to advance knowledge in the field. Yeah, that's the stated purpose, sure. But the real purpose is to get promotions and to get tenure—things like that. And you're required to produce a certain number of papers and present and publish every year. That's what's called publish or perish. So, when I would go to these conferences and listen to people's papers, it was like, Heavens, it's just a bunch of big words strung together very tightly, of interest, probably, only to the person that wrote it, and usually meaning nothing. How does that expression by Shakespeare go? It's a quote from Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.” Well, yeah, that pretty much sounds like it. That's some wisdom from old Will Shakespeare. So I think it was the last conference I went to and it was my last because it's like, what's the point of this? It was extremely disappointing to me. I had a satori of the meaninglessness of this sort of scholastic research. That's why I don't try to write in a manner that exemplifies scholasticism and intelligence, and ohh aren't I smart. That is not my goal whatsoever. I'm actually against that kind of writing and that kind of speaking. I'm trying to simplify all of the gobbledygook, or, as my brother Billy has always called it, argle bargle, down to its core, down to the actual meaning. And especially when we're talking about gnostic insights. What we have to think of is, if this is a consciousness that comes before even our material cosmos, certainly before humanity, certainly before academia, what is the message from the consciousness that can come to any of the 2nd order powers? See, you don't need a college degree in order to understand gnosis. What you need is an ability to reason; to open your eyes and see what is going on. To anticipate consequences. This is what is needed to discern gnosis. When I started the Gnostic Insights podcast a couple of years ago, I posted a couple of articles about memes, and I've noticed by looking at the stats that hardly anybody likes to listen to them. So that is why I'm explaining it to you today and then tying it into karma. A meme, as I use the term, doesn't refer to those cute posters and those funny saying. A meme is any unit of information. And just as a gene is the smallest expression of an organism, a meme is the smallest possible expression of information. Now, we can put memes together and make meme chords and even big meme bundles because memes often go together. So when you consider something like, well, for example, I often use the expression of a cup. What is a cup? Right. The notion of cup is a meme. And what do you think of when you think of the meme of cup? You think of a vessel with a handle, and that is usually what we drink our coffee or tea out of. But the particular expression of that cup meme varies in everyone's mind. My cup meme is expressed by this coffee cup I'm looking at right now and it's got cute little cartoons and kitty cats on it. But your meme might be a hammered brass demitasse, right? Or your meme for cup might be a measuring cup if you're a chef, and it will be one of those clear Pyrex cups with markings on it, but it's still the same concept of cup—what Plato would have called cupness up in the land of forms. So that's what a meme is. Memes can express any kind of concept, so you can take any larger concept, even such as one like justice. And what does justice imply? Google tells me that the definition of justice is the meme that people get what they deserve. OK, that itself is a meme. What does that mean? What constitutes deserving, influenced by a wide range of fields and viewpoints, such as the concepts or memes of ethics, rightness based on morality, rational thinking, law, religion, equity, and fairness. Well, those are big memes, aren't they? So you could definitely spend a lot of time just trying to define the meme of justice. So anyway, that's what I mean when I talk about memes MEME meme. And the gnostic gospel that we talk about here and at Gnostic Insights, that's a bundle of memes relating to this Christian gnosis. So there's a meme bundle for the Father, a meme bundle for the Son, a meme bundle for the ALL and the Fullness. There's a meme bundle for the demiurge. A meme bundle for the fall, a meme bundle for Christ. A meme bundle for virtue and a different meme bundle for vices. Et cetera, et cetera. People don't generally recognize that they're holding on to these various meme bundles. One way you could talk about a big overarching meme bundle is a worldview. And what we're talking about here at Gnostic Insights is a gnostic Christian meme. And that is an ideology because it's so huge. Different religions have their own meme bundles, and generally the follower of those religions hold on to the memes that are promoted by that religion. And it's their differences between their meme bundles that define the boundaries of that religion. Same thing with political parties. Same thing with cultural subgroups and cultures as a whole. We share memes in common with certain people and by the way, the more memes you share in common with someone, generally you like that person all the more. We like people we share memes with. We distrust or don't understand people that hold different memes than we do. So what I've been teaching here and at Gnostic Insights is that the meme bundle or the ideology that we hold determines our thoughts, our moods, our emotions, our actions. And when we pass away out of this material plane and into that in between space, the memes that we hold at the time that we pass away determine our experience in the in between place and our experience of coming back to this Earth or going on to the ethereal plane. Evangelical Christians, of course, hold the meme bundle that only people who have accepted Christ, and in particular Jesus Christ, before they die, are going to go straight up to the ethereal plane. But where the gnostic Christianity differs from that of the evangelical Christianity is that it must logically be the case that if a person passes away from this material plane, i.e., dies without knowing Christ, without having accepted redemption, the Evangelical Christian would say that person's never going to heaven because they died without salvation. But the gnostic Christian says no. Everybody is eventually going to the ethereal plane because we all come from the ethereal plane. We are sparks off of the originating consciousness. We embody the Father, the Son, and the Fullness within these material bodies that we are walking around in, and when our material body stops functioning, our soul, our spirit, our Self and our Ego, are popped loose from being tied to the material plane, and we rise up to this other dimension or realm. And it is at that… This is a public episode. 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