The Meme Machine

180 THE MEME MACHINE
1977). Some people encounter ‘beings’ of no particular religion, but there is no
recorded case in which a religious person has met a deity from a different
religion. Some Christians even meet St. Peter at his pearly gates, while Hindus
are more likely to be budged by Chitragupta who has their names written in his
great book. Americans are likely to go along with the heavenly beings they
meet while Indians are more likely to resist when they meet Yamraj, the King of
the Dead, or his messengers, the Yamdoots, who have come to take them away.
Americans are likely to meet their mothers but Indians rarely encounter female
figures.
The experienced ‘realness’ of the visions leads many people who have them
to reject any naturalistic explanation at all, and in the scientific literature the
debate is dichotomised between those who are convinced that near-death
experiences (NDEs) are evidence of life after death and those, like myself, who
are not (Bailey and Yates 1996). In fact, the experience cannot be evidence of
life after death because all the people who described the experiences were still
alive. Nor can any naturalistic explanation, however full and satisfying, prove
there is no life after death. So the argument is ultimately sterile. But from the
memetic point of view this is not the issue. Instead, we should ask a different
question – why are NDE memes so successful?
The answer is similar to that for abductions. The NDE story serves real
functions. First, there are underlying brain states that predispose certain kinds of
experience when people come close to death and which cry out for explanation.
These are interpreted with the memes available to that person at the time,
whether those memes come from television, science or their religious
upbringing. The classic NDE story also serves another function in reducing fear
of death and providing reassurance about the meaning and purpose of life. Fear
of death is a far more potent motivator than fear of sleep paralysis, and the desire
for life after death an excellent hook for NDE memes. Memes do not need to be
true to be successful.
They do, however, claim to be true. Natural selection has generally equipped
us to choose ideas that are true over those that are false. Our perceptual systems
are designed to provide as accurate a model of the external world as possible.
Our capacity to think and solve problems is designed to give true rather than
false answers, so in general, true memes should thrive better than false ones.
But this provides an opportunity for deception – for truth mimicry. First, false
claims can sneak into memeplexes under the protection of true ones. We might
call this the ‘truth trick’. Second, memes can simply claim to be true – or even
‘The Truth’. So, for example, UFO believers claim that the conspiracy is
suppressing The Truth. NDErs claim to have Seen The Truth with their own