The Meme Machine

194 THE MEME MACHINE
effectively combine special powers with the altruism trick, such as England’s
much-loved grandmotherly medium Doris Stokes who packed her audiences
with clients whom she already knew, and fooled millions (I. Wilson 1987).
Many of those clients were recently bereaved wives, husbands or parents who
gained comfort from Stokes’s messages but who might have coped better with
their grief if they had been helped to accept the reality of death.
I do not mean to imply, from all I have said, that there are no true ideas
anywhere in any religion. The memetic mechanisms I have described would
allow religions to flourish that were based on complete falsehoods and nothing
else, but there may be true ideas embedded in them as well. Just as some
alternative therapies thrive by including a few treatments that work, so religions
may include valid insights as well as misleading myths.
At the heart of many religions lie the mystical traditions, like that found in
the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing or the teachings of Julian of
Norwich in Christianity; the Sufi teachings of Islam; or the stories of
enlightenment in Buddhism. These traditions emphasise direct spiritual
experience which is often ineffable and therefore hard to pass on. In
spontaneous mystical experiences people typically feel they have been given a
glimpse of the world as it really is. They feel that self and other have become
one, the entire universe is as it is, or that everything is oneness and light. These
may indeed be valid insights (I believe they are), but on their own they are not
very successful as memes, and rapidly get overtaken by all the more powerful
religious ideas I have described above.
Buddhism provides a good example. If the stories are to be believed, the
Buddha sat under a tree, with a fervent desire to understand, until finally he
became enlightened. He then taught what he had seen, that everything is empty
of self-nature, that life is unsatisfactory, that suffering comes about through
craving or attachment, and that the cessation of craving leads to freedom from
suffering. He laid down an ethical code of behaviour and taught his disciples to
work out their own salvation with diligence, by calming the mind and practising
attention in every moment. None of this is very comforting. Basically, it means
you are on your own in a fundamentally unsatisfactory world with no one to
help you. If you look to anything at all to try to make it better then you are
caught up in craving and hence suffering. Enlightenment is not something to be
attained; it is simply the giving up of – well everything really. As one of my
students put it ‘I couldn’t bear not to want chocolate. I couldn’t even imagine
not craving chocolate, let alone not craving anything.’
So what happens to difficult ideas like these? Perhaps surprisingly they can