The Meme Machine

OUT OF THE MEME RACE 243
events gives way to nothing but change, and the idea of a self who is viewing the
scene seems to fall away.
Another way is to pay attention to everything equally. This is an odd practice
because things begin to lose their ‘thingness’ and become just changes. Also, it
throws up the question of who is paying attention (Blackmore 1995). What
becomes obvious, in doing this task, is that attention is always being
manipulated by things outside yourself rather than controlled by you. The
longer you can sit still and attend to everything, the more obvious it becomes
that attention is dragged away by sounds, movements, and most of all thoughts
that seem to come from nowhere. These are the memes fighting it out to grab
the information-processing resources of the brain they might use for their
propagation. Things that worry you, opinions that you hold, things you want to
say to someone, or wish you hadn’t – these all come and grab the attention. The
practice of paying equal attention to everything disarms them and makes it
obvious that you never did control the attention; it controlled – and created –
you.
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 reconciles 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 ‘I’.
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