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Old 07-15-2002, 04:04 PM   #8 (permalink)
evad the prophet
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Thanks, Penguin, glad i made ya laugh

At the end there i lost sight of where i was going, but what i was trying to get at was this:
"spiritual awakening" or "enlightenment", whatever you want to call it, is not memetic. This is not something you can learn from someone else, not something you can do by imitation or emulation.
If you consider "self" as a conglomeration of memes seperate from consciousness, then in the transcendent moment as the "self" falls away, it is a cessation of meme replication in your brain, leaving only consciousness that is not memetic and cannot be reduced to, or expressed in memes.
If this is true, it would explain why religion and spirituality seems so crazy to the rational mind, because trying to force something that is not a meme into being a meme just wont work.
For example, concepts like "filled with the Holy Spirit" are meaningless to those who have not been filled, because there can be no replication of a meme in their brain. Invariably what is heard is a lot of empty meaningless nonsense, because the real meaning cannot be expressed through memes.
Anyway this is my theory: Athiests think we are crazy because we really do sound crazy.
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by the rivers of babylon,
there we sat down,
yea, we wept,
when we remembered zion.
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