An aquarium of ideas:
I like to think I’m a rational man, others may or may not agree, but nevertheless this is how I see me. I haven’t always thought as I do mind you, as a younger man I gave truck to Ideas, that now I see as, although still of interest, ludicrous.
I like books, and I’ve read quite a lot them. Tons of fiction and poetry, as well as a lot of non-fiction including more than a passing interest in science, in school initially, then in books ranging from “A Brief history of Time” and “The Ascent of Man” to name just two. Mostly these days, I keep up with science, by way of a magazine called “New Scientist” which I’m going to consider as much the same as the reading of books as to make no difference, at least as far as the transferral of memes is concerned.
Also, I have though, it’s fair to say, read, and considered, even as reasonable from time to tome, mostly in my past, a lot of the more esoteric types of literature. Covering such topics as, philosophy, religion, and all manner of mysticism, taking in the likes of Alistair Crowley, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Karl Jung, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Hume, Berkley and Descartes, to name just some of the luminaries, to whom I’ve given an interest. As well as reading books, like “The Bible”, “The Koran”, “The Torah” the Tibetan and Egyptian, books of the dead, Homers “Odyssey” and “Iliad” and The Epic of Gilgamesh, in fact all manner of mythologies and legends, I’ve thought about gods and God, and pored over the words of many a great thinker.
The thing you notice, you see, when you look at all this stuff, this grand human endeavour, when you really examine the products of this urge to explain all, this input into ourselves, all this sensory data, “What the fuck is that all about?!” has been the collective cry, that resounds through out history, you inevitably find yourself seeing bits of it, that, look an awful lot like other bits of it. You start to see all the archetypes of explanation, gel together, telling similar if not identical stories.
Take, for example the Egyptian gods, the Jewish patriarchs and Chaldean kings. These three lists of names share striking correlations.
These three lists of people seem to highlight different aspects of humanity, Lets take Enoch, for example, who was seen as a builder, he corresponds with both the Egyptian Hor and the Chaldean Ædorachus, both builders. In fact the builder motif comes up at least once more with the repeat of the seventh Egyptian god Hor, here comparable to Noah and Xisuthrus, both also builders this time of boats, another parallel between the three lists is that they are all, also, presented as lists of seven.
You see these coincidences cropping up all over human history, Ideas that share, if not completely the same themes down to, the beginning middle and end of stories, then elements written on different continents will correspond remarkably with each other. A good example here is the flood Myth.
Analysis, not mine obviously I’ve just read other peoples, of some 600 individual flood traditions, from across the globe, reveals a widespread concurrence on essential points: the prior corruption of mankind, a flood warning unheeded by the masses, a survival vessel, or high mountain where refuge is taken, the preservation of up to eight people with representative animal life, the sending forth of a bird to determine the suitability of re-emerging land, significance in the rainbow, descent from a mountain, and the re-population of the whole earth from a single group of survivors. There are even more specific cases where names are uncannily close. Take the name Noah, itself, which is especially remarkably persistent throughout the world. Particularly so when you consider the ultimate language differences between peoples, and the extreme local distortions which developed in flood legends. Yet the name seems to pop up as the hero in all of them virtually unchanged in such isolated places as Hawaii where he was called Nu-u, in the Sudanese myths we find Nuh, in China Nu-Wah and his family found refuge atop a mountain, the Amazon region has Noa, in Phrygia it’s Noe and among the Hottentots we have Noh and Hiagnoh.
You will often hear people citing Buddhist ideology’s likeness to quantum mechanics. Or how akin the stories of Orsiris and the much later Jesus Christ are, they both conquer a devil heal the sick and, in one coincidental meme, both raise the dead but are these likenesses purely coincidental? Maybe not, perhaps they are simply the same stories gathering embellishment and variance with travel through space and time?
With examination you see how these memes might travel, across oceans and continents, ideas and memes merging or simply consuming each other like badly matched fish in a tank, and this is what my thoughts are and how they are represented in my mind, as a vast glass tank, a meme tank, where I merge the Ideas around imagining them as little families of strangely teated fish, see mother Judaism with her children Christianity and Islam, sucking at her breasts, Christianity herself has a litter of offspring feeding from her many nippled bosoms, Catholicism, Protestantism, Jehovah’s witness’ism, quaker’ism Mormonism, she’s a profligate little meme that Christianity, With a host of little teat attachments gulping them down hungrily and excreting them as subtly different Ideas, new memes born into my tank of meme soup.
I used to think of my Meme Tank as a guard against mistaking the map for the territory, that’s what people do you see, they make these maps of life they use to get around the actual landscape of existence, which is at least, possibly a little understood by us, though it remains largely unknown. This is basically what the maps are for, to fill in the large gaps left by what we don’t know, and often these maps serve us well, so well in fact, that people tend to start to think, often developing this belief over hundreds of years, that the map is actually the territory itself, sometimes these cartographically led travellers will come across, others with different maps. doing something in a way that is different from theirs, and they might say something like.
“Hang on there, lets see your map?”
They might then look at the other map and notice that it is different from the one they have, so they’ll say.
“Hey, your map’s wrong?”
The other map users may in turn say, something along the lines of.
“Really? let’s see yours?”.
And of course they then see where that map is wrong, and will probably retort along the lines.
“Right, I see what’s up here, it’s your map that’s wrong”.
They might stand about awkwardly for a few moments before they, inevitably, fight. Dangerous things maps, look at the wrong one, in the wrong place and you’ll find yourself falling over a cliff, or drowning in quicksand, but use the right map, in the right place, and you’ll find you get most of the things you need, food shelter and all sorts of things will be laid at your feet happily, get it wrong, and they’ll stab you.
Of course, now I realise that my meme tank itself is just a map, a useful tool for navigating life’s highways and byways. It’s a map That represents an approach to life I seldom take seriously any more. These days I think I’m a rationalist, an athiest and a sceptic and if I’ve learnt anything from life, then it’s this;
Taking yourself and your map seriously is a big mistake, leave that to other people, it’s best and most fulfilling to make light of life, by which I don’t mean be uncaring, or taking the pain suffering and misfortune of others without due consideration, we will always need empathy and understanding which is why it’s still ok to take the piss out of people, not to harshly and seldom to their face mind you.
Just remember that you are standing on a giant ball of rock, that has been here for billions of years and will be here for billions more, you and I and our silly little maps will be here for merely a fraction of that, so whatever else you find yourself having to do, try and have a little laugh now and again.
Please return to your soup..
