Your Lingering Early Programming – “Excuses Begone”
In addition to our genetic makeup, the other big excuse that most of us use to justify unhappiness, poor health, and lack of success is the family and cultural conditioning we’ve been programmed with. To that end, there’s a fascinating area of inquiry known as memetics, which deals with the mind and is analogous to the relationship of genetics to the body. So as the basic unit of genetics is the gene, the basic unit of memetics is the meme (rhymes with “team”). Yet unlike an atom or an electron, the meme has no physical properties. According to Richard Brodie, in his work Virus Of The Mind, it’s ‘a thought, belief, or attitude in your mind that can spread to and from other people’s minds.
Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist who coined the word meme, describes the process in his book, The Selfish Gene. My understanding is that memetics originates from the word mimic, meaning to observe and copy behavior. This behavior is repeated and passed on and on the mimicking process goes. The key point is this: transferring an idea, attitude, or belief to others is done mentally. We won’t find memes by turning up the magnification of any microscope – they pass on from mind to mind via hundreds of thousands of imitations. By the age of six or seven, we’ve all been programmed with an endless inventory of memes that act very much like a virus. They aren’t necessarily good or bad; they simple spread easily throughout the population.
Once a meme is in your mind, it can and will subtly influence your behavior. This is one of the ways you acquire a huge category of excuses that keep you in a rut. For example: My memes made me do it! I can’t help it! These ideas (beliefs, attitudes) have been passed on to me from one mind to another for generations, and there’s nothing I can do about the way I think. These memes have been building blocks of my mind, and I can’t deprogram myself from these viruses of the mind that just keep replicating and spreading. These ideas (memes) are so much part of me that it’s impossible to ‘disinfect’ myself from the results of all of these mind viruses.” Every excuse you read about in this book is, in reality, a meme that was once planted in your mind.
(Wayne Dyer)
How exciting is all of this? It shows and explains how it is possible to ‘change your habitual mind’.
The potential to rehabilitate our selves from childhood trauma is huge. As I was walking away from my family I was changing my memes. The selfish gene should really be called the self-loving gene.
This is proof to me that when a mother changes and finds inner empowerment, so do her children.
I intuitively knew that if my mother had taken a strong stance, it would enable her children to follow suit. And I also knew that I didn’t walk alone, but that my children, my daughters especially, stepped in my footprints.
To be the change in this genealogy or memealogy takes huge amounts of will, for you are going up against the folks who raised you, supported you, and who we call family.
In order for you to change your memes you alienate yourself from so many, you become someone they do not know, an enemy in the family. You no longer mimic their thoughts, their beliefs and their actions. You are the renegade.
Seeing the written words that explain how I changed my ‘habitual mind’ astounds me.
This also explain peer pressure, the mimicking factor that you are who you hang with! “Birds of a feather flock together.”
I love that I have a new vocabulary to explain what seemed so hard to articulate, “I changed my memes!”
Wayne pronounces it Meam to rhyme with Team.
I would like to call them ME ME Genes.
The genes of Me!
I M Perfect lady 