Social Skills – Integration – The Meditation
by pre.
This week we present our seventh walking meditation. As with the previous six, it’s designed to be listened to while on a short walk, ten minutes or so of listening and thinking along as you stride around your environment. This week the meditation is designed to help you think about the influence of memes on your world and to understand exactly how they work.
While a memetics is, mostly, just a metaphor, we think that a memetic viewpoint on the world is often enlightening and educational. As such, our meditation this month will encourage your to look for memes in the world, to analyse them, see what it is that makes them spread through the social sphere, and to help control which memes you decide to pick up and transmit, and which you reject.
The Meditation
After an initial period of concentrating on your smile, your gait, becoming relaxed and happy and suggestible, the meditation will ask you to look around at your environment, the world through which you are walking.
You will pick some man-made object in your environment. Perhaps discarded packaging for some product, or a building, or a street-sign. If you’re in a less urban environment, perhaps a fence or a road or even a whole field full of crops.
Next you’ll think about the processes involved in making that object. There will be many. In the case of a fence, for example, all the required tree’s will have been found or grown. The trees will have been felled, the wood cut into appropriate shapes. Probably this was done with a band-saw which of course in turn had to be invented, built, operated.
Then you will think about each of these processes, these human skills, and try to imagine how each of them developed. What advantages does that skill bring to the person who is practising it. How does having learned that skill enhance and improve the life of the person who learned it.
Once you’ve thought for a while about how the skill benefits the human who possesses it, you’ll turn your mind around and think instead about how that skill, that meme, was passed on around the human population after it was developed. How it spread. How does this skill, this meme itself, benefit? What qualities about the idea help to encourage the idea to multiply by being copied from one brain to another.
| Guided Meditation File 32 – Social Skills – Memes Backing Music “Overture In D” By T-Zero |
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