Those of you who have read my book know that I’m not a big fan of how we generally think about memes, because the assumption is that ideas are things that can be passed from person to person without disruption, but in practice communication is much messier. The strange thing about the meme concept is that it seems to be a self-generating reality that acts very much like a meme– on the surface it appears recursive. Yet what I have noticed is that depending on your view, memes have different meanings. Some look at them as evil, ideological code, others as benevolent marketing tools, others as a kind evolutionary mechanism.
I’ve been searching for a way to work with the concept of the meme without adhering to its literal definition. As usual, the breakthrough tends to come from outside the memesphere, in this case from a Buddhist writer who talks about thoughts being like flames. Read on:
Each of us has a switching mechanism in our mind that allows us to move from one state of mind to another in an instant… In fact, the surprising thing is not that we have the ability to switch our mind state, but that we have the ability to maintain a mind state, to continue a thought for more than an instant. Thoughts are constantly falling away, yet somehow we are able to maintain coherent ideas. Moreover we have the facility to remember, which is a miraculous phenomenon if each and every moment the world is completely new. What is it that is remembering and what is there to remember? The image that the Buddhists use to work with this paradox is the idea of a flame being passed from candle to candle. We cannot say the flame is the same from one candle to the next, yet each is dependent upon the one just before it. Not only does this account for the potential transmission of thought but also for memory, because each flame has a quality of the original flame as far back as one wishes to travel.
David A. Cooper, Silence, Simplicity and Solitude
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