The Den

Here's some random, train-of-thought bloggishness for y'all :-)  Definitely more of my inner philosophical thought processes than I've ever posted publically before.

In reading the wikipedia entry about memes , while sipping Saturday morning French Roast at the coffee shop around the corner,  I found myself asking the question "Do memes really exist as 'things' in reality?" My mind immediately went down this trail of thought:

Whether or not memes "exist" in reality is beside the point - it is a non-question, like that of the dog having buddha nature.

Reality Exists, that's all that can be said. Memes are a somewhat successful method of describing a part of reality, a method who's success comes from its consistency with the other parts of reality with which it interacts.

This is precisely what any scientific theory is - a method of describing how reality works, but not reality itself. Successful theories are those descriptions that are consistent with those parts of reality they touch.  Do electrons actually exists in reality the way modern physicists describe them? We can't say either way, and it really doesn't matter (hence the invalidity of the question). What matters is that this description works and is adequately consistent for our purposes that need such a description.

The same is true of "religion" in the common sense of the term - the tenets of which are methods to describe reality in a meaningful way. Many (all?) of the conflicts centered around religion come from a lack of consistency with the perception of reality and with other methods of describing it.

At an even deeper level, the same is true of other social constructs such as "culture", which can be thought of as collections of memes. For example, what makes someone a "good mother" and what are mothers "supposed" to be & do? The culturally based answer is merely a part of a way to describe reality.  And language itself - words, and the ways we combine them, are tools for describing reality, not reality itself, as Shakespeare pointed out when he wrote of the reality of roses.

And from there, our own personal mental and emotional constructs, our "understanding" of ourselves and the world around us, are similar. They are not "real" but they are methods for dealing with the real.

 The error of assuming the that any of these descriptions and descriptive methods are themselves reality, rather than tools for interacting with reality, leads to most, if not all,  of the ills of humanity.

The less-commonly known or understood "mystical" aspects of most organized religions, and other forms of non-religious spirituality, seem to be pointing all this out and recommending ways to break through the deception that these "tools for being in reality" are reality themselves, even down to the deepest levels.