(More comment into the thought about thought). The link above is to the comment stream in which these responses arise:
#1 Beam me up Scottie!
Caroline says:
#2 Subconscious Associative Routines
There is an aspect of mind running subconscious that receives impressions of association and retains them. In its positive effect it leaves attention free to enjoy and embrace the physical reality experience without having to attend every detail of its basic orientation, and so it holds certain aspects or fundamental routines in place as an autonomous conditioning - triggered by association - as a conditioned sense of thought and reality-response. In its negative sense it will just as readily hold and respond with negative conditionings reinforcing and witnessing to a sense of fearful, invalid and threatened self - that is then auto-masking with all kinds of social and personal habit pattern.
Once a pathway of association is imprinted by repeated act of attention and reaction it runs as part of 'who you are - and may seem to have a will of its own if you seek to change because it won't conform or communicate to coercive or conforming thinking that seeks to invalidate or override it, but rather to a new set of conscious thoughts and responses from a fresh decision - which is an outcome of a true process of communication and not a rebranded makeover of trying to persist in the same behaviour that brings that same unsatisfactory outcome.
As to what is 'in our lives'; Infinite possibility - at least for each within the range of current probability available, and that is not random or happenstance so much as outcomes arising from the use to which we put our mind. I posit you that Everything imaginable already exists as a timeless and infinite Idea - but that the unfolding experiencing of being and discovering it is a freedom of focus and attention in which the individual expressions of the Idea that recognizes Itself through extension as relational communication - is love creating. Now it wont seem like love creating through the lens of the idea of focusing in and identifying with... who you are not. For each of us is a unique vibrational presence that recognizes itself - and enlivens - along the lines and in the particular frequencies that are relevant and resonant to the themes we are exploring as this focus of experience.
What is not given attention, but disregard, fades from non use. While what is - even as a 'negative' attention -is strengthened and reinforced resulting in a negative outcome.
Consciousness responsibility involves re-wakening as consciousness - the true presence of you - from which and as which to accept only what is aligned with the true of you - as an act of true self love. Clearly a habit-pattern is already running of a range of conditionings that effectively run as a place-holder or overlay of strategies of coping with a negatively or fearfully defined sense of self - for we all meet lovelessness coming into the human conditioning that then covers over a direct feeling and knowing of being for a complex and convoluted masking of social demand.
Because, truly, one is not IN or OF the world, but consciousness in which the experience of the world is held in focus, one man be someone who has never had the past that is not being lived from now. For the personality structure is not a fixed or abiding 'you' but a construct of definitions, feelings thoughts and behaviours through which you participate in shared being. It is a SENSE of disconnection arising from identifying exclusively with the personality structure. This occurs as readily from attempting to conform or coerce it either by inflation or limitation.
The simple key is to choose to use what is in our consciousness and experience of the world to serve a truly positive or re-integrative outcome. Simple but so easily overlooked or neglected in an already running reaction taken as 'self'.
So the willingness to pause and listen or feel for true desire is not to conform to any structure of idea as to how or what love or you should be - but open to what you are being within a willingness of more clearly aligning with what is moving in you. The fear and hatred of fighting believed evil keeps this willingness in such denial as to cage or kill it.
#3 Casting Santa or Satan
The implication that we have no choice whether or not to have Santa in our lives is false, & would be frightening if true.
Santa or or indeed Satan has the roles and functions you give it for you. Imagination grounded in integrity is not a runaway train crash. Who you are not can play a very clear role in the recognition and acceptance of who you are. When the forms of Life are mimicked and manipulated as if they are life - they become false presents that may look glamorous or powerful but are hollow packaging, and gripping so tight to the mask that it becomes you does not add depth but renders everything superficial. The apparent escape from depths in which fears lie hidden plays out as the power to assert and define everything cause-less - so as to remove or conceal all evidences that point back to the feared exposure in which such 'power' is 'lost' to a true account.
To persist in what we don't want as if we do want it is to actively deny our self for the sake of a perceived and believed gain - or to avoid a perceived or believed loss. Perception and belief have to be held to true account or the runaway train crash continues. As long as we are trying to steer out of a skid we have no traction - but the moment we steer into it - a reconnection with the road restores a sense of knowing how to meet the condition and respond with it rather than overriding it and losing communication. The principle here is sound but living this willingness consistently is perhaps the remit of the new epoch - for those who are focusing in such probability. The runaway imagination of action-reaction without true acceptance for consciousness may be a default choice for those who feel more aligned with persisting in a dream of power over Life - or indeed the escape from life that a withholding of living presence paints it as.
#4 Behind the Memes
Roger Nadal says:
I think a Google Images search of Susan Blackmore tells you everything you need to know about the agenda behind “memes.”
Although I feel the agenda behind the idea of memes - I have my own - so I can use them - if I want - to serve my agenda. Language is not frozen.
Top down memes are injected and even astroturfed into the collective narrative of those who suckle unmindfully. True grass root ideas and movements are subverted to serve power agenda. But that's someone else's agenda - not mine. I'm living my life - not theirs.
If unloving agenda comes into my life - its my opportunity to use it to locate and address the correspondence - which is a nice term that means both a message and a resonance of frequency.
I love language that opens many facets at once within what it is to behold existence.
Language reflects and generates the mind that uses it. So use it on purpose to hold meanings that serve your joy in life - or abuse yourself and wonder what hit you!
Michael Burns says:I don't have my own 'memes' I have my own purpose.
...Query: could you say, gives us one of your best personal memes?
Far from the idea of self forming, self existing, self replicating ideas, I feel for the movement of being in which and of which everything is - and so I look and listen there, rather than run in loops of seemingly autonomous thinking. Movement is a time and notion word - but I mean the threshold of the movement of desire and attention. Do I therefore write anything - or am I moved and willing to embody what moves me? Insofar as the words I use are chosen or accepted to feel attuned to the meaning felt - its all poesy.
If I joined in the idea of memes it would be as a way into reflecting something of the nature of consciousness as an observation rather than as 'more thinking'. The 'me-meme' thinks its thought is consciousness, while it operates to usurp and deny consciousness. This pattern is readily observable in others... perhaps as a device of not noticing that we are not really beholding others but running a thinking that self-reinforces or 'me-memes' without really hearing, seeing or feeling anything.
That thinking is invoked to rationalise such thinking and justify the withholding and withdrawal of presence from communication is instead of reflecting to the heart's knowing.
In computing terms its a loop - and in processing a task, a hang, but its conflicted thought can crash or demand a force quit or reboot. But where in computing terms the operator intervenes, in awakening is a noticing or rising of awareness that is not thinking - but observing and feeling thought. This is upstream - and if the term 'me' is used here, it refers to prior and pervading qualities to whatever is 'going on' - simply because they are your current experience of existence itself rather than identifiction within a model. Existence itself is both and. No matter what levels or dimensions - there is always another in which the others are embraced. From certain perspectives existence looks like a mathematical al geometry or meming of unfolding idea - but that is one facet of an Infinite Crystal - and so it doesn't need denial - but nor does it merit exclusivity - unless of course you are moved in your desire to explore that perspective experience for your own reasons - and to do that you have to temporarily deny others. Your experience is yours because it is your gift to the whole - but from denial perspectives it will seem your experience is of denial and coercion - being run by robot thinking that seems more real that you are. Now that is not so far removed from Earth experience today is it? Some sort of loveless machine thinking that has no feeling for anything and only mimics emotionality as manipulative ploy. It feeling my be rage against a sense of lost perfection that life inherently brings to the worship of dead concept.
I see Consciousness as the Projection and Reflection of Idea - and so whatever is held in the focus of an energy of desire and intent is automatically and instantly reflected. The idea of receiving different from what is given, is the idea of a gap in which time replaces or 'frames' eternity, and in the gap a sense of self in power to fragment negatively or segregatively, as a forgetting in which true power is lost to the gap. While an illusion of power as the sense of separation from Life fulfils itself in death or 'power over Life'. However, you get prompts to check in that you are in fact one with your choice because separation from Life is not actual - or there would be no basis upon which to have the experience. Thoughts never leave the mind that thinks them but the attempt to get rid of or deny judged thought by putting it OUT - is actually the way to KEEP them. Hence the 'autonomy' of feeding the very situation that you believe you are escaping. It runs indefinitely through whatever form-changes until there is a breakdown in capacity to believe it.
The belief in the need to escape in form is denying the rising of perspective. Everything depends on the perspective from which it is perceived or beheld or created. Then add to the mix that consciousness shift perspective billions of times per second and that the illusion of changing in graduated steps is just one facet of representing the idea of experiencing the nature of creation in slow motion - so to speak... where in truth every instant is a perfect creation - but to feel this is not within the mind of the gap in its power to judge all things to confirm itself.
Therefore I don't seek for myself but open within relationship - because the former is the loss of power to truly feel and know Life here and now. Not to think about life or think about now.
It isn't more or better thinking, its the release of thinking in shift to feeling. Then if thinking serves, it is given. But it isn't accorded the role of running the show! Nor the burden.
As an informational portal it held no value for you, so – of course – you put it behind you. But noticing what bothers me can open a deeper quality of insight than the story on the page. And perspective upon something uncovered within myself means I truly put something behind me rather than meeting it again (or meting it out again), and again because the insight wants to ‘come home’.
Isn’t it so that we are each in the specific and unique configuration of who we are currently accepting ourselves to be – and learning from it? Perhaps learning is an eventual outcome of transformation and I should rather say ‘experiencing the fruit of it’.
I wondered at your quote of Susan Blackmore’s and came up with my own offering:
This sense of disconnected thought begets itself as the idea of un-feeling memes.
A wish-fulfilment for idea of acquired immunity, untroubled by relational communication from the unfit. Vax them with memes to undermine capacity for receptivity and response!
Automata to be bio-technically upgraded or replaced with AI upgrades.
Beam me up Scottie!