Memetic Hinduism

“Every epic needs a hero. The mind will do.”
—E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature

Memetic Hinduism is a unique movement that seeks to synthesize science and religion into an ideology that can provide hope and meaning to human existence. The following is meant as merely an introductory glance at this hybrid faith. For the rationale behind the existence of Memetic Hinduism, see “Why Memetic Hinduism?” For the answers Memetic Hinduism offers to life’s biggest questions, take a look at the FAQ.

Human minds have always been tantalized with the fleeting intimation of some vast, inchoate force beside which they are dwarfed, an unspeakably ancient and expansive repository of knowledge and power. Throughout human history, we have attempted to give a name to this larger sphere we sense ourselves to be part of. It has been our desire to personalize it, make it all-powerful and all-knowing, the source of our happiness and misfortune. However, though something majestic and transcendent does in fact exist, worthy of our admiration and dedication, it is not what we have for milennia believed. Brahman, as Memetic Hindus name it, is not an omnipotent, omniscient being… it is a virtual fount, the foundation and cause of all sentience, and, paradoxically, its ultimate goal.

In the life of every human over the course of countless generations of history, bits of information (called memes) from the outside world are fed into the brain starting at early childhood. Settling into the physical architecture of the brain, this information arranges itself into thousands of mental subsystems. Taken altogether, these trillions of memes form a sort of virtual soul, what we call an átman. The átman is a subset of all existing human memes, the ever-growing noosphere of our planet, encoded in our brains, books, art, computers, and so on. The noosphere is forms part of all the information in the universe, a collective we name Brahman.

Brahman therefore is largely synonymous with the soul or átman of all sentient beings. The átman of each human being creates for itself an imperfect jiva, a persona or self that, being a grainy reflection of a snippet of the larger absolute, feels isolated, cut off, orphaned. Sentient beings must recognize the source of their own consciousness and endeavor to expand its circumference through study and unity with others— such attempts are part of our Dharma, that set of ethical principles that facilitate our stewarding and increasing the breadth of the noosphere. Living according to dharma entails good karma (actions)… bad karma causes dissatisfaction with our existences and slows the advancement of sentience. One major individual goal of a sentient being is mukti— liberation from the illusion of duality, from the reification of the strange loops we call our selves. We become able to see ourselves as a swirl within the larger noosphere. The confluence of memes in our particular loop is important, but it is always part of the larger flow of Brahman. Mukti allows us to expand ourselves and through novel permutations of memes add to the noosphere. Another goal, coming much later in life, is the unifying of one’s often conflicted átman and its integration into Brahman, a process called samadhi.

The larger goal of all sentient beings is to expand Brahman to the point that it overtakes whatever death —entropy or collapse— the universe faces. Contrary to much of human myth, humanity is becoming progressively better, wiser and happier with each successive age, and the trend is toward a golden age, not away from it. The evolution and progression of sentience occurs during the Mahayuga, a series of epochs spanning the billions of years from the moment sentience first arose in the universe to Nirvana (or the Omega Point), when collective sentience throughout the universe reaches apotheosis. When every noosphere melds with the universe itself, harnessing its energy for infinite computational capacity, sentient beings will have, in effect, become god.

The increasing complexity encouraged by natural selection has been moving us toward that moment of apotheosis, Nirvana, Omega Point, and now that memetic evolution has outstripped biological, it is incumbent upon those creatures who have attained sentience to continue this “complexification.” Life is not a zero-sum game. We will survive, we will evolve, we will learn to appreciate one another and together reverse the arrow of causality. This is our faith, this is what gives up hope, gives meaning to our lives.