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his personal change guide shows you how to change your life by understanding your family-scripts, life-scripts and limiting beliefs.
 emes are learned attitudes or behaviors, decisions and beliefs which are the basis for scripts.
emes determine how you think, how you act, who you are, your self-esteem, your motivation in life, your kinds of success.
 elcome! I would like to introduce you to the idea that you have meme-driven life-scripts that that create an Everyday Magic that makes life magically consistent. Memes act like spells that make us do the same things again and again or get in the same situations over and over.
I wrote this book after observing many people go through various therapies, become happy and well adjusted without having their life structure change. They ended up with the same kind of relationships, same job, same economic situation, and same apparent destiny.
Come explore another dimension of life-change!"
Ken Renshaw
A Direct Approach to Changing Life-Scripts and Limiting Beliefs
About the book
his book is a direct approach to finding out why your life is the way it is. Unlike other books on personal transformation or personal change you may have read, Ken Renshaw’s book builds the idea of meme-driven behavior from basics. “Everyday Magic: the Power of Memes,” guides you in finding the core attitudes and beliefs that shape your life. Ken Renshaw explains how we acquire memes and gives case history examples. He provides exercises and questions to guide you through your personal change process of understanding the memes that make you who you are.
The book explains how to identify simple memes and expands the search to cultural memes. It then gives ten case history examples of how people perpetuate life patterns and roles. The book shows how our attitudes toward others are taught to us by parents and how we constrain our lives to be like our parents. The author points out that even the most loving and exemplary parents carry some memes that are out of date and need to be revised or discarded.
In eight eight additional case histories, the author then shows how some people live a metaphor of their parents’ or other influential peoples’ lives. For example, one woman, whose father was an irresponsible Army private, lived an irresponsible life as a hair dresser. Her life was not a literal copy of her father’s–she was not in the Army–but her life was one of irresponsibility, like her father’s.
The author describes the Sisyphus life pattern where people play the games of life to lose. He shows how this can be a subtle family pattern communicated from generation to generation. You can take the “Sisyphus Test” to see if you have any of these tendencies.
The last section of the book, entitled “Changing Your Life,” shows you how to deal with all the memes and life patterns you have identified in the first part of the book. The author shows how you can compare your life with your parents’ lives through the Rosetta Stone Technique and decide how much of their life pattern you wish to live.
The author has added a lot of humor and made the book easy reading. Anyone who even lightly reads this book will undoubtedly identify memes they want to change. Those who do the exercises will find personal change change in their lives. Everyone will profit from understanding how memes shape our lives. We all have attitudes, beliefs and behaviors we want to change. This book shows us how to make this personal change.
Click here to read Chapter 1.
Where the Meme-of-a-Meme Comes From
he word meme is a relatively new technical jargon word from the field of Sociology. You won’t find it in regular dictionaries. However, if you do an internet search on meme, you will get about three million hits. Most of the hits will be academic resources.
Dictionary.com gives the following definition of meme:
A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
It is generally recognized that Richard Dawkins of Oxford University coined the word in 1976 in his book "The Selfish Gene" He said Darwinian evolution has three processes: replication, variation and selection. The child replicates the genes of the parent and replicates the behavior they learn from the parent. Variation is caused by imperfections in copying the genes and inaccuracies in copying the learned behaviors. Some genes and learned behaviors survive better than others in the process of natural selection. Dawkins called these learned behaviors memes. Genes and memes were the units of what was communicated from generation to generation.
However, Susan Blackmore wrote an article entitled The Power of Memes in the October, 2000 Scientific American. She said: “Behaviors and ideas copied from person to person by imitation–memes–may have forced human genes to make us what we are today.” Her article also follows the idea of memes as evolutionary instruments. In that year she and Richard Dawkins coauthored, "The Meme Machine"
The concept of a meme has itself evolved. The web Meme Electronic Newsletter (memex.org/meme.html) has a definition of meme at the top of each issue:
“meme: (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word ‘memetics,’ a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.”
The meme is also being considered as a unit of cultural evolution. Peter Downes of the University of Alberta wrote an article for Firstmonday, the Peer-reviewed Journal of the Internet, His article, Hacking Memes, talks about memes as a force in popular culture.
Richard Brodie has culminated this thinking in his new book, "Virus of the Mind: the Science of the Meme." Brodie gives an overview of the concept of memes, their origins, and their role in current society. He gives an understanding of how others can use memes to influence your behavior, and influence you in commercials and political campaigns. This debate is continued in many places, such as the Meme Machineand Memes.org.
I decided to use the concept of a meme as an attitude, belief or a component building block of a syndrome, a lifestyle, who we are. I define memes as units of our personal culture. If we want to effect personal change, we have to change our memes.
Ken Renshaw's other websites:
Ken Renshaw's book , The Yosemite Adventure of Spotty Bat, a parable about finding one's identity and flight.
Ken Renshaw's website for local nature walks.
Ken Renshaw's website for technical papers.
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