Mimotism (Psychology Theory)

Mimotism postulates that living mental organisms (i.e. mimotes or mind-motes) exist in a symbiotic relationship with our mind. The interaction between these organisms with each other and our mind explains the complex and often contradictory human behaviors. It also creates the experience of the ego.

Explaination

Rather than a cohesive entity, the ego is a society of many sub-beings (i.e. mimotes), each of which strives to influence the rest into following its agenda. What appears as the ego is actually the surface manifestation of the interaction between all the mimotes.

The mind is a massively parallel processing unit. Within this processing unit, mimotes are independent "threads" of consciousness dedicated to resolve a specific, human (archetypical) issue. When a strong conjunction of thought, emotion and desire is experienced continously for at least 15 seconds, the mind breaks a part of itself off into a mimote to handle the matter.

For instance, an "embrassment" mimote may contain the following:

  1. Continous feeling of extreme embrassment
  2. Repetitive thoughts (e.g. "I have given a horrible speech!")
  3. Constant desiring to get out of the current situation (e.g. "I wish the ground would open up and swallow me!")

Each mimote has one of the following agendas below, but they employ different approaches to attempt to achieve them. However, they are falliable and may actually create the problem that they seek to avoid.

  1. Seek Happiness: Direct their human hosts to behaviors and pursuits that promote happiness and well being for their hosts.
  2. Avoid Pain: Direct their human hosts to behaviors and pursuits that avoids pain and suffering for their hosts.

Each mimote has triggers for situations, thoughts or emotions which reactivates the original conjunction. Their control over the host strengthens every time the host feeds them (by experiencing the conjunction that created them). They also organize themselves along an archetype, sharing both their triggers, food as well as defenses by creating an archemote. For instance, the embarrassment mimotes may combine with self-diminishing (i.e. inferiority) mimotes and mother-attachment mimotes. This results in the "damsel in distress" archemote.

What is success to one archemote can be failure to another, and what is desirable for one archemote can be offensive to another. As long as conflicting archemote exist within a mind, the ego exists in a state of self-contradicting confusion. This leads to the experience of an unquenchable suffering, since no possible situation can ever fulfill the agenda of every single mimote.

How mimotes evolved

Organisms seek to reproduce and survive. Evolution developed a two-pronged system to implement this concept: An animal experiences pleasure while being in a situation or doing something that helps in reproduction and survival. It experiences pain while being in a situation or doing something that impedes reproduction and survival.

As animals evolve to increase their chances of survival, they developed brains that are capable of handling more and more situations as well as learning from experience. A simple reflex-based system can no longer suffice - the brain developed memories of the past so that it may learn from previous experiences. Thus, the consciousness of "right now, right here" expanded into the consciousness of "past and present".

Eventually the brains of the human species developed self-consciousness. As it did so, humans encountered a completely new set of problems concerning relationships with other self-aware beings. Humans also developed the concept of the future, which allowed them to prepare for something they have never experienced before. A new form of consciousness emerged - the story-based consciousness brought together and organized both social and temporal relationships into a coherent understanding.

Mimotes are an adaptation of our human mind to allow us to rapidly assimilate important, real-life situations they encounter into the context of our personal story. This helps us make quick and sufficiently accurate social decisions so that we can play our social roles. The mimote system worked well when desires are simple, situations remained stable, a uniform belief system existed and strong social structures prevented anyone from over-investing their mimotes in socially inappropriate ways.

The mimote system, however, could not handle our modern society. People have great desires, situations keep changing, multiple belief systems competed openly with each other while social structures collapse. The mimote population multiplied rapidly in an attempt to keep up. This led to inner chaos and a fragmentation of consciousness. Humanity is currently in the midst of a psychological crisis that started with the concept of civilization and is now deepening exponentially. If this continues unchecked, Humanity can destroy itself before it evolves a new way of handling the situation.

Implications

To maintain good emotional health, we should only keep mimotes that foster a healthy attitude and are consistent with each other. There are a few ways to test for these conditions using the logical mind:

  1. Attitude: "Who would you be if you cannot think this thought?" / "How do you react when you believe this thought?"
  2. Consistency: "Is this thought true?"

A fire requires heat, fuel and oxygen in order to manifest. Like a fire, a mimote requires thoughts, emotions and desires. Thus, we can extinguish a mimote by questioning the thoughts that originated it, absorbing the emotions that drive it or dropping the desires that holds it together. The first uses reflection, self-awareness or Cognitive Therapy. The second uses (emotional) releasing and a few variants of emotion work. The third uses asceticism and renunciation. An extinguished mimote becomes dormant. However, it can reignite again when the missing components come together.

Mimotes are reluctant to die. They use their contents to protect themselves. The outer layer of a mimote is desire, which will makes its host want to retain it. The middle layer contains an intense emotion, which make it painful or frightening for the host to probe deeper. The last layer contains repetitive and distracting thoughts, which tries to keep the logic probes away. In the core lies a simple desire, which when acknoledged by the host, ends the life of the mimote.

Mimotes also have additional defensive strategies, such as:

  1. Mimotes merge their layers together other similiar mimotes such that each protected mimote has the combined defenses of the group.
  2. Mimotes create "dummy mimotes", which when broken through, redirects to the real mimotes.
  3. Mimotes mutate to accept new situations as triggers or recruit more mimotes into their archemote.
  4. Working in conjunction as an archetype, mimotes influence the host to create a situation that perpetuates itself.
    [e.g. The "damsel in distress" archemote can influence the host to take on challenges that are too difficult, causing the host to fail and reexperience the archemote again.]

The most effective way to attack a mimote is by dissolving it from the inside layers, by reversing the process of its formation. In other words, we must create a negative conjunction of thought, emotion and desire. Firstly, the thought must be reversed (e.g. "He is wrong" changes to "He is not wrong" or "I am wrong"). The emotion can then follow (e.g. hatred into forgiveness). The desire then becomes weak and offers little resistance to reversal (e.g. "I never wish to deal with rich people again" to "I look forward to dealing with rich people again").

Mimote Uniqueness

Mimotes differ from normal thoughts, beliefs or memes in the following aspects:

  1. They are entities that think thoughts, feel emotions and have desires of a specific subset of what a human being can experience.
  2. They persist in the mind without any effort by the conscious mind.
  3. They do not wish to die and will actively defend themselves against any potential harm.
  4. They are aware of other mimotes to varying levels, and will often band with some of them into a story structure to maximize survivability.
  5. Whenever possible, they direct their hosts to attempt to reproduce themselves into other minds.

Using metaphors:

  1. Memes are to mimotes what viruses are to bacteria.
  2. Bacteria in the digestive system convert food into nutrients for our sustenance. Mimotes in consciousness convert situations into stories for our understanding.

Theory Development

I have been working on a theory to explain the self for personal use since 2003 while I started doing emotion healing work using the Art of Releasing. The workshop facilitators used the metaphor of the human mind being a computer, likening false beliefs (that cause our suffering) to viruses on our "heart drive" which can be deleted. I have also read about the Hoffman Quadrinity Process which speaks about patterns and layers of emotions.

However, I felt that the explanations offered in these works were insufficient for my own use, especially since autism has complicated my issues. I sought to develop a full psychology theory that can explain the formation of ego and how the experience of suffering arises. During a corporate meeting in mid-January 2010, I suddendly thought of the concept of mimotes and how they work. This theory is the result.