Chapter Twenty:

Preconscious Cognition and the Writer

We've covered a good deal of ground now, from examining construction and distribution of memes to exploring how group minds come into being. We've examined how to distribute signals and discussed the power dynamics of information and the overlapping domain of marketing, magic, and masterminding. Now let's backtrack a bit and examine how to program your preconscious mind intentionally. Your preconscious mind needs precise goals which it interprets literally, and those goals should be upgraded regularly. Your preconscious mind also retains memetic content indefinitely, and so once a meme is embedded it will continue influencing you until it is deliberately altered or removed. Likewise, once a meme is dissolved from your preconscious mind you will no longer have the result of that meme present in your life. By keeping a record (be it journal, collage, series of tattoos, etc.) you can track the directions of the preconscious motivators.

The preconscious mind is driven by emotional energy to move along specific pathways, acting on the dominant memetic structures. Those structures are put into place through repetition, which is a replication of action. What you believe determines how you imagine, and what symbolic structures you access while imagining. We've already discussed how the preconscious mind isn't affected by the passage of time (when you picked up a meme), but rather by the intensity or resolution of a meme. As your beliefs are the very currency of a memetic economy, and belief constrains the patterns imagination can take, monitoring your imagination and critically thinking about why your imagination consistently follows specific vectors will help you identify the belief structures that limit your creativity.