The Simplest Path to Personal and Planetary Transformation

I considered titling this review, "Stop Whining, Wake Up and Get Busy Saving the World," but decided "Eating Us" would be more attention-grabbing – which matters because I believe Vincent Casspriano, Jr.'s "The Simplest Path, Step One: FREE YOUR MIND" is an important book, and I want to do whatever I can to draw your attention to it.  Pick the title you like best.  Both very fittingly describe what you will find within the pages of this remarkable new release from New Paradigm Press.

I have selected three short quotations to explore in this review that I think best summarize Casspriano's overall message:

From Chapter One, "The Boxes We Dream In":




Now, the idea that Humans are sleeping, and must therefore "awaken," is by no means unique to Casspriano's "Simplest Path" spiritual system, being the root observation underlying pretty much all Eastern religion, and a lot of Western Occultism and New Age metaphysics, as well.  In fairness, Casspriano makes no claim to this as an original insight, openly supporting his assessment of the human predicament with quotations taken from Animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam.  He then flows seamlessly into a list of complementary illustrations from the secular realms of Quantum Physics, brain/consciousness research, and most to-the-point, the study of memes and memetics, ala Evolutionary Biologist and world's best-known cheerleader for scientific atheism, Richard Dawkins.

If you've never heard of memes or memetics, a quick Google of those terms will reveal hundreds of serious, information-rich websites devoted to this now thirty-year old science.  In a nutshell, a "meme" is a sort of contagious thought-form that spreads between people by way of imitation.  Obvious memes in our environment include advertising jingles, fads and fashions, etc.  Casspriano somewhat radically extends the concept to include just about everything that makes up the contents of our individual brains and shared human culture.  While he resists redefining the word "meme" wholesale, he decidedly expands its definition to make memes and "memeplexes" (what you get when a number of memes band together into an organic, relational unit, like a religion or cultural or political movement) the basic, fundamental building blocks of everything we habitually label "real…"

And then he demonstrates, in at times excruciating detail, the complete emptiness of the "apparent-reality" that is a byproduct of memetic activity in our brains.  What we call "real" is not real at all. It's an illusion spun up by our memes. And our memes are not original to us.  They are "viral invaders" assailing our minds from without.  Worse – and, while even this thought is not wholly unique to Casspriano, he certainly gives it his own very effective spin – memes are by no means mere passive beliefs or simple "harmless ideas." They are, Casspriano believes, actively predatory psychic parasites whose survival depends on our buying into the illusions they create in our minds.  Think of illusion (Samsara, Maya, etc.) as a web we're caught in.  Memes are the spider.  We are the fly.  Gotcha.

One thing I like very much about Casspriano's book is that he never asks us to take anything on faith, least of all this rather ugly depiction of the human psychic/spiritual condition.  He not only challenges readers to test his hypothesis firsthand in order to experience what is real and true for ourselves, he spends a large chunk of the book outlining specific exercises anyone can do to escape memetic interference and personally experience reality as-it-is.  The exercises in Part II of the book are powerful medicine… But this is a digression, so let me return to the point.

Memes are the spider, and we are the fly.  A better metaphor might be that memes are the farmer, and we are the cow.  Domesticated and docile, we allow memes to milk us daily, to extract from our minds the potent human psychic energy which, if reclaimed by us and put to proper human use, would quickly and positively transform our lives and our world.  This transformation is awakening, ascension, enlightenment, metanoia, the Buddha-like change of consciousness most religions and spiritual systems on Earth hint at, but few ever actually deliver to followers.  In this analysis, Casspriano's "Simplest Path" is very much in line with Gurdjieff's "Fourth Way," Carlos Castaneda's Toltec sorcery, and a few other well known spiritual practices inhabiting a somewhat darker, though perhaps more realistic corner of the New Age.  But unlike most of those other systems, Casspriano's prescription for escaping illusion and awakening to reality is remarkably, well… simple.

From Chapter Three, "Waking Up":


And later in the same chapter:



For "belief" in the quotation above, read "meme/memeplex."  Casspriano certainly does, treating the terms as largely interchangeable.  In the end, this genuinely simple – at least in the sense of being uncomplicated and pragmatic – spiritual practice amounts to discovering reality as-it-actually-is less by searching for a glimpse beyond the illusion, than by systematically withdrawing our participation in, and identification with, the dream.  When we disentangle our psyches from memetic illusion, only reality remains.  We don't have to chase it; to a meme-free mind, reality just appears.  This is "Satori" in Zen Buddhism.  This is "stopping the world" in the Toltec sorcery of Castaneda and others.  Casspriano's genius lies in his talent for exposing the core mechanism behind such complex and often inscrutable spiritual systems, and for putting into plain language clear instructions for unraveling the dream and achieving personal awakening.  The virus-like process by which memes take over and control our human minds, as described by Casspriano is, to my mind, very complicated (but well worth struggling through).  What is genuinely simple about "The Simplest Path," however, is Casspriano's prescription for breaking those bonds, once you've made the effort to understand how they are created and maintained.  For Casspriano, remaining a victim of spiritual sleep and energetic exploitation by memes is a complex activity in which we unconsciously invest enormous amounts of psychic energy every day of our lives.  Awakening is the product of a simple act of withdrawing that investment, which automatically re-energizes of our minds and lives.  Or as Casspriano cleverly phrases it when closing Chapter Three, "Waking Up":


Anyone can do this.  Spiritual awakening, in Casspriano's view, may be hard work, but it is not complicated work.  The path to enlightenment is really rather shockingly simple.  Fall out of love with the dream.  Reclaim your psychic energy.  Wake up to reality.

The ten "Key Questions" Casspriano explores in the second section of the book are designed to put the theory laid out in Part I to practical and immediate use.  Essentially, I think Casspriano sees these ten issues – why we treat enlightenment as an "airy-fairy" ideal instead of a measurable transformation of brain functioning, the excuses we make for avoiding personal responsibility and integrity along the lines of Castaneda's "impeccability," the fallacy of belief in a "separate self," etc. – as pillars of both our personal and collective human dreams.  They are by no means an exhaustive listing of the memes twisting our minds.  But they are primary keystones on which layers upon layers of the grand illusion are built.  Topple these ten baseline pillars and the larger structure crumbles.

Casspriano explores some "Keys" more successfully than others.  One downside to the book is that, especially in the "Keys," Casspriano's own memetic prejudices shine at times rather glaringly through, as when, in his discussion of the American "What Would Jesus Do?" religious fad, he characterizes the Evangelical Christian purveyors of WWJD as, "ultra-conservative, right wing ideologues."  Even should the reader personally agree with such pronouncements, its hard to resist thinking, "Hey Vince!  Your memes are showing!"  But where he nails his point, Casspriano's prose can be downright inspiring, as with the "Key" cosmological study "Is Earth the Center of the Universe?," which explores the gap between what we know, scientifically, about the Universe and what our daily choices and behavior says we really believe, about the cosmos and about ourselves.  His closing "Key" "Are We Alone?" so poetically frames the true stakes of  our global human predicament – species survival VS extinction – that its hard to imagine anyone keeping their gaze glued squarely to their own self-involved navel in the wake of reading it.  Of course we are not alone.  There are six and a half billion of us on Planet Earth, and whether we awaken to what's best in us or follow our darkest drives over History's cliff into oblivion, we do so as one.  One planet, one fate.

This notion of "oneness" and of a common, intertwined human spiritual and biological destiny is a core theme in The Simplest Path, Step One: FREE YOUR MIND that sets it apart from any spiritual book in recent memory.  My final quotation from the book returns us to the opening lines of Chapter One, "The Boxes We Dream In":


Vincent Casspriano, Jr.'s "The Simplest Path to Personal and Planetary Transformation, Step One: FREE YOUR MIND" does not offer easy escape from these very pressing real-world human ills, but rather, a down to Earth, workable prescription for their cure.  Yes, we must awaken as individuals, and, rest assured, "The Simplest Path" shows spiritual seekers exactly how to do that.  But a prime message of "The Simplest Path" is that, for personal awakening to have meaning, it must occur within the context of a complete re-visioning of global culture, and a mass wrenching away of the wheel of History from the control of viral memes, that we might create a common cosmic human destiny worthy of our highest potential as a species.

Now that's a meme worth feeding.

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To purchase Vincent Casspriano's "The Simplest Path, Step One: FREE YOUR MIND," visit the New Paradigm Press website at http://www.newparadigmpress.com.  Or learn more at http://www.thesimplestpath.com. Tweet