From the Publisher
This book is a direct approach to finding out why your life is the way it is. Unlike other books on personal transformation 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 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 The author points out that even the most loving and exemplary parents carry some memes that are out of date and need to be revised or discarded.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 that their lives will change in a substantial way. 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 change.
From the Inside Flap
Change Your Memes: Change Your Life
Memes (pronounced like themes) are learned attitudes or behaviors, decisions and beliefs. They are the rules we use in dealing with situations. We acquire them from our parents, siblings, schools, TV and religious training. They determine the Everyday Magic in our life.
Everyday Magic is finding parking spaces when you need them, things routinely turning out better than expected, having the right people in your life, desired opportunities presenting themselves. This is Magic that you don’t have to think about. It is your life pattern.
Everyday Magic can have other forms: never finding convenient parking places, having to spend enormous energy to see people, having things work out marginally only after enormous effort, being disappointed by the actions of people in your life, and never getting any "breaks." This is Magic most people don’t think they create. It is an invisible life pattern.
This book shows you how to systematically examining and understand your memes, and examine your life pattern to change your Everyday Magic
