The progression of memes reflects the development of society from its primitive beginnings up to the present. So far, eight different memes have been identified and analyzed.

Their characteristics are:

Meme 1. Basic, personal survival. The most primitive motivation of just staying alive.

Meme 2. Clan survival. Tribal and family bonding along with superstition-filled attempts to understand the powers of nature which threaten to overpower them.

Meme 3. Courage, survival of the fittest. Mastering the environment, fighting to break free of constraints.
Sensing many gods, all of which are models of power.
This is where individuals first find their personal power but, seeing reality through a worldview of separation and limited resources, compete against each other in attempts to gain advantage. As a meme which is short on thought and long on passion, societies in this stage quickly fragment into territorial, feudal-type communities surrounded by competing, enemy communities.

Meme 4. Finding order and purpose in life. Obeying authority, regulations and externally imposed rules of behavior and morality. Sacrificing the self to a greater cause for a deferred reward. Dedicating allegiance to one supreme God. This social meme started to spread within civilization 5,000 years ago. Eventually, alliances arose between large-scale feudal structures and those who wished to develop extensive religious power.

Meme 5. Achievement, striving to succeed. Fighting to win, beating the competition, achieving independence. This meme started to spread significantly in the 1700s. It was made possible by the collapse of feudalism and also a sense of increased personal empowerment, which was a side-effect of the Protestant Reformation. It gained particular strength with the founding of the United States, whose Constitution and Bill of Rights intentionally empowered and protected individual liberty.

WEMES EMERGE:
Weme 6. Community and caring. Unconditional love, accepting others as they are, seeing the value of service to others, the beginnings of spiritual understanding. Freedom of the spirit from greed, dogma, contention and other distractions from spiritual centeredness. This meme started to spread in the mid-1800s.

Professor Clare Graves, the originator of this branch of social science, saw the first set of six memes as a first tier of human development. He called the transition of the human race into meme number seven a momentous leap, an entry into an entirely new set of memes, a new tier of consciousness. With this new tier comes freedom from all of the fears of the prior memes, and, finally, the freedom for human cognition to focus upon its possibilities in the world.

As more and more people shift into the second tier of Wemes, the underpinnings of society become spiritual rather than materialistic. The second tier is expansive rather than self-serving or merely survival-oriented. Service to the world community, to the planet as a whole, becomes the inspiration as people activate these higher memes of consciousness.

"Love and light" is not just a greeting to wish someone well, it is the byline of the emerging New Reality. The future of the human race is a bright one. It is love and light.

Weme 7. Responsible freedom.

Flexible flow, adapting to a world full of change.
Big-picture views, the discovery of self-accountable, personal freedom. This meme started to spread after the global defeat of fascism in World War II. While most people started to look forward to the renewed chance to create personal prosperity, the beat generation of the 1950s emerged with its questioning of materialistic culture.
This emerging movement examined Eastern philosophy, such as Zen Buddhism, in a search for answers to the mysteries of life.

In Weme number seven, people act from an inner-directed core.
Values come from fundamental, natural law, meaning that human rights are perceived as fundamental due to the fact that you exist.

By nature, seventh Weme thinkers are self-accountable and independent within reason. They are honest in their communications and do not spend time on the rules of formality, unless they are important to those present.
Seventh meme thinkers like technology for what it can do to improve life, and they value knowledge and competency above rank or status.

They enjoy the pleasures of life, without being bound by any of them, and pursue activities that express their inner joy.
External fashions and trends have no bearing upon these choices. They have emotional control, meaning that they still express emotions, but these expressions are appropriate, and not uncontrolled outbursts.

This is a powerful Weme in promoting the exploration of the greater possibilities of life. It creates information networks and networks of people which easily adapt to changing needs.

Seventh Weme thinkers are concerned with the endangered world environment and want to restore viability and ecological order. Their purpose of living includes being independent within reason, knowledgeable as much as possible, and caring for others within practical limits. They are accountable to themselves as responsible individuals, yet embrace their community of associates. Rather than striving to have things or to achieve things, they prefer to pursue personal development along a pathway that is natural to them.

They can interact with people of the first six memes and speak their psychological language. They respect others' world views and unique habits, customs and cultures, even if they don't necessarily agree with them.

This Weme brings a high sense of self-esteem based upon information as much as emotion. It brings an enlightened self-acceptance which acknowledges and accepts their own shortcomings and faults as mere stages along the way to acquiring more skills.

Weme 8. Holistic, global view.

Spiritual awareness, learning through simply being as well as doing. Becoming conscious of the superconscious, trusting intuition. This Weme started to spread in the cultural and spiritual awakening of the mid-1960s. Those seekers who found this pattern of thinking launched a whole new movement of spiritual awareness. This spiritual renaissance has the potential to develop the awareness to carry humanity through the Shift and into the New Reality.

This Weme has a global village outlook, and seeks projects and solutions that will work well for the whole planet.
It contains the vision to bring order out of chaos.

Because of the incredible power of the second tier of Wemes, these will accelerate the transformation of the world as they become more and more widely adopted.

Weme 9. The mystery Weme.

The authors of Spiral Dynamics have identified, as of the 1990s, Weme number nine. They call this the Coral Weme, but they have not observed it in large quantities of people, so they cannot yet summarize its characteristics.

However, using basic metaphysical principles, you can predict exactly what meme number nine will become.

The new Weme number nine will be like meme number three (courage, survival of the fittest), only in a higher form of manifestation. Meme number three's courage lead to adventure, exploration and mastery of the physical environment. As the second tier memes all have a spiritual orientation, this means that the new Weme number nine will bring about adventure, exploration and mastery of the holistic environment of mind, body and spirit. It will do this while encompassing a global scale of awareness.

The new, ninth Weme will bring exploration of the spiritually-inspired use of the power of the mind to transform reality for the better. It will create strong demand for spiritual and creative freedom on a global basis.

This far-ranging, inspiring Weme has the power, quite simply, to transform the entire world as we know it.

The keywords of the ninth Weme will be 'Powerful creativity.'

Powerful Creativity:

How powerful will it become? How much will this Weme transform the world as it gains in popularity?

When a spiritually-oriented person uses their creativity, they use the same formula that Infinite Being originally used to create the entire universe. That's how powerful spiritual creativity is. In its fundamental form, it consists of three essential components:

(1) Intent is used to define the goal, or the desired outcome.
When defining a goal, it is better to leave the specifics undefined and deal in generalities. This allows the universe to find the easiest pathway through which to manifest the desired goal. Even better than specific objects are general principles. For example, the general principle of natural prosperity can find thousands of ways to materialize, whereas a goal involving one specific objective along the path to prosperity limits the options considerably.

(2) Feeling is added to give the goal the life energy with which to grow from an idea into a pre-physical reality that becomes ready to manifest in the physical world. Ideally, an equal balance between the amount of intent and feeling makes for the most powerful act of creativity. For the sake of clarity, feeling is defined as a separate component from intent. In practice, however, the act of creativity expresses intent and feeling intertwined together as one creative act.

This is in keeping with the way nature functions. Light, for example, is a form of electromagnetic radiation - electric and magnetic energies intertwined in perfect balance and set into motion.

(3) Action. As the energy of your environment reorganizes itself around your empowered intent, you need to provide the third and final component, action. However, before the action, there first has to be a pause lasting several days. This is a hands-off period where you allow the growth of the project to occur at its own pace within the pre-physical ethers of space.

Then, after several days have passed and the objective is ready to manifest, it will cause synchronistic flow to appear in your life. 'Coincidences' will occur which cause events around you to move towards the fulfillment of your desired goal. When this flow of supportive coincidences begins to occur, your job is to provide the action which each synchronistic event calls for, until the goal has become fully manifested.

If, for example, a desired career opening occurs, then you would follow that opportunity to see if this is the main event, or if it is just something that you will learn from along the journey towards your goal.

If a key contact occurs which can help your project, then you follow through on that contact to see where it will lead.
Whatever mini-opportunities arise along the path to the realization of your goal, you provide the physical action to materialize those opportunities out of the realm of possibilities and bring them into the physical realm. Most often, goals materialize through a daisy chain of events and opportunities, each of which builds up to the final realization of the entire, original goal.

People today are finding their way through the spiritual awakenings that come with second-tier Wemes number seven and eight. As they activate number nine, the Weme of powerful creativity, they discover a power which, unleashed, can transform not only their own lives but the world around them for the better.

The New Reality is yours to explore. It already exists as a frequency of consciousness. In a world where thoughtlessness and heartlessness are common, people of the New Reality bring thoughtfulness and heartfulness. Where there is strife, people of the New Reality bring peace. Where there is pain, people of the New Reality bring love and healing.

This is the New Reality, the spiritual revolution in human consciousness.

Peace and Blessings ... Weme on .... Know what I meme?

A meme becomes a meme when one person transmits it to another.
Or to be more exact when one person intends to transmit it....via print, megaphone, mime, whatever.
It is then a meme. It could die on the page not one person having picked up on it, taken it on as their own idea etc.
It would be an unsuccessful meme, but still a meme.

Memetics, as a subset of cognitive psychology, may be able to explain HOW propositional content becomes a meme. There is an outstanding debate within epistemology between the volitionalists and the intellectualists: can we simply will ourselves to believe something? Alvin Plantingna and William James are volitionalists, for example. If I pay you $1 million to believe the sky is green can you simply will yourself to actually believe that the sky is green? The answer seems to be "No". Yet we do sometimes will ourselves to believe things--especially in cases of self-deception. To reconcile this we need to figure out HOW it is that something becomes a meme.