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The New
Culture of Desire: 5 Radical Strategies That Will Change Your Business and
Your Life by Melinda Davis Rating: • (Read only if your interest is strong) |
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Oh O Melinda Davis’ recent book, The New
Culture of Desire, may possibly be the strangest book I’ve read in years.
Thanks to something called The Human Desire Project, Davis and her team know
way too much about what people want, and the lengths to which they’ll go to
get it. Here’s a sample of what to expect: (pp. 79-81) THE STATE OF O Peak Imaginational Experience The supreme, increasingly mainstream manifestation
of this new need is the craving we seem to be feeling for achieving what I
call the State of O—a kind of transcendence, spiritual or otherwise. It is an
experience that goes by many names: the Zone, the Flow, getting our groove
back, healing bliss. O is the consummation of our imaginational lives, the
experience that makes us feel the most vigorously and successfully alive. It is our ability to cope and flourish mentally, the
reverse of toxic psychic stress, the opposite of losing your mind. In plain words, O is merely short for optimal state
of mind. It is peak interior pleasure, the ultimate ahhhh of the mind. You
can get there by running, praying, dancing, chanting, meditating, playing
really good golf. Dervishes do it by whirling. Some do it with other rituals,
others believe it is as simple as the correct combination of essential oils
or fragrances, or the correct dose of chemicals. Some people beat drums.
Others insist that achieving O is a skill to be learned at the feet of an
exalted master, over time. This ultimate feel-good, peak experience is the
orgasmic reward of our imaginational times. Little wonder the possibility of O
is looming so large on our radar screens. In
the State of O you are said to lose your sense of being anywhere, and
feel a wondrous sense of unity with the universe. You become pure
imaginational man or woman—safe and happy in the arms of something divine.
Your head becomes a pleasure pad, and not the site of a crash. The
quest for the State of O is not new. What is remarkable is how ex cathedra
the quest for O has become, how common in the standard repertory of human
pursuits. We are all looking for rapture now, if only to reassure us
that we are, in fact, safely away from the edge of oblivion. Or to call a
kind of ceasefire in the endless firing off of toxic, and not pleasurable,
neurons. An ecstatic man is not an anxious man. A womanin rapture is not depressed.
A person in transcendence transcends imaginational mayhem. The State of O is the new survival must-have. It is
the ultimate proof that you are, indeed, alive and kicking in spite of all
the madness, that you are not a victim of the imaginational age, but a
high-flying achiever. The State of O As Spiritual Transport At its most sublime expression, the quest for O is a
bona fide holy quest. Folks at this exalted level of awareness sense the
tingle of the infinite in all this new interior pressure, and mindfully go
about seeking the ultimate benefit in more or less prescribed ways and
rituals, ancient and otherwise. This goal is rupture, transcendence, seeing
the light of truth, salvation, sukhavati (the "Land of Bliss'' )
epiphany, redemption, seeing the light of the Shekhina (godliness, in
kabbalistic thinking), the one great truth, enlightenment, mahasukha
(the great light of Mahayana Buddhism), bliss, a state of grace, wisal
("attaining to the divine in
Islamic thinking), Nirvana being
in harmony with the tao, oneness with the divine, seeing the face of
God. In the spiritual realm, the most exalted state of O
is a transcendent experience, indeed—a state that the O, as a symbol,
communicates with powerful totemic resonances of rich legacy. The O is the
symbol of the circle of life itself. To some, this rings true with the heady ping of a
Tibetan bell. The circle is the center, the symbol of wholeness and
completion, everything and nothing, a world without end. The circle is
infinity—a mark that, paradoxically, represents the absence of marked-off
boundaries—that realm in which there are no limits. “I am one with the universe! I am
theworld and the world is me!” (May I call your attention to just how
powerful the concept of “being beyond boundaries” seems to be in the cultural
marketplace these days? “No limits”
is the identity line for Showtime Networks. “No boundaries” is the promise of
at least three different corporate voices: the division of Ford Motor Company
that brings us the Explorer, the division of Sharp Consumer Electronics that
brings us the flat-panel LCD TV, and the division of R- J. Reynolds Tobacco
that brings us Winston cigarettes. AT&T's wireless Web service is
positioned on the promise of being “Boundless.”) In a series of think-tank
sessions about peak experiences, the ultimate sublime state was almost
unanimously described as the sensation of flying in boundless space—out of
the matrix but magically unafraid. We can also say that O is short for orgasm. O is in fact the new orgasm.
This ultimate pleasure comes to us with no small history of sexual
implication. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, among others, O is the sacred
union of the male and the female powers, the yin and the yang; in Hindu
tradition, the holy copulation of Shakti and Shiva, the KundaUni—theYabYum.
(An extraordinary percentage of YabYum search hits on the Internet lead to
Amsterdam, where YabYum is the name of "the world's foremost tantric sex
club.') The ancient Gnostic tradition presents it as ouroboros, the
image of the serpent biting his tail, turning and turning in endless circular
triumph over death. If you’ve been wondering about where
marketers get their ideas, look at The New Culture
of Desire to find out. If, like me, you think certain desires should be
sublimated, take a pass. Steve Hopkins, January 21, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the February 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
New Culture of Desire.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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