“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death”

I’m just going to give you lists of words and not tell you where they came from. Because ultimately I don’t really know either. Where I “found” them is not really where they “came from” so to speak, if you catch my drift. Here goes (then we’re going to talk about two kinds of desire, if I can remember):

blue melons, wealthy monkeys, anxious young monkeys, inquisitive little monkey, elder monkeys, white melons, little blue monkeys, beach monkeys, red melon, melon trees, strongest monkeys, lazy monkeys, worker monkeys, white monkey, anxious monkeys, new melons, lucky monkey, melons fall, great monkey, working monkeys, tree monkeys, old melons, other monkeys, red monkey, old monkey

How sweet is that, right? Pretty rippin’? Well check this, bitches!

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Okay so I will tell you where they came from, because I think it’s somehow important. It proves something I’ve been trying haphazardly to say for months. The first one comes from Amazon.com and is from some random book. It consists of the “key phrases” or maybe the “Statistically Improbable Phrases” contained within that book.

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

Here are the SIP’s for Jung’s Man and His Symbols: “humpbacked girl, bush soul, hero cycles, primal ground, anima figure, animal disguise, white monkey, unconscious psyche, hero myth, initial dream.”

Besides these being cool lists of words that set my imagination whirring as to what they potentially mean and how they fit together, this is important because: if they can do this on books, they can do it on anything. That is, I guarantee that they could and more than possibly DO use this on all of our websites to scan for phrases that are unique to each of our sites. I’m happy to say that my site is probably really wonky in a search analysis like this, because it invariably will turn up hundreds upon hundreds of statistically improbable and totally made up words and phrases. It’s only a short leap of the imagination to see how “they” could take any of our SIP word lists and then check them against word lists which they believe to be potentially dangerous or socially unacceptable.

Not that I’m too worried about that shit nowadays, but I just think it’s interesting. Keyword clusters in action. So many things you could do with them. Makes my head spin. The other quote is from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which someone told me about last night while we were talking about the Holy Spirit and a bunch of other “holy shit.” Frankl invented something called “logotherapy” (as in the Logos).

But I was going to talk about two kinds of desire, wasn’t I? My point was a lot more clear in my mind last night when I started and then abandoned this post to go to sleep. But I think the basic point was this: the human being is driven by two kinds of desire. The first kind consists of the drive to satisfy essentially biological (and egological) drives: food, shelter, sex, status, etc. I wrote something related to this one time, in all caps. Let me see if I can find it. Here it is. It’s a little rambling, so I will chop it down slightly for our purposes here. It starts like this:

I WANT A COMPANY TO SELL ME THE PERFECT PRODUCT, WHICH SATISFIES MY EVERY NEED AND DESIRE FULLY…

But then goes on into some kind of rhetorical proof that since no (earthly) organization is able to satisfy this need *fully* that they are not actually that powerful at all. And in fact that I am more powerful than them because the desires that I have are stronger than their ability to satiate me.

What I am actually talking about there is the “second kind of desire,” although I wasn’t thinking like this at the time. But I was taking shots in the dark at a target which I knew instinctively exists. Maybe a better name for this Second Kind of Desire™ would actually be something like “Longing.” It is the desire which springs up regardless of whether or not any of the other more basic needs are met. Actually, this is starting to sound rather like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But I’ve always heard that talked about in regards to the more basic needs needing to be met before the self-actualization and transcendent needs can be fulfilled. Maybe that’s an erroneous understanding of what Maslow was talking about, but that’s not really my concern here.

I guess my concern is that this other need, this Longing&Trade; comes from the heart. And now for a little free product placement (which ideally, I should be getting paid for by New Line Cinemas, but we’ll talk more about that later):

The Golden Compass in that trailer, the Elysiometer (sp?), is an externalization of the mechanism within the human heart whose purpose is to long for and to recognize Transcendent Truth, the kind that comes direct from God. The kind that smashes Maslow’s hierarchy of need into little bits. You’ll notice that they visualized this device in the movie in such a way that its compass needle actually points towards symbolic elements, which we talked about at length yesterday. The xenoglossic Language of Truth™ is spoken in that tongue, the Language That Comes Before All Language™, the sound at which every knee upon Heaven and Earth shall bend and every head shall be bowed and every heart shall be made light.

You recognize truth when you hear it because you have that as an inbuilt faculty. Your heartometer suddenly explodes. The alien-implant pacemaker heartReducer transducer device which usually squelches your ability to fully experience divinity within the moment is suddenly short-circuited and your skin gets goosebumps, your face gets hot, your body flushes with chills and heat at the same time. You recognize truth when you hear it. My heart has never beat before this minute. My heart has never beat, but now you’re in it, O Lord.

That’s how you know.

That’s the second kind of desire.

The longing for that moment of recognition of the truth, which makes the bells of our hearts cry out in songs of Joy for the Coming of Our Lord™. Philip K. Dick talks about this, how one of the signs of the Parousia is the ringing of bells:

But if you have followed my conjectures about the overlapping of these alternate worlds, and you sense as I do the possibility that if there are three there may be thirty or three thousand of them — and that some of us live in this one, others of us in another one, others in others, and that events in one track cannot be perceived by persons not in that track — well, let me say what I want to say and be done with it. I think I once experienced a track in which the Savior returned. But I experienced it just very briefly. I am not there now. I am not sure I ever was. Certainly I may never be again. I grieve for that loss, but loss it is; somehow I moved laterally, but then fell back, and then it was gone. A vanished mountain and a stream. The sound of bells. All gone now for me; entirely gone.

Towards the end of his life, Dick wrote at great length about this Longing. He knew it even more keenly because he felt the Parousia at one point within his heart, while he was having his “religious experiences” from I believe 1974 onward. God was with him, within him, and he glimpsed aspects of this world as they truly are under Heaven, not as they appear in this Black Iron Prison world. And then, for whatever reason, it left him. Grace folded up and walked out the door one Saturday afternoon. Or so he says. He may have simply been dramatizing the experience of the struggle to maintain that closeness to God once it is achieved.

Because once you actually experience it in even its smallest fraction, you want nothing more than to hold onto it. Which is often a good way to lose it: to try and put it into a fixed form. It’s what the first four commandments warn against:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me
Thou shalt not make for thyself an idol
Thou shalt not make wrongful use of the name of thy God

Do not try to put God into a fixed form, because then you will ruin it:

When Jesus said “I and the Father are one” (for which he was eventually killed), he meant that he was connected to the raw data feed of pure experience.

Or

“Men are so crazy, they want the essence, the woman is the essence, there it is right in there hands but they rush off erecting big abstract constructions.”

I’ve heard people talk about I think certain practices of the Hasidic Jews. They live according to strict rules, rituals and daily regulations - the purpose of which is to keep them immediately mindful of the Actual Literal Presence of God at all times throughout their entire day, every day. Who knows if it works, but the basic idea is a sound one, I think: cultivating mindfulness. You must practice this if you want this.

First you must practice tuning your Golden Compass, the deep heart which beats firmly upon recognizition of the Truth. And you must learn how to defeat the evil alien pacemaker which keeps you entranced at low operating frequencies. It’s what they remove from Neo in the car. It’s the tiny metallic RFID microchip device that records and transmits the YouTube Eye of Sauron Truman Show director’s cut that you call reality, but which is really a veil laid across your senses to hide from you the True Love and Endless Glory of every possible moment, because if men and women have access to the deepness of their hearts, live in God’s Love at all moments and are bathed in the Light of the Truth, then they cannot be controlled or broken, even into the heart of the Lion’s Den, even unto the concentration camps where we will all become martyred one day. This world lays its burdens upon us, which we can lay down if we so choose, but it is an Act of Will™: *the* act of will. Unsubscribe, or join Stardust?

anima figure, animal disguise, bush soul, hero cycles, hero myth, humpbacked girl, initial dream, primal ground, unconscious psyche, white monkey