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A Something Deeperist Writes To A Different-Ist, Trying to be friends

A Something Deeperist Writes To A Different-Ist, Trying to be friends

You asked what I believe.

Well,

I believe there’s more to this life than atoms, void, animal impulses and chance. I think there’s a Light that is the Truth shining through each conscious moment and we can and should follow our inborn push towards that Light and the awareness, honesty, respectful kindness and joyful sharing that the Light demands of us. In this way, we can get better and better and understanding and following the Light, at becoming Light in the world. However, the Light is prior to ideas and feelings, so we cannot have literal/direct/definitive insight into the Truth. We need to keep seeking as we keep working to live the Truth we’ve discovered. This operation should be safeguarded by the traditional mechanisms of religion: humility, selflessness, honest reflection and self-critique, personal decency, compassion, a community of fellow believers.

The impulse towards religious faith is good but goes too far when it puts ideas and feelings about why life matters ahead of engagement with the inner Light that alone knows how and why life matters. The impulse towards skepticism is good but goes too far when it puts the need to avoid intellectual and/or emotional errors ahead of the engagement with the Light within that alone knows that and why and how accuracy matters.

Voila what I believe! How much progress I’ve made down the path is another question.

I’m a Something Deeperist. I made up that name and precised-up the ideas, but it is basically the tradition I was raised in. We were raised Christian, but with the understanding that other religious traditions can also point towards the Truth. My grandfather, though an American Baptist minister, was a universal salvationist and my mom’s theology is also liberal. My father was raised fundamentalist Christian, but changed course as a young man and reads a lot of Sufiism and writings from other mystical traditions.

Maybe our spiritual notions are at a bit of an impasse. I mean, from my perspective, none of us really quite understand or care about our own dogmas–since they are just ideas and feelings, and, though ideas and feelings are important and necessary tools for humans to navigate life, they don’t quite make any sense to any of us–. Therefore, I don’t worry too much about what people think they believe as long as they forgive me my own human-sized delusions on that front and agree that the main thing is that within us all that knows that and how life matters, and that that inner something demands aware honest thinking and feeling and competent helpful selfless joyful communal living. Still, I’m not to be dissuaded from my general view of things and I understand if you think my notions are incompatible with yours. Also, I am aware of the gap between my beliefs and my wisdom. I think it is better to aim beyond your current wisdom-level than to avoid hypocrisy at all costs; but I still think I am a little too far from wise and don’t fault you for agreeing.

Anyway, that’s my impromptu essay.

Political Something Deeperism

Political Something Deeperism

As a private theophilosophical position, Something Deeperism suggests an individual work to get more and more insight into that and how the undoubtables are True.

With “undoubtables” I mean those beliefs and values without which human thought cannot make sense to itself:

we should think and act aware and clear (to the degree we don’t abide by these principles, we turn our thoughts to mush, and lose control over them);

we should be honest with ourselves and think logically and make progress towards our inner sense of “more preferable” (to the degree we don’t abide by these principles, we have no system for choosing one idea or action over another that makes any sense to us; we turn our thoughts to mush and lose control over them);

what we say and do actually matters, and other people are essentially like us and also matter, and we should all treat each other with kindness, respect, and mutual appreciation (to the degree we don’t believe in and abide by these principles, our life has no meaning we can believe in, understand, care about, or even stand; our feelings and thus our thoughts turn to mush and we lose control over them).

To these, you could arguably also add communication and Truth:
If our ideas and feelings cannot meaningfully communicate with one another, and/or there is no Truth within our conscious experience able to tell our ideas and feelings what is actually going on, what actually matters, and what is actually preferable; then how can we meaningfully steer our own thoughts and actions in a way that actually means anything to us?
And if we cannot communicate meaningfully with other human beings, who can stand the loneliness? And what meaning can we make out of everything we know–the bulk of which came from interactions with other human beings that we thought involved communication.

Naturally, just because a belief or value is undoubtable (ie: to the degree you doubt it, you doubt your own thought’s meaningfulness), doesn’t mean it is True; and just because you assent to a belief or value, doesn’t mean you know that it is true or True or understand what it means.

For this reason, Something Deeperism does not request blind faith in the undoubtables, but requires rather that one keep working to better and better understand that they are True and how they are True. Human thought is ideas, feelings, and etc all working together. The way forward is to assume a Truth shining through one’s conscious moment that one’s ideas and feelings can relate meaningfully, though of course not literally/definitively/1:1 to (the Truth is what is actually the case; not ideas and feelings about what is actually the case); and then to constantly work to discover, understand, accept, follow that Truth.

How to know how well one’s attaining that never-ending goal (never-ending because there will always be a mismatch between the Truth and our ideas and feelings about the Truth, and thus always some estimating/fudging/revising required)? Attached to the seed of wisdom within (the push towards awareness, clarity, honesty, decency, competency, loving kindness, shared joy), is knowledge of guardrails: “am I putting my lusts, greeds, vanities, fears ahead of treating others with respect and kindness? To the degree I answer ‘yes’, I’m going the wrong way”; “am I mean, am I cruel, do I get off on watching others suffers? To the degree I do, I’m going the wrong”; “am I doing this because it satisfies my greeds and/or ego; or am I doing it to help another person?”–things like that.

Something Deeperism is very compatible with the religious life. It is a philosophical argument for heading into a spiritual path and for keeping your spiritual path focused the Light that tells us we are all in this together and must be respectful and kind to ourselves and one another, the Light that alone knows that and how our life is meaningful: to keep fighting against our tendency to make Gods out of ideas and feelings: be they simple gimme-gimmes, or deeply-felt narratives about why our life is meaningful.

Something Deeperism seeks to keep dogmatism and skepticism in their proper places: in service of an ever-growing insight into that and in what way the undoubtables are actually True. Because that is the only path that allows for coherent thoughts and actions. Therefore, when thought-tools like dogmatism or skepticism are used in a way that undermines that path, they undermine their only possible meaningful purpose.

But what about for groups? What about for a political theory? Must we convince everyone of the preeminence of Something Deeperism before we set out a framework for shared government?

No! All we need to do is to make this point: whatever your belief system is, to the degree it is meaningful to yourself or anyone, it refuses to compromise on those values without which human thought is meaningless to itself (awareness, clarity, honesty-with-oneself, competency, kindness, shared joy, etc); and it also refuses to compromise on those values without which coherent public discussions and actions are impossible: accuracy, competency, honesty, and clarity in public debate; anti-corruption in politics and business.

People often agree to those values, but then let themselves and others set them aside in the name of some justifiable ends, or because they claim their opponents can’t or won’t abide by them, or simply because “you gotta be realistic”. Naturally, life is not perfectly clear-cut; however, the fate of all of us and the world depends upon how we humans manage ourselves; and while we don’t know everything and don’t share all the same beliefs, we should all be able to agree that to the degree a human is on the right track, that human shares certain basic values (obvious things like awareness, clarity, honesty, open-hearted/mindedness, decency, loving kindness; an honest search for accuracy, for competency, for what’s best for everyone; etc), and so it behooves us to keep working to at least protect those basic values that we do all share and that we can therefore all get on board with, and without which none of us can either understand our private lives or public discourses.

The more corrupt an individual or a state is, the easier it is for low impulses (greeds, lusts, vanities, lazinesses, delusions, cruelties, etc) to indulge their cravings and rule the moment, and the harder it is for high impulses (the ones we’ve been advocating for throughout this essay) to stand up for what is right and rule the moment. We want to always work to push against corruption in ourselves and in our state.

Ideas and feelings often tempt us; they want to count as Gods; and so they often fool us into supposing we are behaving well, or at least well-enough, when deep within we know we are heading down the wrong path. That is corruption in an individual. We can push against it by pursuing the basic spiritual values with an understanding that human insight into the Truth is an ongoing process of better and better organizing ideas and feelings around the Light within, and so requires constant effort and refinement.

But what about in the public sphere? How do we push back on the corruptions within the state? It seems like the starting point is to admit that they are a more fundamental issue than our personal political agendas because they create the framework within which our personal political agendas can be fairly tried. And we should only want our personal political agendas to be pursued if they are actually superior, and we should know that we cannot have successful long-term policies without building consensus. Therefore, we should all demand clear, honest, non-corrupt governing from everyone–not just those whose policies we disagree with. This is correct; but would it even be enough if everyone agreed to it? Most everyone is willing to nod at it, and that clearly isn’t enough. I don’t know what to do.

Here’s something: Recall that personal Something Deeperism has two main tenets: moral relativism is a hopeless slip-and-slide so you need to accept some basic spiritual values–the ones without which you cannot understand, believe-in, or care about your own thoughts and actions; however, blind faith just causes you to mindlessly clutch ideas you don’t understand, which also causes you to lose internal-meaning and traction within your own thoughts and actions. If we apply the same principles to political Something Deeperism, we’d have the demand for protecting our shared spiritual values (already made), but we’d also have the demand that we better understand and follow them, this time as a group. That would mean that part of what we’d discuss in public discourse would be “what is awareness, accuracy, honesty, decency, kindness? How to know they actually matter? How to know when we’re adequately aware, accurate, … ?”

Can we have that conversation in a productive way if some of us are atheists, some are fundamentalists of this or that religion, some are liberals of this or that religion, some are secular humanists, some think abstract ideas are unhelpful, etc? Or would this just invite chaos and discord? The political Something Deeperism was supposed to be less demanding than the individual Something Deeperism: we’re not asking everyone sign on to Something Deeperism, just that they agree that we can publicly share certain core values because, while we may feud about many details, we can still agree that we can and should demand valuing and pursuing honesty, accuracy, competency, kindness, and so on from ourselves and others in the public sphere. With political Something Deeperism, I was just trying to get us all to see that we have shared fundamental values, so we can all communicate with each other and work meaningfully together–to the degree we as a collective don’t jettison those values. OK, but wouldn’t everyone already agree to that? I don’t know; I feel like we slip away from it quite easily and I thought that if we were to all go through this logic together, we’d see that slipping away from our shared values is not acceptable: it causes each of us to betray our own individual values and to thus lose meaningful traction in our own ideas and feelings; and it causes us as a group to lose our ability to share meaning and thus coherently discuss ideas and make choices. In short, it invites confusion in at both the individual and the group level, and that invites corruption in, and that is bad for everyone. I thought if we would just go over this reasoning together, well then,
we’d,
we’d all agree to demand more and more clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, kindness of our elected officials; we’d all ag

AMW/BW

Something Deeperism vs Literalism

Something Deeperism vs Literalism

From the point of view of an individual, Something Deeperism implies working to better and better learn that and in what way awareness, clarity, honesty, competency, kindness, and most of all selfless love are the Way; while simultaneously discovering and understanding the Truth this way leads to and that also leads to the Truth. Ie: there’s a seed of wisdom within each of us that one must unpack for themselves in order to live in a way that they can understand, believe in, care about, and, well, stand. A philosophy of Something Deeperism wouldn’t claim that the foregoing is true; merely that it is either True, and one can find a way to better and better understand that and how it is True, or we humans have no way to coherently choose one thought over another, one action over another (because unless awareness … is really onto something, as opposed to just being another ultimately perhaps-meaningless value judgement; what way of thinking and acting do we have that really means anything to any of us?).

When one tries to dispense with awareness … Truth … awareness, one runs into the problem of relativism. If as far as we know everything is just perhaps-pointless impulses mixed with logical conjectures that may or may not have any ultimate meaning, how can we say anything meaningful? How can you say, “everything I say may be ultimately meaningless” in a meaningful way? And how can you say, “everything I feel may be ultimately meaningless” in a way that feels meaningful to you? To the degree one assumes that things like awareness, clarity, honesty, competence, and selfless love; one ceases to be meaningful to oneself, and all of one’s thoughts, including that assumption turn to mush. Hence Something Deeperism’s suggestion: accept these undoubtable values: don’t pretend you can coherently doubt them; all that does is make you lie to yourself, confusing your thoughts further. And so you remove the only meaningful steering wheel your thought can have, which allows your thought and action to be hijacked by greeds, lusts, vainglories, and all the normal nonsense; plus, you feel all the time like your mouth’s stuffed with cotton balls.

However, when one claims literal knowledge of the Truth, one runs into many problems. We cannot stand outside of our own thoughts and assess how they measure up to some objective standard of Truth: for all they can reason to on their own, our ideas and feelings don’t relate to the Truth in any meaningful way, if there is a Truth at all. So then one offers the idea of faith: accept the literal Truth of, for example, the scriptures and go from there. But then you run into the same problem as the relativist: you’ve opened yourself up to turning off the only meaningful steering wheel your thought has. Indeed, the relativist’s mistake is really just a variant of literalism. Human thought is simply not capable of literal/definitive/certain/1:1 insight. Even if a dogma you accept as literally True somehow turned out to be literally True (which I don’t think is possible, since dogma’s are ideas held with feelings, but whatever is going on is whatever is going on, not ideas and feelings about whatever is going on; but, again, for the sake of argument, supposing … ), there’s still the problem of how you are going to interpret that Truth in your day-to-day life. You, with your merely human ideas and feelings: you are not going to interpret the Truth perfectly (even supposing they could recite words that somehow connected perfectly the the Truth). But literal knowledge implies perfection: no room for error, misunderstanding, or confusion. I submit to you: even if a human could have literal knowledge, that knowledge would be meaningful only if the human had insight into that and how it was True. Hence Something Deeperism’s suggestion: don’t just blindly accept and follow dogmas, but gain insight into them.

Literalism is a misunderstanding of human thought. We are not formal systems. We are ideas, feelings, and etc all working together, and our own thought is only meaningful to us if it follows its own rules: logical rigor is one of them, but not the only one, and not the most fundamental one. Logic knows that unless there’s really a point in what we say and do, there’s no point in being logical. That is not at all to say that we can dispense with logic. We cannot make sense to ourselves if we do not think logically; we cannot choose our thoughts coherently, in a way meaningful to us. It’s just that logic cannot coherently be used to doubt meaningfulness and other values without which our thoughts ceases to believe in itself. The mistake of literalism is to pretend human understanding is identical with assenting to principles and following logical reasonings based on those principles. That is just a little portion of human understanding.

Something Deeperism suggests we accept those dogmas without which human thought have no meaning to human thought, but do so remembering that those dogmas are meaningless without insight into that and how they are True. Literalism suggests we need to accept xyz ideas as true or True (depending on a given literalism’s flavor) and then use reasoning to convert these truth or Truths into other literal beliefs and practical decisions. Something Deeperism suggests we find a way to organize our ideas and feelings around the Truth shining through our conscious experience better and better, with the goal of gaining more and more insight into that and how it is the case that there is a Truth shining through our conscious experience. Literalism thinks you either know it / believe it, or you don’t. Something Deeperism thinks knowledge and belief are things of degrees. Literalism suggests we need to assent to True dogmas and then interpret them. Something Deeperism suggests one organize one’s ideas and feelings better and better around the Truth within, understanding that one will never perfectly translate the Truth into ideas and feelings.

AMW/BW

Failed again

Something Deeperism – Midway Between Dogmatism & Skepticism

Something Deeperism – Midway Between Dogmatism & Skepticism

Something Deeperism is the middle way between excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. I have an inner joy that tells me love is real and that I must pursue ever more and more insight into that inner joy and that the way to succeed in this endeavor is through more and more awareness, clarity, honesty, competency, kindness, gentleness, love, sharing and giving. If that inner joy is not really onto something, I have no way to discover thoughts and actions that really mean anything to me, that I really understand, care about, or am interested in. To the degree I fail to make progress in the inner calling to better and better understand the truth of that inner calling (both that it is true and in what way it is true), I lose traction in my own conscious moment: my ideas and feelings become less and less meaningful to me / to themselves / to this series of conscious moments. Therefore, I should not sacrifice anything to the task of gaining more and more insight into the joy within by seeking ever more awareness, clarity, honesty, competency, kindness, gentleness, love, sharing, and giving.

If an intellectual idea or feeling or (as is most often the case in human thought) a combination of ideas and feelings causes me to lose engagement with the inner joy, that that idea, feeling, or combo is leading me astray. For example, if I focus on my idea of God and what God thinks of me and other people and etc. more than I focus on finding God within, then my religion can actually lead me away from God. For another example, if I focus on avoiding intellectual errors at all cost and lose sight of the fact that intellectual accuracy only matters if there’s something that is actually True, actually meaning, actually worth aligning one’s ideas and feelings with—well, then, my skepticism has undermined the only possible meaningful use of scepticism: helping me to get closer to the Truth.

Both excessive religious fundamentalism and excessive skepticism misunderstand human thought.
Human thought is not a perfect science; our ideas are not perfectly clear objects. When we use completely precise definitions to perfect certain aspects of our thought (into, for example, mathematical reasoning), we necessarily jettison other aspects of our thought (for example, the ability to speak meaningfully about absolute concepts like “meaning”, “truth”, and “goodness”). That’s not to say rigorously defined intellectual disciplines have no place in human thought or that we cannot fit meaningfully into a human’s journey as a whole. The point is merely that human thought is not just ideas, nor even just ideas and feelings. It is ideas and feelings plus intangibles like awareness, meaning, love. You can have theories about what these intangibles are, but you cannot capture them with theories—they are experiences, not ideas about experiences; and they provide the meaningfulness without which none of us can care about anything, including theories.

Human thought (ideas, feelings, and whatever else is in a human conscious moment) loses meaning to itself to the degree it does not meaningfully engage with the Absolute (ie: what is really going on, what really matters, what should really be done; as opposed to opinions, theories, feelings about what is going on, … ). And if we try to turn the Absolute into perfectly clear ideas (in practice often tied to feelings of certainty), we are shift our core conscious focus from what is actually going on to mere ideas and feelings about what is actually going on: we miss the mark. That is true if we convince ourselves that we know exactly how to interpret xyz holy scriptures, or if we convince ourselves that we should not have faith in anything except doubt. In both cases, we’ve turned some notion—some mixture of ideas and feelings—into our Absolute (even if, as in the case of radical skepticism, we refuse to countenance the idea of the “Absolute”: we’ve still clenched our dogma with the sense of THIS IS RIGHT!, and so have tried to make an intellectual idea into what is really going on, which, of course, is deeper and wider than intellectual ideas).

You’ll note that I sometimes use “I” and sometimes “we” in the above. That’s because part of what the shared joy tells us, and part of the inner insight whose Truth we must discover in order to understand, care about, believe in, and engage in our own thoughts and actions, is this: we are all in this together and are essentially the same and, just as my ideas and feelings can adequately communicate with each other and the Light shining through my conscious moment, different human beings can adequately communicate with one another.

Something Deeperism entails the never ending attempt to become more aware, honest, kind, generous, good, decent, loving: to keep working to become more and more truly competent as a whole being—from the Light out through ideas and feelings into this shared space where we interact with others likewise rooted in the Light.

How to prove the above? Or how to say when, for example, one’s spiritual insight is “adequate”? There is no philosophy or religion that can be 100% proven by ideas. Our ideas do not perfectly capture concepts like “meaning” and in and of themselves, there’s no reason to suppose ideas actually mean anything. The above is only meant to point adequately towards a sense of things within us all, and to help us to hold it up together for a moment and think about what conclusions we should draw from it.

Dr Doctor Von Aenywey

Shrugs and “sure”s provided by BW & AMW

What is Love?

What is Love?

Is love a feeling?
Is love an attitude?
Is love affection, respect, caring, empathy, understanding?
Is love willing oneself to care for another’s spiritual/emotional/intellectual/physical health?

When humans love, they feel affection, respect, caring, empathy and understanding; and they also will themselves to act affectionately, respectfully, and with caring, empathy and understanding, and to do what they can to nurture the loved one’s physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health.

However, love is more than this. Because real love successfully nurtures the spirit of oneself and one’s loved one. Real love is wise and knows how to actually help oneself and others live well. Love is not just something people do, but something that God does; and, since for God there’s no distinction between doing and being, something that eternally and infinitely IS. Human love is successful to the degree it understands and follows divine Love.

INTERRUPTING INTERLUDE
I feel that to the degree you fail to love everyone, you fail to love anyone. The proof’s based on the interconnected nature of all created things; and how the One Love shines through it all. The proof’s based on the difference between an open and a closed heart/mind (the gate must be open if anything’s to pass through, but if the gate’s open, everything can pass through). The proof’s based on all the chalk I’ve been chewing, all the werewolfing hunched-over, open arms bent beseechingly upward, yellow-fangdrooling bellowing I’ve been preening, all the alleycats I’ve been hissing.
INTERLUDE ENDS HERE

Love is a decision (we choose to love) and a feeling/action (we love) and something bigger than us that takes over and guides our decisions and actions (Love as spiritual Reality).

Can you choose how you feel?
Yes and No.
The point of a spiritual path is to change yourself, so that you become wiser: more able to understand what Pure Love (ie: spiritual love, godly love, love that is 100% good and helpful/useful/uplifting/selfless; love that only compassionately holds and uplifts) is and more willing and able to live in and through and for Pure Love.
We can choose to work every day to become more patient, more empathetic, more understanding, gentler, kinder, more insightful. And so we can choose to work to change both our feelings and ideas, to bring them more in line with wisdom — more in accordance with the counsel of Pure Love.

But ideas and feelings are not wise.
In and of themselves, they do not know what is really going on, what really matters, what should really be done. To become wiser, ideas and feelings must more adequately understand and follow Pure Love. We must ask Pure Love to guide us; It must oblige; and we must accept Its counsel. Our fundamental life-choice is whether or not we consciously turn more and more towards the Love shining in and through all things.

[Here the essay turned into another standard Something Deeperism essay; concluding standardly:]

But how? But don’t we know? Doesn’t the very sense that pushes us towards seeking a life lived in and through and for Pure Love contain within itself a sense of the path we must follow?: Think clear, honest, aware, kind, open-hearted and -minded; seek real fellowship, sharing kind joy around the understanding that we are all in this together and all share the same Light and therefore the same rights and responsibilities.

Love is accepting, assenting to, caring for, celebrating and lifting up. So I guess Pure Love does that 100% no questions asked for every little bit of the interconnected whole??

Anyway,

Lisa Singz Allown

Editor’s Note: Erich Fromm defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” in The Road Less Travelled, but the author didn’t hear about it until Bell Hooks mentioned it in All About Love: New Visions. She also mentions affection and caring as being part of love’s works, though in and of themselves not enough to constitute love. Neither the author nor editor read Erich Fromm, or more than a few pages of Bell Hooks. Some projects are scholarly-precise, and some are lucky if they can stagger out into the sun to die a happy death* in the soft forgiving damp springtime air.

[Editor’s Note: See Albert Camus’s La Mort Heureuse (A Happy Death).
Or should you? He didn’t see fit to publish it, and though completed in 1938 it was not released until 1971, after the author had been dead for like 11 years.]

[:en]Auto Draft[:fr]IDF – How to use Design Thinking In Your Life?[:]

[:en]Auto Draft[:fr]IDF – How to use Design Thinking In Your Life?[:]

[:fr]​I’m trying to write an essay outlining the fundamental concepts of Something Deeperism (the general-philosophy/worldview that holds that humans have insight into the Truth, but this insight is poetic rather than literal [ie: accurate insight into the Truth is meaningful to all aspects of a human’s conscious moment–including the intellect–, but this insight not liable to precise definitions or intellectual or emotional certainties]). I’m not making much progress. Perhaps if I tried design thinking: empathize with my readers (why do I want to explain these ideas to them and to myself? What’s the point? Why do any of us matter and how could these theories actually be put to real meaningful use in human lives?); Define the problem (how to demonstrate that Something Deeperism could be true and is worth pursuing?; how to explain the path towards active insight into the Truth in a way that is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually rigorous? and how to do all this without either author or 99.99999999% of the readership being Buddha-enlightened?); Ideate ? But I’ve been doing that part forever: talking to myself, jotting down notions; Prototype: again, I’ve been at it forever: writing essay after essay that doesn’t quite work; test: hmmm: who will bother with this project? I can’t pay them. I should make a list of the questions I want to be able to answer about Something Deeperism and then try to answer them and then have people read what I wrote and ask them to answer the same questions. Andy my ideating and prototyping could use more discipline.[:]

What Can We Say 1 & 2

What Can We Say 1 & 2

1

What strange times! What can we say?

Let’s start with what we all can agree on and go from there.

Example 1: Let’s demand aware clear honest thought searching for truly better ways of thinking and acting, with the whole process guard-railed by the understanding that to the degree we do not prioritize sharing kind joy we are going in the wrong direction. Any human dogma that fails to accept that principle (not so much those words, nor even those concepts, but the inner-senses-of-things they imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately point towards) is meaningless/boring/not-believable to human minds and hearts. So to the degree one abandons it, one disappears from the conscious moment and becomes an amoeba, pushed around by whims that rise up, as whims always will, declaring themselves, as is their spurty want, great Truths. Much wiser to keep working to better and better center oneself around the Truth–deeper and wider than human ideas, and thus not liable to literal/definitive descriptions, but not therefore completely severed from human ideas (think of how a good poem can, when read with an open mind/heart, imperfectly but still meaningfully recreate the author’s experience within the reader’s conscious moment). That way one can compare a given whim’s claims against the Joy within that alone knows that and how human thought and action actually matter. We don’t need to be enlightened to agree on this principle, and we aren’t hypocrites if we agree to it and don’t always live up to it. The point is to agree that this is the goal and to throw back words and deeds that do not live up to it: “please try again!”, not “you’re out of the club!”, which anyway clearly violates the sharing kind joy rule.

Example 2: Let’s demand clean government. We will not all agree on everything. However, we can all agree that our only hope is 1) clear honest well-considered win-win policy decisions are superior to randomly generated / whim- & prejudice-based ones (if not, we humans have no method for coherently thinking our way to truly better thoughts and actions, and are thus at the mercy of chance and history, which would imply there’s no point having political opinions, or any ideas at all [note that you have no good reason to suppose this, and to the degree you do suppose it, you don’t suppose you should bother thinking anything, and so you undercut all your thoughts, including that attempted-supposition]) and 2) our individual and group decisions are, on the whole, clear … win-win. So let’s agree that we will not tolerate dishonesty, nor will we stand for doing any old stupid thing, no matter how much money or other powers request that stupid thing. Ah! But here’s the rub! For most will assent to these principles, but then, in the same breath, they’ll come to completely different conclusions about which politicians are lying and which ones are doing any old stupid thing for the sake of money, ego, or blind worldly dogmatism grabbed with religious fervor. How? What is going on here? And how to fix it before it critically undermines our shared interests with the persistent myth that we are not on the same team and cannot share kind joy?

Example 3: Let’s agree that human ideas and feelings are not Gods, and that we must therefore ask over and over again for the great God to bless us and make us wise enough to understand that and how it is True that what we say and do really does matter, and that we really are all in this together and cannot escape one another and so must find a way, if it takes us eternity!, for everyone to share kind joy with everyone.

2

What strange times! What can we say?

Upon death, I’ve heard, the soul is led to the River Lethe, where it forgets all but its deepest, most profound, most spiritual lessons. There, every bit of you that is not Love disappears. Everything not soaked through with Love is, as some have put it, burned in the fire. And so, the theory concludes, the eternal purpose of human beings is to understand and live Love. Insofar as we accomplish this, we succeed. Insofar as we don’t, we fail and gently disappear.

Another, related, line of thought runs thus: We are all in this together and the whole rises and falls in accordance with how well we all treat each other, and also by how well we all treat shared resources: our immediate and larger environment, our governments and their organizations, our written and spoken thoughts, and so on–these structures within which all live.

There are of course those who hold that it doesn’t matter what we do. After all, the game goes on forever and there’s no stopping until all are saved. Even, they reason, if we blow up this world: that’s cool–we’ll just inhabit other forms in another world and keep on rocking. Perhaps. I couldn’t say for sure from where I sit, on a tall stool at the great front window of some no-account SouthEasternConnecticut coffee shop, watching the rain stop and a wintry droop-leafed rose bush wobble in the gray winds, the various accounts drifting see-saw all around me. However, it seems safe to say that as far as we know it would be best to not blow our hand. Better to go easy on one another and our shared physical and mental space, to seek more and more wisdom and, no matter the details of our lives, to focus first and foremost on sharing kind joy. Granted: that’s the sort of thing everybody knows, irregardless how foolish we all sometimes are and how high-flying our theories sometimes get; but, you know, at Christmas we remind ourselves of these platitudes, and that, trite as they may be, they are still True, which still Matters.

Authors: Bartleby Willard & Andy Watson
Editorial Concerns / Copyright: AMW

[correction to CNL 2018: delete “no-account”]

A Belief in Goodness

A Belief in Goodness

Dear God,

Please give us Goodness. How hard it is for us to believe in Goodness! What if Goodness is real? What if this life really is most fundamentally for sharing kind joy? How great! But also scary. Because it would mean we have to put loving compassion ahead of our longings to look out for ourselves and those closest to us. It does not mean we should not look out for ourselves and those closest to us, just that we need to relax that goal and open ourselves up to a higher one. But what if the higher one isn’t even there? Or what if we misunderstand the higher goal and so end up hurting ourselves and those we’re closest to for no good reason? What is the faith from which we must begin? That Goodness will harm no one? It’s not supposed to. It is supposed to be infinitely kind. But how much time, energy, and wealth does Goodness really want me to give away? And in what form am I to make this sacrifice? I guess calling it a sacrifice only shows that I’ve no real insight into Goodness, since all Goodness is trying to do is create lives that we can stand. As we lie dying, what must we have accomplished in order to know we made a decent effort?

Please give us Goodness. Please guide us well. Please keep us safely folded within the Light. Please help us to have whole being insight into how it is True that our top priorities should be to love the Goodness shining through all things and ourselves and everyone else with all our being. Please center our ideas and feelings around that Goodness meaningfully, and help us to keep improving the way we relate ideas, feelings, words and deeds to Goodness. Please help us to understand the Love that transcends ideas and feelings, that is prior to them, that is of God. Please keep us within kindness, within Joy.

Sincerely,

All Your Children Here
in this ragged fire
where we learn the faith
that heals the soul
so when we die its fine because we’ve learned to see the Light even when blindfolded by ideas, feelings, and other illusions that can either be fun and beautiful or ugly and destructive–depending on how we relate to them. They’re for the Light to play and laugh within, not to smother the Light in boring lies. Right? If it is right, help us to more and more whole being insight into how it is True and how its Truth should move us through this life. If it is not right, there is no Truth that means anything to human beings, and so we’ll never know anything since as we try to know what is meaningless to us, our brains and hearts turn off and we know nothing, peeling out into the chaos of blah blah blah

Author: Something Deeperist Committee, 2017 Convention

Editor:BW
Copyright: AW

The Law

The Law

Here is a spiritual question.

If meditation is too painful for you because the hurt inside is yelling so loudly, should you still meditate? Or is it wiser to stop? And if the latter, is there some substitution you could make so that your practice might limp along until you, in a reasonably short eventuality, are in a position to resume meditation?

Here is a practical consideration.

One can well begin the process by demanding incrementally more dignity for oneself. By that I don’t mean to suggest that mopers can cure themselves by taking to the streets and demanding passerbys salute them, call them “Sir” or “Madam” and otherwise pay homage. I’m speaking rather of simple, private adjustments in one’s life. For example, tidying up one’s apartment, organizing one’s finances, keeping oneself and one’s dress clean. Or, calling forward a more specific example in order to awaken the senses and with it one’s imagination, suppose it was Saturday morning and you were alone in this apartment, eating a pomegranate; pomegranates, though delicious and healthful reminders of the wonders of international trade, can be rather messy; no great surprise, then, that you notice, while passing your bathroom mirror, that you’ve got some red streaking on your chin, adding a sort of Halloweeny ghoulishness to your aspect; now, you’re not planning on going anywhere for a while, and you hadn’t even noticed the juice stain until you’d seen it in the mirror, so it clearly causes you no physical discomfort; it may even be possible that a bit of pomegranate juice on the skin provides a little health and beauty benefit by infusing your flesh with antioxidants; perhaps you should leave well enough alone and continue walking past the mirror; but no: it is at this point that our method inserts itself, explaining that for the sake of your own private dignity, you break your momentum, turn back towards the mirror and wash off the pomegranate juice, also taking the opportunity to straighten your hair. Do you see? In this way, you communicate to yourself at a very deep level that you mean business, that you demand something of yourself and for yourself.

Indeed, even if a meditation practice must be paused, one’s spiritual practice need not collapse in upon itself. In addition to taking care of your space and your appearance, you can also focus on being mindful about what you say and how you present yourself. You can keep a journal each night, writing down how you felt and how you behaved and what you want to do next and how you might accomplish your goals. You can exercise. You can breathe carefully, taking care not to overbreathe and feeling the stillness created when you breathe air out but do not immediately breathe air back in. You can even add silent chanting meditation to your walk to work and to the time spent falling in and out of sleep. A good one is, “what should I do, what should I do, what should I do, ….” Another nice phrase to run over and over again in your head is, “how can I actually make things better for me and everyone else?”, or some variation like “how can we all make things better for everyone?”

We humans. Do you remember the spot in the creek where the channel suddenly and precipitously narrowed, creating a funnel of white water emptying into a deep (5ft?) and wide (10ft?) trench in the creek? It was between Napier Park and the bridge over Main Street that led from the front gate of GE to the downtown, which was of course nothing more than a small section of Main Street. Creeks ever evolve, and I don’t know how long after 1992 this slice lasted. Certainly, in 2010, it was no more. An awesome sight, but also a little terrifying. What I enjoyed doing at the time was tossing a stick into the creek (pronounced in this essay, out of nostalgia and shouldershrug, as “crick”) right above the diving tunnel and watching its fate. Because the water churned so violently both forward and backward at that spot, the stick would often spend several seconds jiggling back and forth in place before the chaos’s fickleness resolved into the inevitable suck-down under the white water. The water after the frothing was glassy green and deep, and from the right vantage you could see the water gushing into the deep spot as a straight white tube sunk into the green still waters. You never knew when the stick would emerge. It might be a few seconds, it might be five minutes. This private research of mine held me in good stead when my family went to nearby Niagara Falls and learned, in an incredible 3-D film with surround-sound and a surround-screen wrapping around the first fourth of the auditorium, of someone who went over Niagara Falls in a giant rubber ball with extra oxygen stored inside, but who, held under the falls for 14 hours with only three hours worth of oxygen in his tank, was found the next day inside his perfectly preserved one ton tomb.

“O divine Niagara, be prepared on July the 5th to receive a faithful worshiper of your beauty and of the mystery that covers you, and if you will to keep me with you eternally as your prisoner, I accept the sacrifice in the hope that your divine nymphs will spray my grave with flowers from the gardens of your palaces.” (George Stathakis, Buffalo Evening News from I guess sometime shortly after 7/5/1930)

If you’re just a human, tossed about by the noises inside and outside, a prisoner to the white water of stimuli and other physical slaps, how do you proceed?

Some say that asking any question except “how can we make things better for everyone?” will lead to the correct answer. Simply because all other questions miss out on the fundamental interconnectedness and spiritual importance of all sentient creatures, and so ask the wrong question. No matter how passionately, creatively, logically, interestingly you answer the wrong question, you still end up with the wrong answer. And, so goes the reasoning, it is this failure to even quite want to make things better for everyone, that keeps humanity breaking apart on the rocks all the time. Is this true? Didn’t, for example, Marx ask that question, and end up finding an answer that has not made everything better for everyone? I guess the nuance is that people ask questions that they may think answer that question, like “how can we give everyone material security?” or “how can we get everyone into heaven?”, but in focusing on these questions, they skip over the one they are purportedly answering, and actually answer something quite different.

But if that’s the case, then how can you ask anyone to ask this question, since in asking it they inevitably skip over it, and only think they are asking it? Well, we have to keep tuning ourselves, keep refining our approaches, keep coming back to the real question, the one that understands we are all in this together and must find and share kind joy together. We can’t come up with ideas, policies, or systems to once and for all correctly ask and answer our question. But we can agree that it is our goal and keep refining our ideas, policies, and systems with the understanding that they are not the answer, that the answer is known only to the inner joy that knows what this life is really for, and as such cannot be perfectly translated into ideas, policies, and/or systems, but that it be better or worse translated into such what we say and do, and so it can and should remain our shared goal and standard. Not to bring about heaven on earth or to force everyone into heaven. Those kind of goals make sense only for God. But to work together within the only framework that can possibly mean anything to human beings: how can we grow together in the understanding of how we are all in this together and how we should therefore treat ourselves, each other, and the resources (be they ideas, governments, raw goods, etc) we share?

Author: Susan Jes Sayin
Editory: B Willard
Copyright: AM Watson

What is Something Deeperism?

What is Something Deeperism?

A Quick Intro To Something Deeperism

1) Basic Definition: There is a Truth (aka: Light; God; True Good; etc — we’re pointing with words imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately towards a shared vista). The Truth shines through each conscious moment. The path of wisdom is relating the rest of our conscious moments (ideas, feelings, etc, all working together) better and better around the Truth so that there is less and less gap between the Truth and our words and deeds. In this way the Truth guides our thought-as-a-whole (feelings, ideas, awareness, and the Truth shining through all things, all working imperfectly but still meaningfully together) better and better, allowing us to translate the Truth better and better into words and deeds.

The path towards wisdom is the seed of wisdom: By following our inner push towards aware, clear, accurate, competent, honest, compassionate, kind, joyfully-together thinking and acting, centered around the Light within ourselves and everyone else; our ideas and feeling get better and better at following and understanding the Light; allowing the Light to guide our thought-as-a-whole to more and more aware .. joyfully-together thinking and acting.

We don’t start out with only what feels like inkling of the Truth. And the Truth would have to be deeper and wider than our (oh so human!) ideas and feelings, so we can never have literal / definitive / 1:1 / exclusive insight into the Truth. However, we cannot have literal certainty about anything; and we wouldn’t be able to understand, care about, or follow literal certainty anyway. And, as far as we know, we can do as the mystics suggest: via meditation, prayer, contemplation, and loving kindness practice; we can think and act more and more aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, and joyfully together; gaining more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say “we are all in this together”.

We can’t have literal insight into the Truth. But that does not mean we cannot have an adequate whole-being insight into the Truth. Such an insight would allow our emotional and intellectual ideas to point adequately well towards the Truth. And it is such an adequate whole-being pointing-towards what is really going on and what really matters that our intellectual thought requires if it is to know how it should be used, and what it should be used in service of.

Ideas and feelings know they are limited. They know they should not run the show alone. Pursuing wisdom is pursuing adequate insight into foundational values that allow ideas and feelings to function adequately well and with adequately clear consciences.

We should seek a better and better organization of ideas and feelings around the Light within that alone Knows what’s Best. But ideas and feelings are notoriously limited; so we’ll never get it perfect: we need to keep reassessing, admitting errors, trying again, pushing out from within, pushing for less and less gap between the Light outside our thinking/feeling/perceiving and the Light within our thinking/feeling/perceiving.

2) Basic Argument for Adopting and Relentlessly Pursuing Truth, and Bounding that Pursuit with the Assumption that the Truth Ratifies Goods Like Awareness, Honesty, Kindness … : No human’s thoughts and actions can mean anything much to him or her unless the following requirements are met:
(a) the Truth is real (ie: some ways are truly more preferable than others)
(b) one’s thought-as-a-whole relate meaningfully to the Truth (ie: something along the lines of the following: one’s ideas, feelings and the Truth shining through all things can work together and understand each other adequately);
(c) Truth is infinitely aware, clear, honest, competent, kind and good and helpful; and is here equally for everyone. And we can grow in our understanding of the Truth by following our own inborn sense towards aware … helpful thinking and acting; reaching always for more insight and compassion by seeking always to be more and more centered around and aware of the Truth within and shining through all things.

The state of affairs (a-c) is the bare minimum required for a human being to be able to truly understand, care about, and believe in his or her own ideas and feelings. Of course we cannot have literal knowledge about such things, but we could work to gain more and more whole-being insight into that and in what sense (a-c) are essentially True.

Note that you don’t necessarily have to accept the metaphysics of (a-c) to follow, understand, or care about your own thoughts and actions. You have to gain the whole-being insight towards which (a-c) imperfectly, but not therefore necessarily inadequately points. You can play skeptic and doubt the existence of a Truth without particularly undermining your own thinking/acting; just as you can play believer while still drastically undermining your own thinking/acting. Wisdom is a whole-being insight into the Light within. To be coherent (for your own thoughts and actions to be meaningful to you), what you need is to find whole-being insight into that and in what sense (a-c) are essentially True. That is not going to be a literal insight.

So why bother with Something Deeperism? If success in Something Deeperism is not the same as agreeing to the ideas of Something Deeperism, why pursue a philosophy of Something Deeperism? Better ideas help to orientate one’s thought-as-a-whole better towards what’s really going on and what really matters, which in turn helps one gain more whole-being insight into that and in what way it is True to say we are all in this together. To the degree we lack whole-being insight into that sense of things, we cannot believe in, understand, or care about anything we think or do.

Intellectual thoughts are a really big part of how we relate to ourselves, other people and this life. So we want to choose ideas that point us more towards our real situation. That way, we are in a better position to gain whole-being-insight into the Truth, and that insight can flow more easily/naturally out into our ideas.

So, Yes: It is true that of course ideas without insight are not worth much, and it is very possible to be more or less wise than one’s ideas. Nonetheless, part of growing in wisdom is working always to replace worse sketches of what is really going on and what really matters with better sketches of what is really going on and what really matters. Hence the usefulness of philosophy, religion, and wisdom practices; and hence the usefulness of Something Deeperism, which is basically just a gentle (but persistent) reminder that there’s no point in either skepticism and faith unless they are helping us to gain more insight into the Light within that alone knows what’s really going on and what really matters (and that therefore alone knows that and in what sense false beliefs should be avoided [the raison d’etre of skepticisms] and true beliefs should be adopted [the raison d’etre of faiths]).

Furthermore, a philosophy of Something Deeperism can help groups recognize and make use of all the common ground their members have. Something Deeperism helps us to realize that none of our philosophies make sense to any of us in the absence of insight into and use of aware … helpful thinking and acting. And so Something Deeperism keeps us all on the same page: Whatever our differences, we can all agree on aware … helpful thinking and acting, and on the need for us all to seek wisdom; and to agree that wisdom is honest and kind, not dishonest and cruel; and to agree that it is counterproductive to pretend wisdom can fit into a literal set of metaphysical, political, and/or philosophical ideas. All this implies a shared starting point: a place of clarity we can refuse to abandon: we will disagree on much, but should we not agree on (no matter what! for if we sacrifice this, we sacrifice the only coherency any of us could have) awareness, honesty, clarity, competency, accuracy, kindness, and shared joy; all bound up in a respect for wisdom and for our different vantages on what surpasses all human feelings and thoughts????

3) Basic Argument for Seeking a Relationship with the Truth that is Founded Primarily on Direct Whole-Being Experience of the Truth, and for Always Push-ing Against the Human Tendency to Shift One’s Focus onto Ideas and Feelings about the Truth: Putting more focus on ideas and feelings about the Truth than on the Truth Itself is a grave and a common error. The Truth is not ideas and/or feelings about what is really going on, but what is really going on itself; the way forward is to relate ideas and feelings to the Truth more and more meaningfully — a process that self-defeats to the degree we confuse ideas/feelings with the Truth. When you put too much stock in ideas and/or feelings about the Truth, your focus turns away from a whole-being coordination around the Truth and you confuse and frustrate yourself by more and more pathetically/desperately clutching ideas and feelings that (since they claim a clarity and certainty you deepdown know they don’t have) are ultimately meaningless to you.

[Note that notions of “there is no Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth” are just as guilty of the above-sketched error as are notions of “I know the Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth”.]

[Note that we need some principles to help us navigate human life, since ideas are necessary for interacting with this world and our own thoughts, and without any firm principles, you spend every second trying to build up to a coherent philosophy from scratch. The principles of Something Deeperism should be adopted, just not grasped too tightly. They know they are mere ideas and are therefore like evolving, never-quite-adequate ladders towards whole-being insight (ideas, feels, etc centered around the Light/Truth) into the Truth. The idea is to create a ladder that we can see fits adequately well with our inner moment; and then work to travel deeper and deeper into the Truth via that ladder, which will allow the Truth to explicate Itself to our thought-as-a-whole better and better, allowing us to understand better and better in what sense any given ladder is adequate and inadequate.]

[Note that we are all already Something Deeperists. We all already know we need insight into why it is TRUE that we are all in this together in order to believe in, care about, or understand our own thinking or acting; but we also know that we will never have literal insight into such a TRUTH, and that confusing ideas about the TRUTH with the TRUTH creates a great deal of trouble. Something Deeperism is not here to reject or contradict your philosophy or religion. It is here to work with all of us to help us all remember what our philosophies and religions are for: they are there to help us to understand that and in what way it is TRUE to say we are all in this together and should be kind and respectful towards one another, and happy together, enjoying each other’s company.]

AMW and BW, copyright AMW, although everybody knows this so why does he try to own it???

A Quick Intro To Something Deeperism

1) Basic Definition: There is a Truth (aka: Light; God; True Good; etc — we’re pointing with words imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately towards a shared vista). The Truth shines through each conscious moment. The path of wisdom is relating the rest of our conscious moments (ideas, feelings, etc, all working together) better and better around the Truth so that there is less and less gap between the Truth and our words and deeds. In this way the Truth guides our thought-as-a-whole (feelings, ideas, awareness, and the Truth shining through all things, all working imperfectly but still meaningfully together) better and better, allowing us to translate the Truth better and better into words and deeds.

The path towards wisdom is the seed of wisdom: By following our inner push towards aware, clear, accurate, competent, honest, compassionate, kind, joyfully-together thinking and acting, centered around the Light within ourselves and everyone else; our ideas and feeling get better and better at following and understanding the Light; allowing the Light to guide our thought-as-a-whole to more and more aware .. joyfully-together thinking and acting.

We start out with only what seems to be an inkling of the Truth. And the Truth would have to be deeper and wider than our (oh so human!) ideas and feelings. So we can never have literal / definitive / 1:1 / exclusive insight into the Truth. However, we cannot have literal certainty about anything; and we wouldn’t be able to understand, care about, or follow literal certainty anyway. And, as far as we know, we can do as the mystics suggest: via meditation, prayer, contemplation, and loving kindness practice; we can think and act more and more aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, and joyfully together; gaining more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say “we are all in this together”.

We can’t have literal insight into the Truth. But that does not mean we cannot have an adequate whole-being insight into the Truth. Such an insight would allow our emotional and intellectual ideas to point adequately well towards the Truth. And it is such an adequate whole-being pointing-towards what is really going on and what really matters that our intellectual thought requires if it is to know how it should be used, and what it should be used in service of.

Ideas and feelings know they are limited. They know they should not run the show alone. Pursuing wisdom is pursuing adequate insight into foundational values that allow ideas and feelings to function adequately well and with adequately clear consciences.

We should seek a better and better whole-being organization around the Truth within. But we’ll never get it perfect (for it to be an adequate standard of thought and action, the Truth would have to be perfect; and we are not perfect): We need to keep reassessing, admitting and adjusting missteps, trying again, pushing out from within, pushing for less and less gap between the Light outside our thinking/feeling/perceiving and the Light within.

2) Basic Argument for Adopting and Relentlessly Pursuing Truth, and Bounding that Pursuit with the Assumption that the Truth Ratifies Goods Like Awareness, Honesty, Kindness … : No human’s thoughts and actions can mean anything much to him or her unless the following requirements are met:
(a) the Truth is real (ie: some ways are truly more preferable than others)
(b) one’s thought-as-a-whole can relate meaningfully to the Truth (ie: something along the lines of the following: one’s ideas, feelings and the Truth shining through all things can work together and understand each other adequately);
(c) Truth is infinitely aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, good, joyfully caring/sharing and helpful; and is here equally for everyone. And we can grow in our understanding of the Truth in the way we sense we can: by following our own inborn sense towards aware … helpful thinking and acting, reaching always for more insight and compassion by seeking always to be more and more centered around and aware of the Truth within and shining through all things.

The state of affairs (a-c) is the bare minimum required for a human being to be able to truly understand, care about, and believe in his or her own ideas and feelings. Of course we cannot have literal knowledge about such things, but we can work to gain more and more whole-being insight into that and in what sense (a-c) are essentially True.

[The topic of undoubtables is covered in more detail in “Why Something Deeperism? Simple!” (the next essay in the book).
But let’s discuss (c) real quick:
If our inner senses towards clarity, honesty, accuracy, and competency cannot lead us to genuine insight; we have no intellectual path towards genuine insight that we can intellectually or emotionally understand or make use of. If our inner senses towards kindness and joyful compassionate generous and grateful togetherness cannot lead us to genuine insight; we have no emotional path towards genuine insight that we can understand, or even stand. We can only gain meaningful-to-us insights into what’s really going on and what really matters if to the degree we can gain insight into that and in what way (c) is essentially correct about the nature of Reality and our relationship to It.]

3) Basic Argument for Seeking a Relationship with the Truth that is Founded Primarily on Direct Whole-Being Experience of the Truth, and for Always Pushing Against the Human Tendency to Shift One’s Focus onto Ideas and Feelings about the Truth: Putting more focus on ideas and feelings about the Truth than on the Truth Itself is a grave and a common error. The Truth is not ideas and/or feelings about what is really going on, but what is really going on itself. The way forward is to relate ideas and feelings to the Truth more and more meaningfully — a process that self-defeats to the degree we confuse ideas/feelings with the Truth. When you put too much stock in ideas and/or feelings about the Truth, your focus turns away from a whole-being coordination around the Truth and you confuse and frustrate yourself by more and more pathetically/desperately clutching ideas and feelings that (since they claim a clarity and certainty you deepdown know they don’t have) are ultimately meaningless to you.

[Note that notions of “there is no Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth” are just as guilty of the above-sketched error as are notions of “I know the Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth”.]

We could not understand, believe in, or care about literal ideas about Reality (our ideas and feelings know they can have no literal purchase on Reality). The goal is, rather, a whole-being organization around the Truth within, allowing our ideas and feelings to flow out into the world adequately in tune with the Truth. The goal is to live in and through and for the Light that Knows that and in what way it is True to say “we are all children of the Light and must be kind to grateful for ourselves and each other.”

[Note that we need some principles to help us navigate human life, since ideas are necessary for interacting with this world and our own thoughts, and without any firm principles you spend every second trying to build up to a coherent philosophy from scratch. The principles of Something Deeperism should be adopted — just not clenched too tightly. Our principles are mere ideas and are therefore at best evolving, never-quite-adequate ladders towards whole-being insight into the Truth (ie: ideas, feels, etc centered around and adequately understanding and following the Light/Truth). The goal is to create an idea-ladder that fits adequately well with our inner moment; and to travel deeper and deeper into the Truth with the help of that ladder — which adventure (to the degree it is successful) will allow the Truth to explicate Itself to our thought-as-a-whole better and better, allowing us to understand better and better in what sense any given ladder is adequate and inadequate.]

[Note that we are all already Something Deeperists. We all already know we need insight into why it is TRUE that we are all in this together in order to believe in, care about, or understand our own thinking or acting; but we also know that we will never have literal insight into such a TRUTH, and that confusing ideas about the TRUTH with the TRUTH creates a great deal of trouble. Something Deeperism is not here to reject or contradict our philosophies or religions, except to the degree they cause us to self-defeat. By explicitly stating and discussing Something Deeperism we seek only to remind us what our philosophies and religions are for: to help us to understand that and in what way it is TRUE to say we are all in this together and should be kind and respectful towards one another, and happy together, enjoying each other’s company while we work together to grow in wisdom and make things better for everyone.]

4) Something Deeperism is helpful in group settings: A philosophy of Something Deeperism can help groups recognize and make use of all the common ground their members have. Something Deeperism points out that none of our philosophies make sense to any of us in the absence of insight into and use of aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, joyfully-sharing, truly-helpful thinking and acting. And so Something Deeperism keeps us all on the same page: Whatever our differences, we can all agree on aware … helpful thinking and acting, and on the need for us all to seek wisdom. And we can all agree that wisdom is honest and kind, not dishonest and cruel; and that it is counterproductive to pretend wisdom can fit into a literal set of metaphysical, political, and/or philosophical ideas. All this agreeing implies a shared space: a place of clarity we can together inhabit and defend. We will disagree on much, but we can and should agree on (no matter what! for if we sacrifice this, we sacrifice the only coherency any of us could have) awareness, honesty, clarity, competency, accuracy, kindness, and shared joy; all bound up in a respect for wisdom and the Light that makes wisdom possible. Without these standards, all humans self-defeat; it is therefore sensible for groups to adopt them and work together to better understand them and abide by them.

AMW and BW, copyright AMW, although everybody knows this so why does he try to own it???