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