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