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Prefatory Quote

Prefatory Quote

Have you ever been involved–no matter on what side or in what capacity–in a raped and pillaged village? More particularly, have you ever been struck down in the midst of such a fiery, hope-shattering melee: either by the downward-splitting blade of a horseback attacker or the whistling arrow of the resistance? Did you ever, while your lungs drew in cold shocked night air filling with stinging smoke and insanely bereaved/terrified bone-deep wails, suddenly understand the final stab and sink down from horrified pain to broken-hearted ache to sweet forgetful sleep?

If so, perhaps you’ll recall awakening to the soul plane just as you left the body level. And, still in and watching the scene but no longer liable to other bodily sensations, you looked around at the others. Some still animated and enveloped in the pell-mell; others, like yourself, no longer embodied, blazed like candle flames as the white-hot flickering outline of a tidier (the wounds healed, the dirt and blood gone) and still-alive version of your broken bodies. You and the other dead, look at the living and at each other, and you feel so sorry, so sad–no matter were you an innocent child now unjustly robbed nor a marauding villain (perhaps out of your teens, perhaps not) justly served. You feel guilty and terrible and you look at the other spirits who also feel the heavenly wind yanking them upwards, out of the fray and the two colliding communities. What is in their look? The same thing in your mind:

No matter who I am,
no matter my experiences,
my reasons,
unless “how can I make things truly better for myself and everyone else: how can I let the joyful sharing Love at the core of all experience win this world for responsible kind respectful joyous cooperation?”:
Unless that is my question,
I am asking the wrong questions and will keep getting the wrong answer.

But how, fading ghost soon to be reconfigured to await judgement, options, and another try: How will you remember this lesson with all intellectual and emotional ideas deleted? True: at it’s core, this insight is deeper than those things and partakes of the one spiritual idea, the Knowledge that is also Reality. But still: you’ll need a way to build a bridge between the mind/body you’ll wear next and that grand glimpse.

Preface Poem: Old Timey Hymn

Preface Poem: Old Timey Hymn

What was that wager
He put to me
On the road to Galilee?

What was that wager
He offered me
Upon the road by Galilee?

They say some Savior
He’s rescued us
Down by the Sea of Galilee.

But what is the wager
That sets us free
On our way to Galilee?

That Love is real
And Kindness right,
That within this stance
There shines a Light
To lead us home,
To break the night.

Copyright: AMW

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

The Truth is But A Dream

The Truth is But A Dream

What do you know?
How do you know it?
No matter how you slice it, you believe in clarity, honesty, and accuracy of thought.
No matter how you gin it, you believe in freedom of will and of the need to choose well.
No matter how you pose it, you believe in a kind joy we can share and that must win for any of us to win.

What to do with what you cannot disbelieve?
Believe it blindly and you don’t really understand it, believe it, or even care about it: you retreat into an emotionally clutched story about what you believe, and so slide away from presence in what you actually believe, which is of course prior to all ideas and feelings about what you believe.

What to do with that which disbelieving amounts to disbelieving in your own thought as you cannot but help to understand it?
Doubt it and you doubt yourself. Believe it literally/definitively and you lose it for a boring story that you have to grasp tighter and tighter to keep from seeing that you’re clutching dandelion fluff blowing in the summer breeze, clawing at nothing at all while that which you truly believe slips away from your focus. Doubt it literally or believe it literally and you end up in the same spot: living in stories, incoherent because the bulk of your conscious experience has left the only thought that means anything to you. What is that thought? It is the seed of wisdom and it screams Yes! I can think clear and true and follow the Light better and better! If that is not true, what does anything mean or matter to you? But blindly believe in some collaborating account and you are living in ideas and feelings about the spark within, and those are not at all the same as the spark within.

So how to catch it right? Where’s the nuance we’re looking for?
Not mindless doubting, not mindlessly believing. Not pretending you can ignore the intellect and maintain a workable relationship to this life; but also not pretending the intellect is all there is or that it cannot relate meaningfully to the rest of your experience.

How to catch it right?
One’s thought as a whole coordinating the various aspects of thought around the Light within that alone knows what is real, what matters, how we should live, what we should do. Flowing more and more cleanly off that Light. Not pretending our ideas and feelings are the Light! But working every moment to better and better translate the Light into workable ideas and feelings, that of course know themselves limited and provisional, but also necessary. That’s how you gotta work it when you span what is prior to ideas and feelings, through ideas and feelings, out into the world where you meet the others and affect and are affected by them.

Ah friends, the rapids froth! The raft flows and twists with the madcap rambling roller coaster cold mountain water.

Don’t leave me here all by myself.

AMW

Footnote on Pure Love & Something Deeperism

Footnote on Pure Love & Something Deeperism

1. Pure Love 2. Something Deeperism Quickest Sketch 3. Continuing The Overview of Something Deeperism 4. Flushing The General Position Out A Little More 5. Ideas to Motivate Adherence to Something Deeperism

You don’t need to read every entry now. Maybe just the first two. That would probably be best for now. In fact, I implore you: just quickly read over the first two sections and go back to the Introduction. If they bore you, just skim them! This is supposed to be a nice fun work of fiction: don’t let the obsessiveness of certain elements within the authorship take that away from us!!

1. Pure Love is the infinite and eternal love that all earthly loves partake of to the degree that they are actually love (to the degree they don’t partake of just Pure Love, earthly loves are tainted by non-infinite, non-eternal aspects of experience). Pure Love gives, supports, lifts-up helps, understands, loves 100%—for free. Human loves to some degree pull-towards and push-away. To the degree they are Pure Love, they do not pull-towards or push-away, but only beam brightly buoyantly effectively through.

2. Something Deeperism is the general position that we humans have insight into the Absolute (the Absolute is what is actually going on / what actually matters / what one should actually do–as opposed to mere opinions-about/perspectives-on what is going on / etc), but not literal / definitive / exclusive insight.

Something Deeperism seeks to clarify the confusion caused by the false debate between faith and reason. Sure: we cannot perfectly translate the Truth into human ideas and feelings; but that doesn’t mean we cannot relate human ideas, feelings, words and actions meaningfully to the Truth; and since the we cannot make sense of, believe in, or care about our own ideas without intellectual and emotional rigor, as well as spiritual (ie: non-mutable, non-relative/perspectival/debatable) Love, we have no choice but to work to better and better translate between ideas, feelings, words, deeds and the Truth.

Something Deeperism posits via clear thought and feeling one’s ideas and words can imperfectly but still adequately relate to feelings even though feelings are wider/deeper/vaguer than ideas and words, clear thinking and feeling can allow one to

If the Truth shines through the human conscious moment and we can through clear thinking and feeling coordinate our ideas, feelings, words and deeds better and better with the Truth, and if the Truth supports our sense that we are all in this together and must be kind to one another and that shared joy is the way: if all that is the case and a person can discover that and how it is the case, humans have a method for choosing one thought over another that is meaningful/interesting/stand-able to human beings. Otherwise, we don’t and we will make no progress in thought and action. So groups should accept those essential dogmas and we should all seek the Truth: the Truth would be both Knowledge and Reality and thus have the stamp of “True!” within it; thus endarounding the problem of the divide between ways of knowing and Reality; of course, the Truth cannot fit into our ideas, feelings, words and deeds, so what we need is not intellectual and emotional assent to the essential dogmas so much as insight into that and how they are the case–indeed confusing ideas and feelings about the Truth actually pushes one into dogmatically clutching ideas and feelings one doesn’t understand, which is antithetical to growth in wisdom: the continual improvement of one’s whole-being coordination of ideas, feelings, words and deeds around the Joy within that alone knows what is going on, what matters, and what should be done.

[A Note on Interchanging Different Descriptions of the Absolute:
We’re here positing that the Truth shines through all things, including each human conscious moment, and that It is prior to ideas and feelings, so we can only point imperfectly [but not therefore necessarily meaninglessly] towards It; so “Love”, “Truth”, “God”, “Light”, “Buddha Nature”, “Joy” can all be used interchangeably–not necessarily as indicating exactly the same thing, but as generally pointing adequately enough towards that which can only be pointed towards, since it is prior to ideas and feelings.]

{A SOMETHING DEEPERISM WITHOUT METAPHYSICS?

Or does that go too far? Sure, that’s the Something Deeperism of this author, but it is not the Something Deeperism of every Something Deeperist. All that is needed to qualify as a Something Deeperist is to agree that that inner sense that I like to call the “seed of wisdom” is actually onto something, and so one shouldn’t fart around in either radical skepticism or blind faith: one should seek to understand that and how this “seed of wisdom” is onto something. Right? Can’t this be done without metaphysics? I dunno: what does “actually onto something” mean? Doesn’t it point towards “actually the case”, towards True? I think humans cannot help but use ideas and feelings in their thoughts and actions; but they also cannot understand, believe in, or even care about their own ideas and feelings without grounding those ideas and feelings on whole-being insight into what is actually going on (the fact that people often delude themselves about what is actually going on is no argument against this position: the whole point is that our insight needs to be adequately based on Truth for it to guide us meaningfully forward–that we often lurch incoherently in one direction while it becomes less and less meaningful to us only points out how we struggle with this task); therefore, I think we humans must accept (necessarily imperfectly) translating inner insights into ideas and feelings, from which it follows that it is wiser to say “I should think clearly” than to say “I have no idea about what is going on”: both are imperfect translations of inner senses of things ultimately prior to ideas about them, but the former includes a path forward and the latter is completely self-defeating. Of course, if you cannot find any Truth in the former, you shouldn’t announce it, but the latter makes no sense, so saying it amounts to forcing confusion into the center; that’s why Something Deeperists suggest working to find a way to gain whole-being insight (ideas and feelings working with and under the adequate guidance of the Absolute–that which alone Knows because It is both Knowledge and Reality) so that you know both that the former is True and in what way it is True.}

So why squawk on and on about how cool you are because nobody knows shit or because you know the Truth. Seems better to relax, say nothing, and try meditation, prayer, loving kindness, maybe even pick a religion that fits where you are and so join a community of like-minded people who can help keep you on track. But, hey: whatever? Right? I’m taking off, I’m heading out the door, I’m going for a walk. These questions slice so deep and what’s down there anyway? I’m afraid I’ve found a bunch of squeaking mice madly dashing into walls and into and over each other while the cleaver breaks them apart and sends their writhing bloody pieces here and there in the general sprawling mayhem.

Another failed introduction to Something Deeperism!

[Back to Intro of “Love at a Reasonable Price”]

3. Continuing the Overview of Something Deeperism Has been moved, for everyone’s sake, to Outtakes!

[Back to Intro of LaaRP]

4. A Few Principles Of Something Deeperism:

Wisdom is possible—at least as a direction. Growing in wisdom is the never-ending process of better and better—through the clear thinking and feeling outlined above—organizing one’s feelings, ideas, words, and deeds around the Truth within (so the rest of one’s experience better and better syncs up with and so understands and follows the Truth at the core of one’s experience).

True dogmas (here “dogma” means a statement about Absolutes—like what is actually going on, what actually matters, or how one should truly live) are not literal, definitive, or exclusive. They point poetically (not perfectly clear, precise, or intellectually verifiable; but not therefore inadequately) toward the Truth, which after all is prior to ideas and feelings about It (ie: “true dogmas” point one’s conscious experience toward adequate insight into the Truth the way a good poem recreate’s the writer’s experience adequately though not literally/definitively within the reader: it is not a mathematical formulation, but the essential has still been communicated).

When one’s thought-as-a-whole is properly organized around the Truth at the core of each human conscious moment, one’s thought-as-a-whole can use the intellect to sketch adequate intellectual pictures of the Truth and how the Truth relates to everything else, and such sketches can help others to get a better sense of the Truth. But they are still just sketches, and unwise conscious moments are still very much able to woefully misunderstand them. So no matter what the source, one must be careful to expect any goodness to come of mindlessly “yessing” the dogma. What is most fundamentally needed is insight; dogmas are only supposed to help people gain, share, and build a shared language for insight into what is really going on, what really matters, and how we should really live—a language for together contemplating questions whose answers are deeper and wider than any ideas, and thus than any dogmas.

Humans with the same stated dogma (examples of stated dogmas: “secular humanist” or “born again Christian”) are never 100% on the same page; and those with different dogmas are still somewhat on the same page; and both people with identical and those with different dogmas can—with good intentions and real effort—get more and more on the same page.

We humans all share the same most fundamental value: seeking and choosing truly better ways of thinking and acting via clear and honest investigation of our inner and outer experiences, with the whole process orchestrated by a deepening insight into that sense within that knows our thoughts and actions truly matter and in what way they truly matter, and the entire process guide-guardrailed by the knowledge that joyful sharing kindness is the way and everything else baloney.

Something Deeperism cannot be intellectually proven, but it can be intellectually motivated. For an attempt at a quick sketch of that see below (#5)

[Back to Intro of LaaRP]

5. Ideas to Motivate Seeking in Individuals and Assuming Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice, and most of all Love in groups:

Note that no matter what our outlook, we cannot help but accept/assume some intellectual ideas about what is going on, what matters, and what should be done that we cannot prove intellectually. {In fact, insofar as one doesn’t adequately answer those questions, we can’t really understand, care about, or believe in one’s own thought process (which cannot help but assume insight into those fundamental questions is what it is ultimately working on).} Therefore, we are going to have to accept some dogmas (unproven beliefs accepted as “true enough”) about what is going on, what matters, and what should be done. The only choice available to humans is between dogmas that lead to more coherency and dogmas that lead to less, so we may as well pick dogmas that lead us to more coherent thoughts and actions (ie: thoughts and actions that are more meaningful to the thinker/actor).

Then note that for any idea about what is going on & etc to be coherent, the basic premise of Something Deeperism must be true.

…..

The basic premises of Something Deeperism:

“Truth” and “Goodness” (not those concepts but what they imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately point towards) actually exist and, though they are ultimately prior to ideas and feelings about them and thus not liable to literal/definitive insights, our inborn sense that we can improve our insight into them via clear, honest, pure-hearted thought, contemplation, conversation, and action bounded by valuing kindness, respect, and shared-joy for all is correct. If that premise isn’t True or I cannot find a way to demonstrate to myself that and how it is True, how can I understand, care about, believe in, or otherwise participate in my own thoughts and actions? I can’t. My thought needs insight into that and how that sense of things is True to be meaningful to itself: that is simply the way we humans are constructed {some say you can’t go from your own fundamental experience to the experience of all others, but I can’t make any sense of my thoughts if other people are not essentially like me and [otherwise how can I make sense of all I’ve learned by interacting with them?], so the belief that others are basically like me is also undoubtable: I don’t know that it is True, but I do know that to the degree I do not gain insight into how and that it is True, my own thoughts and actions are meaningless to me.}

But don’t forget that ideas and feelings about what is really true, worthwhile, and preferable are only meaningful to you if you actually understand them; so what is needed is not so much literal answers as whole-being (ideas, feelings, words and deeds under the guidance of the Truth shining within and through each conscious moment). Even supposing literal understanding of the Truth were possible (and how could it be? The Truth is not the same as an idea about the Truth!), merely forcing feelings of certainty atop intellectual assents to literally true dogmas would just lead to misunderstanding those dogmas. What is needed is a whole-being organization around the Light within that alone knows that and how we all matter—an organization that must be self-aware enough to not pretend it can ever consider itself definitive/finished.

…..

Radical skepticism is self-defeating because there’s no point avoiding error unless accuracy is real and actually matters. Blind dogmatism is self-defeating because “what is actually the case” is not the same as ideas and feelings about “what is actually the case” and so belief in a dogma without insight into the way in which it is True actually points you away from meaningful whole-being engagement with “what is actually the case” [regardless of how true the dogma is a dogma can never be “True”; dogmas can only be more or less “true”, though insight can show you the way and degree the dogma points towards what is True]. To avoid the extremes of blind doubt and blind faith, Something Deeperism seeks insight into “what is actually the case” with one’s thought-as-a-whole: the intellect and feelings need to contemplate “what is actually the case” (to notice that they need to relate to “w i a t c” and to consider how to best do that and how to best guard against misunderstanding “w i a t c”) and they can and should also keep working to sketch better and better descriptions of “what is actually the case”, but they must always remember that these sketches are not themselves “what is actually the case” and the process of growing in wisdom must continue, refreshed each moment, until the moment of death.

Everyone is already something of a Something Deeperist. We all realize that to the degree we lack insight into how life is actually meaningful, we cannot understand, believe in, or care about anything we think or do. (Even the most dogmatic skeptic must admit that there’s no way to know how to be a skeptic and no motivation for being one unless there’s something to one’s inner push for accuracy—unless in some sense avoiding error is actually attainable and worth pursuing.) And we all also realize that it is possible, tempting, and self-defeating to get so focused on ideas about why our lives matter that we miss out in engagement with that within that alone understands that and how our lives matter. (Even the most fundamental religious believer will agree that of course they are trying to follow not human ideas about God, but God; and that whenever human ideas and feelings get involved, there is some danger of spiritual misinterpretation and mistake, since, after all, human ideas and feelings are not perfect, but spiritual Truth is.) And we all know that to the degree a society sacrifices accuracy, honesty, kindness and shared joy for anything—including xyz religious or secular dogma—that society works against any meaningful philosophy, religion, or attitude.

Arguing for Something Deeperism is not so much arguing as gently reminding everyone that we all are already to some degree Something Deeperists, and we should remember that, remember that we are all basically the same and in this together, remember that pretending we are not alike enough for respectful communication and collaboration is a cruel lie that undermines us to the degree we countenance it.

We all have to keep pedaling, keep pushing for more real whole-being insight into the kind joy within that alone understands what this life is all about. We cannot never stop seeking for more clarity in thought and action, for more wisdom. We have to keep pedaling.

How great Something Deeperism is! Without it, you wander hopeless lost in meaninglessness. If you imagine you can have no meaningful relationship to the Truth, then you say things like “for all I know, I don’t know anything”, which makes no sense: insofar as you actually believe it, you don’t actually believe it. If, in the other extreme, you imagine that you know the Truth, that It is xyz dogmas that you memorize and live by, you mislabel the Truth—which is actually prior to ideas and feelings and therefore insofar as you equate It 1:1 with xyz idea—, and so you shift your focus away from an active engagement with the Truth and onto ideas that you clench with forced feelings of certainty which you can neither actually understand nor care about (and, anyway, what use is a dogma—even if it were somehow TRUE—if you don’t understand it?). And so how nicely Something Deeperism steps in! How nicely it tidies things up: there is a Truth and you have some insight into It and with clear and honest effort can get more insight into It, but as the Truth is obviously prior to ideas and feelings about It, you don’t need to worry about literally, definitively or exclusively understanding the Truth—indeed, if that’s what you think you are doing, then you are drifting into La La Land, and need to stop! and head back home, back to a whole-being insight into the Truth.]

This fun, informative article was written by Johnny Go Lightly, a terrible influence on his friends and family.

[Back to Intro of LaaRP]

Author & shame: BW
Editor & shame: AMW
Copyright & shame: AMW

Why Something Deeperism? Simple! It is not a self-defeating philosophy but its rivals are.

Why Something Deeperism? Simple! It is not a self-defeating philosophy but its rivals are.

[Something Deeperism Institute]

Some assumptions are undoubtable to human thought. To the degree a human doubts them, they doubt their own thought as they cannot help but understand it, and thus they doubt all their conclusions, and thus they doubt the attempted initial doubt. Those logoi are truly self-defeating!

Note: In the various Examples of Undoubtables below, words are sometimes set off in quotes to stress that we are here using language to point imperfectly (but not therefore necessarily inadequately) ultimately prior to ideas and feelings.

Examples of Undoubtables:
1. You are capable of “truly meaningful” thoughts and actions.
2. Your various aspects of conscious experience (ex: ideas, feelings, vaguer/wider/deeper senses-of-things) can relate meaningfully to one another.
3. Being true to your inner sense towards “aware”, “clear”, “honest”, “accurate”, “truer” and “better” is a viable way to meaningfully choose one thought/action over another.
4. “Truer” and “better” are not completely relative, but are ultimately grounded within endpoints: “Truth” and “Goodness”. (Otherwise “truer” and “better” meander with your whims, and you cannot decisively declare anyone ever wrong or right).
5. You can relate meaningfully to “Truth” and “Goodness”.

[Doubt any of these and you doubt your thought’s inborn procedures for discovering viable thought-/action-paths, and thus you doubt your own thinking as you cannot help but understand it; and so you doubt all your thoughts, and so you doubt the doubt that started all this …
That’s not to say the above examples point perfectly to what they’re referring to. Of course they don’t.
The point is that if you doubt away the inner senses-of-things those examples are pointing towards, you doubt away any workable thought/action process.
Don’t doubt them away: They are your only possible starting point for thoughts and actions that mean anything to you.
Granted: that is not sufficient reason to blindly believe in them. But more on that nuance below.]

[Note that 1-4 build the general system of mystical knowledge:
Rather than waiting for perfect intellectual knowledge of how one should really think and act, the mystic accepts the inner sense towards clarity, honesty, truer and better; and seeks a whole-being insight into an inner Light that alone knows that and in what sense it is True to say, “we are all in this together”.
(“whole-being insight: ideas, feelings, and the Light shining through all things [including each conscious moment] all relating meaningfully with one another, though—since we are finite and the Light, if It is to be the firm foundation for Truth and Goodness that we seek, must be infinite—not relating literally/1:1/definitively with one another.)
The mystic does not renounce intellectual and emotional clarity—without these our thoughts make no sense to themselves.
However, the mystic does put whole-being clarity of attitude and purpose ahead of intellectual knowledge:
We don’t strictly speaking have to know whether or not there is a Reality corresponding to xyz human notion of “Reality”. What we must know is how to think and act in a way that is truly better—that doesn’t just “seem better” to this or that person’s way of thinking and feeling. The danger of self-deceit, of confusing ideas and feelings for the “True Good” remains for self-conscious and purposeful spiritual seekers, as it does for everyone. But, as we just mentioned: more on this later.]

Another Undoubtable:
You and other people are fundamentally the same and can communicate meaningfully.

[If not, what becomes of your understanding of all you’ve learned by interacting with others and their works?
Also, if not, can you stand life? No: to the degree you disbelieve we are all fundamentally the same and able to relate to one another, life becomes absurdly stupid: and to that degree you cannot understand, believe in, or care about your own thinking/acting (See the chapter “How We Learn / Against All Talk of “Philosophical Zombies” in First Essays for more on this.)]

Some Final Examples:
“We are all in this together.”
“Loving Kindness is the Way. “
“Joyful sharing and collaborating is actually preferable.”
“We all can and should treat one another with respect and kindness.”
“What we say and do really does matter.”

[Doubt these fundamental rules of thumb, and you doubt away the only meaning of your life you can understand, care about, or believe in.
This is true of the previous undoubtables too, but the first and second category also lead to obvious logical and ethical (in the widest sense of what one should do, shorn of any a priori assumptions about what “truly preferable” is supposed to look like) paradoxes; while trying to doubt this final category of undoubtables leads only to obvious emotional/a-Reality-I-can-stand conundrums—at least that I easily perceive. I dunno: search yourself.]

To the degree an individual doubts the undoubtables, she doubts the meaningfulnes and viability of her own inborn thought-process/system-for-choosing-one-possibility-over-another; to this degree, she doubts all her thoughts, including her attempted doubts; to this degree she wanders in the meaningless chaos of thoughts she cannot understand, believe in, or care about; to this degree, she loses the ability to travel with her own thoughts to her own conclusions: she ghosts-away in boring, self-imposed confusions and hands the steering wheel of her thought over to animal caprices, which are often mean, stupid, and boring.

Naturally, an assumption’s procedural undoubtability doesn’t prove it either true or True.
And forcing yourself to believe something without adequately demonstrating its accuracy to yourself also breaks a fundamental rule of human thought and so leads to the abyss of self-confusion.
Furthermore, we are speaking here of fundamental notions experienced at a level deeper than ideas and feelings, which conceptual language therefore can never literally/definitively describe.
And we are seeking to ground our feeling/thinking/grounding an Absolute Truth, which our finite minds/hearts/bodies could never fully grasp.
Forcing yourself to believe the literal Truth of xyz undoubtable dogma will only result in tightly clutching an idea you don’t understand.

Forcing a feeling of certainty onto an idea you don’t even really fathom, let alone care about, is not at all the same as meaningfully relating your ideas and feelings to an undoubtable sense of things well enough that your ideas and feelings win real insight into the way in which that undoubtable sense is True (assuming it is True).
But that internal spiritual discovery is the prerequisite for you (you = your thought-as-a-whole = your combined conscious and unconscious experience) to understand, believe, care about, and meaningfully steer and journey-with your own thinking/acting.

Accordingly, Something Deeperism forbids doubting the undoubtables, but it also forbids forcing literal beliefs upon yourself. Instead, Something Deeperism suggests you work to better and better coordinate your ideas and feelings around that sense within that knows what and how life “actually matters”. It suggests you recognize that we of course need ideas to help us make decisions in human life, but ideas are only useful as provisional structures for gaining and living-out more and more whole-being insight into that and in what sense it is True to say, for example, “Love is Real”.

Blindly believing or disbelieving the undoubtables will just confuse us. Instead, Something Deeperism suggests accepting them provisionally as part of a whole-being (ideas, feelings and the Light within) effort to center ourselves around the Light within (whose Reality we again accept provisionally) that alone Knows that and in what sense we are all in this together.

The goal is to organize one’s feeling/thinking/acting around the Light well enough that one’s thought as a whole can grasp the “Truth” to the point that one’s feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting are essentially in accord with the “Truth”. Such a goal could never be fully realized (we are finite and the Truth infinite), but one could move more and more in the right direction, allowing for feeling/thinking/acting that was more and more meaningful to oneself / more and more “Beautiful/True/Good/Just/LovingKind”.

I say “provisionally”, but only half mean it:
Part of the motion of Something Deeperism is what we’ve spelled out above:
A results-demanding wager on the only path of thinking and acting that can mean something to human beings: An aware, honest, accurate, competent, kind, joyful, generous whole-being coordination of ideas and feelings around the perfect Light within that alone Knows what’s what, and that our imperfect ideas and feelings can relate to (imperfectly—but not therefore necessarily inadequately);
However, Something Deeperism is also about prioritizing what we know deeper and wider — if perhaps less intellectually capturably/provably — than our certainties and uncertainties:
That still, silent, uplifting YesILoveYou! from God to all of us, from all of us to God, and from all of us to one another.

Let’s choose our dogmas well. Let’s not choose dogmas that confuse our thought, such as “Nothing is True”, or “Nothing matters”, or “It is literally True that life matters and if you believe that you are right and otherwise wrong”. Let’s instead choose ideas that we can understand and work with, such as “I am going to keep working to gain more and more whole-being insight into in what way it is True that life matters”.

Let’s reject radical skepticism and dogmatic literalism for a constant whole being quest to better and better understand that and in what way it is basically True to say “We are all in this together and must treat everyone equally: with complete respect, love and unflinching kindness.” Let’s choose thought-/action-paths that allow for meaningful progress in thoughts and actions.

Author Lost to Time and Chance
Copyright: AMW

[This essay can be found in “A Readable Reader”, “First Loves: Vol 1 of Love at a Reasonable Rate” and “First Essays”. See Buy Our Books! for more.]

[Something Deeperism Institute]

Something Deeperism: A Quick Intro [FAILED]

Something Deeperism: A Quick Intro [FAILED]

Something Deeperism is a general intellectual position along the lines of:

“I can and should follow my own inner-pushes towards accuracy, honesty, Truth, Goodness, and Pure Love–guard-railing that seeking with my inner-sense that other people are essentially the same as I am, and that respect, kindness, self- and other-compassion, and open-minded/-hearted communal joy are Correct. In this way, I can make progress in life’s meaning: I can gain more and more active insight into what is really going on, what really matters, and how I should really live.

“What would make life worth living and justify choosing any action over another is one thing alone: the Joyful Sharing Love at the heart of the conscious moment. Therefore, I cannot perfectly translate what-is-most-important into ideas and feelings, as what-is-most-important is prior to ideas and feelings. However, imperfect is not the same as inadequate and I can neither relate to this human life without using ideas and feelings, nor can I understand, care about or believe in my thoughts and actions without adequate spiritual insight; therefore, I must find a way to show my whole self (ideas, feelings, inner senses, and the Light within that alone knows what is actually truly preferable: all those elements working together) not only that these principles (ie: every assumption I’m here making) are True, but also how they are True.

“And so the only way forward is to organize my ideas and feelings better and better around the Light within, keeping in mind that I must constantly fight against the human tendency to confuse ideas and feelings about the Light for the Light: I must never stop pushing for more awareness, honesty, joy, Love, kindness, shared joy: for more and more open-hearted/-minded seeking and sharing.”

Much of that mantra is poetic: it points past ideas and feelings towards what is prior to them. However, all worldviews have a poetic base. What actually matters to people are notions–spoken or unspoken, admitted or denied–about what is really going on, what actually matters, and how one should actually live. Whether we form the thought, and even if we form contradictory thoughts, we cannot help but base our lives on attempts to answer those questions. The only choice we have is whether we pull those questions out in the open, thus giving ourselves a chance to think and act coherently, or we hide from the questions by pretending we’ve already got them all figured out. We evade those fundamental questions by focussing on ideas and feelings about what we should believe and do (even the self-aware or -unaware choice of pursuing a blithe thoughtfulness is actually also an assumption about what one should believe and do) so much that we lose sight of the whole-being insight into the Truth/Light/PureLove/TrueGood/God/BuddhaNature (all these concepts point imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately towards what we’re trying to get at here).

Human wisdom is a thing of degrees. We must keep working to see more clearly and act better.

That is the general attitude of Something Deeperism: To the degree I lack whole-being insight into that and how Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice, Respectful Helping Kindly Shared Joy are True, I cannot care about understand, believe in, or even care about my own thoughts and actions. So the only choice is to seek wisdom, and if that sense within towards clarity, honesty, accuracy and kindness of thought is not the way towards wisdom, I have no path towards wisdom that I can understand, believe in, or even care about. So the only choice is to accept the spiritual calling, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and strength and mind, and your neighbor–who is just like you and thus also belongs to God–as yourself. The only possible way forward is to get serious about awareness, honesty, kindness.

What about for groups? Well, we all have different ideas about what is True and what Matters, and what doctrines one requires to adequately align oneself with what’s knowable and preferable, but can we not all agree that we are all in this together and that all of our philosophies and religions are only valuable to the degree they ratify and provide a structure for living those values without which none of us can stand life? Can we not all agree on accuracy, honesty, compassion, respect, kindness, rule of law as nourished by a free people freely seeking the Law? Can we not all agree that forcing beliefs onto people is corrupting because it tempts people to lie to themselves and others about their experiences of what is most sacred to them? But can we also not all agree that we still all must and in fact do share some fundamental spiritual values: “It matters what I say and do”, “Aware, clear, honest, accurate thought is the way forward”, “kindness is right”, “we are all in this together and so should be respectful of and kind towards one another and we should appreciate each other and share community and enjoy each other’s company”. Things like that. Things without which we have nothing: let’s accept them and admit we don’t perfectly understand them and that it is a stupid and cruel distortion to pretend like our fellows do not have the same basic rights and duties imprinted within their hearts-of-hearts.

Author: Spelunker Stewart
Copyright: AMW

On Philosophical Systems

On Philosophical Systems

I once overheard some desperate wag declare, “Der Wille zum System ist ein Mangel an Rechtschaffenheit.” [“The will to a system is a lack of integrity!”]

What was he talking about? What is a philosophical system? Why is creating or supporting or using them reprehensible? What was he talking about?

A philosophical system is a framework that explains everything essential: what can be known, what is true, how you should live. It is a complete philosophy. And you can put it on like you’d put on a religion. You can wear it. It has grooves into which you can slide your intellectual and emotional thoughts, and it also has an interface with both perceptions and Reality (assuming the system believes in a Reality). So it allows your ideas and feelings to relate adequately to themselves, each other, your daily experience, and (sometimes at least) Reality.

The problem with philosophical systems is that they are just built of ideas, but human life is ideas, feelings, vague notions, and whatever-all-else. So how can a human being expect a contraption made entirely of ideas to adequately answer the questions of his or her life? Also, intellectual ideas cannot prove or disprove their own ultimate viability and/or meaningfulness. So why would you trust a fortress of intellectual ideas to keep you safe and bring you to whole-being victory?

And yet, and yet. Friends, friends, what if we calm down? What if we don’t wear philosophical systems too tightly? What if we just put them on to try a new perspective, to help guide our thinking towards better ways to address our fundamental longing to know what is going on and what should be done about it? What if we just calm the fuck down?

Certainly, a philosophical system will never be literally True, nor ever completely inhabitable/livable by human beings.

However, while a human will never fit completely within a philosophical system — and what a nauseating limit, what a tragedy if a human could fit into a set of ideas! —, systems can help us coherently organize ourselves.

One must merely remember that the intellect’s not all we are: each human conscious moment contains feelings (including both emotions and sense-perceptions), ideas, senses-of-things (prior to ideas and feelings: ur-ideas and ur-feelings together, before differentiating into ideas and feelings; for example the inner sense that eventually gets estimated up into concepts like “what I say and do matters”; another word for “senses-of-things” might be “vague notions”), and — if the song within the storm is correct — most fundamentally a Something Deeper (aka: God, the Light within, etc — we’re poetically pointing through concepts towards what is ultimately prior to concepts) that alone knows what is really going on, what really matters, and what we should actually do. And it is an intellectually unproven and unprovable intellectual prejudice that these various aspects cannot interact meaningfully with one another, with thought-tools like language, and with other human beings. [there’s some translation required to translate, for example, feelings into ideas; and all translations are imperfect; but “imperfect” does not necessarily mean “inadequate”.]

Philosophical systems like those sketched in Plato’s Republic or the Buddha’s teachings can — so long as we don’t lose sight of the fact that human conceptual structures can only be imperfect ladders and platforms in one’s climb to more and more insight into and reliance upon the Truth within — help people organize their conscious moments around the Truth.

One can benefit from trying on, for example, the general sketch of living gently and peaceably while simultaneously reaching for and seeking to flow out of the Form of the Good at one’s center (the “Form of the Good” is here another poetic formulation for that Light within which alone is wise enough to adequately advise your thought as a whole). Playing within such a intellectual/emotional/spiritual framework — presuming you don’t forget it is just a human construct and not itself the Truth (aka: the Form of the Good; aka: God) — help you organize your thought-as-a-whole better and better.

Philosophy is always like Descarte’s “Meditations” in this regard: one person tries to intellectually think-through hisorher own experience of fundamental questions about knowledge, reality, meaning, and morality (ie: formulate a coherent intellectual response to them), and then invites others to try the logic on: to see how it fits their own experiences and thinking-throughs. Even if a philosophy doesn’t spell out a system for understanding reality, it presumes a system: people always do — we always carry within our assumptions more fundamental ones about how to take in, organize, analyze, and evaluate information. So a blatant philosophical system is actually more forthcoming than much philosophical thinking: it takes great pains to tell the reader where it is coming from.

Clutching systems too tightly is indeed destructive, as trying to turn mere human ideas into eternal Truths must be; but humans need some intellectual beliefs to keep their intellects grounded and coherent, and we in any case cannot help but trust some general heuristics for how one should approach life (aka: systems) and we cannot help but believe some things (indeed radical skepticism—supposing that you need to disbelieve everything—is, self-defeatingly, both a system and belief).

So enjoy creating and using philosophical systems! Don’t clutch them too tightly, but that goes for all merely human constructs. We are merely humans, so we need to build and use merely human constructs, but our Good cannot be contained within them, because the do not adequately understand and respond to Love.

Authors: Sommerset Gone and B Willard
Copyright: AMW and Andy Watson

Something Deeperism: Individuals & Groups

Something Deeperism: Individuals & Groups

Something Deeperism for individuals:

Nothing can make sense or matter to humans unless we can know/understand/follow what is actually going on and what actually matters (without adequate insight into Truth, we wander forever about in opinion, conjecture, and arguments with their counterarguments).
And the Truth has to be prior to ideas and feelings about the Truth, but we humans have a tendency to clench ideas and feelings about the Truth so tightly that we focus more on them than on a whole-being organization around the Truth within, which alone could adequately relate what is prior to ideas and feelings to ideas and feelings to ideas and feelings and thus to our specific day-to-day experiences and choices.

For the reasons above we adopt a minimal dogmatism that speaks to both our minds and our hearts, and a refusal to ever abandon that essential starting-point for progress in thought and action: “It matters what I say and do. I should be kind to myself and others. If my ideas and feelings are moving me away from aware, clear, and honest thought and feeling, away from kindness and compassion, away from a growing active insight into the Light within that knows that I matter and others matter and how we should think and act as individuals and in relationship with one another–then my ideas and feelings are undermining my true purpose and real goal; and so I must stop, rethink, find a way towards better ideas and feelings.” Because insofar as we abandon that within that knows how to find out what is going on and what should be done, we contradict all our efforts, undermine ourselves, aren’t even at a starting point.

That isn’t to stay one should stay at the starting point. It isn’t enough just to assume that minimal dogmatism. One must find a way to allow one’s thought-as-a-whole to get better and better at understanding how and in what way that tenet is True. Otherwise, one goes further and further towards ideas-about what really matters, and further and further away from a whole-being-engagement with what really matters (which must, as we’ve noted, be prior to ideas-about what really matters).

Something Deeperism for groups:

Since humans can make no progress without refusing to overstep or abandon something along the lines of the Something Deeperist’s minimal dogmatism, groups should agree to also not overstep or abandon that general direction. That is to say: people should be free to believe as their conscious bids them, but the group should never pretend like truth, clarity, accuracy and honesty, as well as kindness, compassion, win-win, community, joy and other basic inborn and necessary human values are up for doubt, or can ever be set aside for some supposed “higher truth”. It creates chaos (internal meaninglessness and thus the inability to coherently choose one direction over another) in both individuals and groups when doctrines are allowed to doubt or belittle what we humans have to know/believe/care-about in order to make any progress in their thoughts and actions.

So we, speaking poetically so as to avoid unnecessary (though not necessarily inaccurate) metaphysical dogmas, we do hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The point is that whatever philosophy or religion you can imagine, to the degree it asks you to think illogically or dishonestly or confusedly or to be unkind it loses meaning to you and so turns to chaos, to mush, to a dogma that–since illegible to your mind and heart, but claiming absolute authority–can be used to justify anything. So let us agree that the only way forward for an individual is to find a Truth that does not ask one to think sloppily or to be unkind; and that therefore we as a group must also value good, clear thought and real kindness so much that we do not put up with any doctrines or behaviors that undermine these goods. Otherwise, how can we create a place where we can all be our best truest selves and meaningfully relate to one another? How else can we create a space where togetherness and jointly thinking, choosing, and creating is possible? And if this is not the goal of a group of humans, what meaning does that group really have? I mean: give me a break! Throw us a bone, here!

Whatever’s Best (Essayish 10)/Standard Theory PL 2-Scholium

Whatever’s Best (Essayish 10)/Standard Theory PL 2-Scholium

Philosophically, I’ve always been a bestist. One should aim for whatever’s best. We mortal flashes don’t know everything. We have an inner sense towards discovering and living “truer” and “better”–towards “truly better”. Those concept-bound descriptions are approximations–the sense-of-things they seek to point towards is deeper than concepts. Anyway, our feelings and intellects are tools that should be put in service of the quest to keep getting better and better at understanding and realizing that core goal. We all know that. I here estimate what we all know in our hearts of hearts up into words.

Author: Wanda Wicchwey
Author: The Old BW
Copyright: Andy the Watson I was there with him in kindergarten when signing “Andy Watson” in a steady, respectful hand was a worthy goal, a proud moment on the tight-weave blue rug.

What is this?
It has to do with Love at a Reasonable Price.
The first section of that evolving ebook starts with two stories from the town of Pine, Michigan–where Ichabod the Love Peddler appeared over a century ago, and where there now stands a Pure Love Research Center (at the University of Pine). At the end of the second story, a Pure Love researcher says, “To understand Charles’ and I’s research, you have to be at least somewhat acquainted with the standard model of Pure Love.”
So that seems to call for a standard model or standard theory of Pure Love–similar to how there is one a standard model for physics: a set of principles and findings that just about all practicing physicists agree on. But we’ve been having our troubles writing a standard theory of Pure Love. So now we’re just writing poems around the topic, hoping to perhaps eventually sink in at an appropriate place. So far these “standard model” poems are all free (so far all poems are free: see “Poems” category on the right hand side to see them all). These poems and all other writings in Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price

Access to the whole evolving ebook, along with Diary of an Adamant Seducer for sale here:
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Wandering Albatross Press’s most physical products:

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Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Can the dashing author-adventurer Bartleby Willard and his faithful editor Andy Watson get anything done? I dunno, maybe, if they can get the right rhythm going. Maybe they can put together enough sanity and creativity and firestorm and discipline and decency to make something of this project. However, what if their surrounding environment goes to pot? What then?

Many things can go wrong. A small band of haters can gather up chemical weapons or nuclear devices and take out a city or three. Or maybe before too long the world’s dependence on oil and fresh water will create a new cataclysmic strife. Or the pandemic really will come, and everybody will tumble into the sea, to float gently along: bloated sunk-eyed jellyfish who don’t recall their childhood in the scamper town or their grownup life drifting through the signs.

Or here’s a list of other worries I recently made:

We’re going to kill ourselves soon. I don’t know exactly where to fit this in. Categorize it under “First things first”. The US and Russia still full of nukes pointed at each other and around the world; still sliding nuclear submarines around the globe, ready to take out a billion people. And countries around the world still trying to edge their way into the nihilistic world-destroying club while those already in chuckle to themselves, their mountains safely full of doomsday–as if anybody could control doomsday! Oh, and then there’s pumping tortured livestock full of antibiotics; in this way agribusiness avoids the cost of treating animals with a trace of decency while simultaneously creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs. And what’s going on with GMOs? And why didn’t we put the brakes on high risk banking after it cost the world economy gazillions and came close to melting it down into burning paper and overturned streets.

Why don’t we get serious about nuclear disarmament? Why don’t we stop small groups from profiting by putting the rest of us in danger? Clearly the only hope is a growth in wisdom. But what does wisdom look like in the public sphere?

I would like to see an end to the subtle corruption of the USA of my day: The way money buys political ads and accompanying that money flutter lobbyists whispering sweet-somethings into squishy, campaign-fatted ears. But apparently spending money to make people see your propaganda everywhere they turn is equivalent to freedom of speech, which of course we need as a fundamental guard against corruption, and which is therefore duly protected by the very first amendment our forefathers brought forth on this great nation. It is perhaps conceivable that the right to outspend your enemies and therefore more fully saturate everybody’s poor little unsuspecting brain with your psychologically proven mind-influencers is not actually equivalent to freedom of speech. It is conceivable that that was nothing more than an opinion held at one specific time by the majority of nine old sitabouts who–far from being the Form-following philosopher kings that their intelligence, expertise, dedication, advanced age, and freedom from financial or career concerns was supposed to make them–had their own hatchets to sharpen.

But even supposing another set of uppermost judges were to–rightly or wrongly!–reverse the ruling that equates regulating campaign spending with regulating speech (perhaps using an argument that the speech act is one thing and the using power to drench the world in it is another thingNote 1), we’d still all be gathered around our own individual media sources, drinking only the spin that already agrees with our own particular prejudices, getting thicker and thicker in certainty and swagger and louder and louder in indignation and disgust at neighbors who gobble the contrary media.

The real problem is clearly that we’re an evil and depraved people. Except that if you actually meet us, we’re not that bad. We’ve just stopped believing in a shared good, in a larger nation, in beliefs and hopes and goals held in common. We’ve fallen for the lie of Red vs Blue and it is killing us down into the asphalt that the jumpers dent, splatter, and forget.

Perhaps if we began to pull ourselves away from the televisions and computers, and/or we began to demand not journalism that makes us feel like we are already right, but journalism that challenges us. (I know!: The problem with the latter fix is that the underlying problem involves how everyone thinks their opinions are the Truth and it’s the other side who can’t bear to be challenged with the Truth.)

Whatever you are trying for: “truth” or “goodness” or “holiness” or “best current guess” or “decency”–whatever phraseology you use, your deep underlying goal presupposes that life matters and that we can consciously find our way to better and worse ideas and actions (ie: your real motivation is a sense of meaningfulness deeper than ideas and feelings). So though our specific philo-spiritual persuasions vary widely, we all agree that life matters and that with open-hearts and open-minds, we can find our way to truer visions and better actions. Take that common ground seriously and you will see that it implies a shared absolute standard of values. The real Truth is prior to our ideas and feelings about Truth, but each of us has the same inner sense: this is the truth from which we can begin: this is the truth from which real commonwealth can beginNote 2): admit that the Truth is in each of us: we all know very well that life matters, that people matter, that we need to treat one another with respect and dignity. We don’t just think that or feel that, we know it, and it is this deep knowledge, deeper than the assumptions out of which we’d build our doubts about the authority of this knowledge, that binds us.

We need to start seeing that we have enough in common and that the only things that win in media battles are memes and dramatic swells of self-aggrandizing emotion-puffs. People aren’t soundbites or momentary thrills. They aren’t even complex, well-thought-out ideas and intricate mazes of overlapping and interacting feelings. They are ideas and feelings centered around that indefinable something that motivates and justifies our attempts to use ideas and feelings to find truer and better paths. People win when they treat themselves and others with dignity and actually think and work together; they lose when they reduce the real world to black and white sides and human beings to us or them.

But in case we don’t straighten up and fly right, I’ve got another plan:

Some scientific genius can come up with some magic dust that will–upon release from a small, square-based, cork-stopped glass flask–instantly fill the world and undo all nuclear weapons all over the world–rendering them all harmless. Another scientific genius can come up with something similar for chemical weapon X and another for Chemical weapon Y. And then we’ll need a scientific genius to release a special bacteria that will make us resistant to all the dangerous ones and a special virus that will keep us safe from the bad ones. And so on. I’m not sure how many scientific geniuses we’ll exactly need, or how we can be sure to keep their inventions from not backfiring and actually making things worse. But at least that’s the plan in a rough-sketch.

Or everyone could do like me and turn into a superbeing that cannot be harmed by anything and that jumps from city to city, from harbor to harbor, from coast to valley, from desert to mountaintop, from the seafloor to the country church. I certainly enjoy this lifestyle and wholeheartedly recommend it for everyone. But for some reason the many–stiff-necked!–drag their feet, make milky-eyed laments and handlebar-frown excuses. They can’t, they don’t know how, they’re just so wretchedly mortal–and on and on. There’s no helping some people!

Author: Bartleby Willard
Oversight: Andy Watson

Copyright: Andy Watson
Note 1: This idea originated in the idle conversation of WAP co-founder and -leader Tom Watson, co-chief of the implausible yet achievable Wandering Albatross Press. On numerous chit chat throughout the continental United States, Tom Watson has expanded at length upon a scholarly legal article that he proposes to write. In this much-promised and little-realized paper, Tom plans on demonstrating the constitution’s ultimate support for campaign finance in the 21st Century and beyond, basing his prodigious future-arguments largely upon the distinction between the freedom to speak and share your opinions and the power to fill the media sea with them. Or so I understand this as yet nonexistent but at least to hear him talk inevitable intellectual, moral, and spiritual achievement. As the unwritten article as yet remains unnamed, for convenience’s sake we will in the future refer to it as “Article I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Note 2: A Literary Allusion: “Villanelle for Our Time” by Frank Scott (Leonard Cohen put music to this poem in his 2004 album “Dear Heather”)

“Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.” is in F Scott’s poem.

I found the poem, along with a concise and thoughtful commentary by a certain “Max Stephenson, Jr”, professor of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, here;
http://www.ee.unirel.vt.edu/index.php/outreach-policy/comment/leonard_cohen_a_villanelle_for_our_time/

It goes without saying that this poem is a favorite amongst Something Deeperists far and wide and near and far.
……

This piece has been filed under Diary of an Adamant Lover: Essayish.

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)