Something Deeperism is the general worldview that

(1) There is an Absolute Truth.
(2) The Absolute Truth is something like Reality = Love.
(3) Reality = Love shines through everything, including each conscious moment.
(4) We are meaningful to ourselves only to the degree we relate our whole conscious moment meaningfully to Reality = Love.
(5) At least in our day to day lives (in all we say and do), our ideas and feelings are fundamental elements of our conscious moment.
(5) We can relate our ideas and feelings to Reality = Love meaningfully, but — as ideas and feelings about the Truth are finite while the Truth is Absolute — we can never relate our ideas and feelings to R = L literally, 1:1, or definitively.
(6) And to the degree we confuse our ideas and feelings for the Truth, we turn away from R = L.

(6) Wisdom is the meaningful — though not literal, perfect, or definitive — relationship between all aspects of a human conscious moment: feelings, ideas, etc (all the animal aspects of a conscious moment), and Reality = Love (which shines through everything, including each conscious moment).

(7) As we grow in wisdom, we become more meaningful to ourselves.

(8) To grow in wisdom we must get better and better at
(a) organizing the rest of our conscious moment (feelings, ideas, etc) around Reality = Love
and
(b) experiencing R = L
and
(c) poetically (imperfectly-but-still-adequately pointing towards the gist-of; rather than precisely, definitively, and/or literally describing) translating Reality = Love into our feeling/thinking/acting.

(9) Human wisdom (being a relationship of limited faculties to what is unlimited) is never complete, and is always liable to self-deceptions.

(10) Wisdom is thus an ongoing process, requiring constant effort.
(a) We must practice constant self-observation, -analysis, -critique, and -adjustment.
(b) We should make use of our inborn guardrails (the universal values, fundamental questions, and standard spiritual practices) to help us stay focused on the dance of relating our ideas and feelings meaningfully to Reality = Love.

[Note:
The universal values are something like: aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing.

The fundamental questions are something like: what is going on?, what is preferable?, where should I bestow and seek love?, and how can I flow with what is going on towards what is preferable — particularly as regards love?

The universal values and fundamental questions are seeking Absolute, not relative direction. (Deep inside we are not working to figure out what we think might be going on, but what is Really going on.)

The standard spiritual practices are things like: meditation, prayer, contemplation, studying spiritual literature, fellowship, service, and practicing humility, loving kindness, and wholesome living. These practices presuppose (or at least to some degree presuppose and to some degree wager on) Reality = Love.
]

That is to say:

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the mystics are basically right.

An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism

A. To be meaningful to itself, human thought (human feeling/thinking/acting) requires a Reality = Love to motivate, ratify/justify, and explicate its own inborn rules.

(1) we have certain inborn, indelible rules for feeling/thinking/acting.
(2) And we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we follow those rules.
(3) And those rules require (a) accurate insight into a Reality infinitely beyond our feelings and ideas; and (b) accurate insight into that and in what way Reality is most fundamentally a Love that chooses everyone and will bring us all safely home (something like Reality = Love).

Explanation:

(1) We have universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, kind, joyfully-sharing/-together), and fundamental questions (what is really going on?, what is truly preferable?, and what to do with our love and where to seek love?).

(2) To the degree we don’t abide by the universal values and/or don’t adequately address the fundamental questions; we cannot believe in, understand, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting. Why? I don’t know. We’re just made that way. But try to have any faith or interest in your own ideas if they are muddled, dishonest, selfish, etc; you can’t. Or try to suppose you aren’t deep inside working to figure out what’s going on; you know you are lying to yourself and lose interest and traction in your own suppositions.

(3a) And these values and questions are not requesting relative insight, but Absolute insight. Again, this is just how human beings are.

Deep inside we cannot help but seek and even to some degree believe we are finding insight into (for example) what is really going on — not what we maybe suppose is going on; or would like to have be going on; or, accepting xyz unprovable assumptions, can scientifically verify is going on.

We can therefore make sense to ourselves only to the degree that we discover that and in what way the Absolute motivates, ratifies/justifies, and explicates the universal values and fundamental questions.

To understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting, we need the Absolute to help us abide by the universal values and address the fundamental questions. To the degree we lack this Absolute assistance, we slip and slide in nihilisms (“as far as I can tell all decision are choose-able!”) and romanticisms (“through faith I force my concept of ‘God’ [or ‘No-God’; ‘science’; ‘existential stand’, or etc] to be a firm foundation for choosing one decision over another!”).

[Note that these nihilisms and romanticisms are rarely explicitly stated. If they were, we’d see through them. Instead, we imagine our faith is of “God”, or we can somehow reason beyond faith (as if reason had a reason for faith in itself!), or etc. maneuvers in the self-imposed dark.]

(3b) But if we cannot discover a Reality that is infinitely loving, with enough kind joy for all with infinite left over; we cannot believe in, understand, or care about our own feeling, thinking and acting. And if the Absolute is not such a Reality, we cannot relate meaningfully to It. Why are we so sensitive? So needy? I don’t know. But there’s no point pretending to be what we’re not.

We can therefore only make sense to ourselves to the degree that we discover that and in what way the Absolute is something like a Reality = Love. To this degree, this Love can motivate, ratify/justify, and explicate the universal values, the fundamental questions, the standard spiritual practices, and (most fundamentally) our searing inner need for a Love that chooses everyone and that is infinitely more than enough for everyone.

We need to relate meaningfully to Reality = Love to abide by our own rules for coherently choosing one thought-direction over another.

Also following from our need to connect with a Love that chooses everyone:

We require Reality = Love to grant us insight into that and in what way it is True to say we are all essentially the same and are all in this together.

[Also, without such insight, life is too lonely to bear; and we also don’t know what to make of everything we’ve learned by interacting with others — which is very much of what we think we know, and it’s impossible to say where the influence of others, and the assumption they are like us, begins and ends within our own understandings.]

B. That we need a Reality = Love to motivate, justify/ratify, and explicate the universal values, fundamental questions, and our need for Love to be Real doesn’t prove that they Reality = Love exists, or that we can relate meaningfully to It. It only demonstrates that we need R = L to exist and we need to relate meaningfully to It if we are to be internally coherent (meaningful to ourselves / able to meaningfully inhabit and travel with our own feeling/thinking/acting to our own conclusions, and thus able to meaningfully choose one thought-direction over another).

C. Over and over again, we pause, drop everything, and work again to stand up straight within our own conscious moments, pushing out from within, letting the Light of Love flood us and explode out through our feeling/thinking/acting.

Over and over again we ground ourselves in the Love prior to our ideas and feelings, and try again to listen with every strand of our feeling/thinking/acting to the Love that alone Knows that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together.”

We become more meaningful to ourselves by allowing the Reality = Love shining through everything to explain Itself to the rest of our conscious moments, and to thus provide a firm foundation for feeling/thinking/acting.

Only to the degree that our feeling/thinking/acting is in sync with and flows aware and clear along with Reality = Love can we understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting.

The proof of Reality = Love is beyond concepts. The proof is an experiential work-in-progress.

It was a misunderstanding of human thought to imagine we needed or could make any use of intellectual and/or emotional proofs of Reality = Love.

We don’t really understand, care about, or believe in ideas and feelings. We follow logical chains and feelingly move concepts and emotions around in our conscious spaces. And they morph and bump and create new combinations of ideas and feelings. But they don’t tell us any more than sticks and stones that we feelingly move about while creating a little bridge in the creek while we’re young and easygoing.

What human thought can do is experience itself as a whole conscious moment, and use ideas and feelings to build constantly evolving bridges to and from the generous joy that lies beyond ideas and feelings, beyond being and nonbeing — beyond all the stories we tell ourselves and the feelings we use to force costumes of “real” and “not real” onto them.

The proof of Reality = Love is not a proof, but a project, a way of life, the way to life overflowing.

The wise, it is said, rest on impermanence and interconnectedness as seagulls rest upon the ocean breeze.
God, it is said, is Love and loves us all.

We like to play a game.
It is called wonder-wide.
How can it be that Thich Nhat Hanh finds no individual self-entity anywhere, including no personal God, but instead defines God as the capacity for infinite compassion within us all; while Julian of Norwich knows God personally, finds that God is everywhere, and hears God tell her that God loves her and everyone infinitely, that God delights in us, is pleased with us, is working with us to make all well, and assures us that at the deepest level, all is already well?

We like to play a game.
It is called cool-it.
Every time we find ourselves angry with ourselves or another, we imagine the infinite strands of feeling/thinking/acting creating their moment and our moment unravelling. We picture the Love exploding through them and us and everything. We breathe slow and careful and ask ourselves, “what’s so funny? what’s the giggly joke that saves us all, that loves us all, that is us all?”

We like to play a game.
It is called an experiential proof of Something Deeperism.
We open up, turn ourselves inside out, push out from within, and let Love in.

Authors: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Mac Watson