Short Version
Something Deeperism is the general worldview that there is a Truth and people can relate meaningfully to It — just not in a literal way.
A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager: that the most fundamental aspect of life is a Love that chooses everyone, and we can relate to meaningfully to that Love.
The Something Deeperist wagers that Love is Real and Love can help us to feel/think/act more and more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing — growing ever deeper and wider in a whole-being insight (ideas and feelings interacting meaningfully &mash; though of course not literally/1:1/definitively — with each other and with the Light shining through the center of our conscious space) into that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”.
Magical thinking is when, for example, you are lonely and wishing that some particular person would be your person, and then you see a heart drawn somewhere and take it as evidence that you and that person are meant to be together forever and you’ll never have to be lonely every again.
But what about when you keep being overwhelmed by the sense that someone is the one for you? What if it just keeps blaring through you that s/he “is the one” — sometimes in words that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in feelings that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in combinations thereof? Is that just magical thinking, or might it have an appreciable spiritual component? Or, even if it doesn’t have a spiritual element, could it at least count as insight into your feelings for someone?
And is magical thinking always completely cut-off from spiritual Reality? Is it not conceivable that What Is might sometimes give us signs to help point us in the right direction?
A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager, but is also wary of the fundamental spiritual error: pretending one’s ideas and feelings about Reality are identical with Reality — and/or pretending Reality ratifies your notions about and wishes for reality.
Both pretending that we don’t need Truth and pretending that we can have literal Truth are distortions that cause one to lose sight of the fundamental task of relating poetically with the Truth. That is the core of Something Deeperism: growing one’s relationship with the Truth in the only way possible for humans: poetically (not literally accurate, precise, and certain; but still adequately accurate, precise, and certain for whatever task is at hand).
The Something Deeperist works poetically with Pure Love like the poet works poetically with whatever she’s painting. A poet points towards a moment in the woods or a lover’s embrace or etc, and the reader uses empathy and the fundamental sameness of all human beings to feelingly recreate the poet’s experience and sense-of-things. The Something Deeperist organizes her feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love shining through everything (and thus each conscious moment) and poetically (not with literal precision, accuracy, or certainty; but still with adequate precision, accuracy, and certainty for the task at hand) relates to and interprets that Pure Love in her feeling, thinking, and acting.
Something Deeperism is an open-ended task. Every moment we drop our current sense of Reality and start over. We don’t forget our previous ideas and feelings and how well they did or didn’t seem to relate to Reality; we just let go of our certainty of them and open up again for the Pure Love that must shine through everyone if this life is to be meaningful/tolerable to any of us. [Over and over again, we make the fundamental spiritual wager while trying over and over again to drop the fundamental spiritual error.]
In practice, Something Deeperism looks something like this:
I seek the Light shining through my core that I sense to be my most essential self. I seek that same Light from others. I seek that Light beaming out of all sentient beings and also through everything (but in sentient beings the Light is a fundamental element within their conscious moment, and that makes the Light more relatable to us). And from here I make a little poetic sketch of how I should at that moment think/feel/act. Then I let go of everything and watch how that sketch reacts with the Light and me and the outside world and others; and then I ground again in the Light in myself, others, and through everything; and then I use that grounding and what I learned by observing the results of my last little poetic motion/interaction to make another small, gentle, cautious guess about how I should then and there feel/think/act. Over and over and over again we start from zero, from the Love that chooses everyone.
[That’s Something Deeperism in day-to-day decision-making. Maybe it looks different in certain types of meditation, prayers, and other spiritual exercises; but, in any case, Pure Love is always the core of Something Deeperism.]
How does Something Deeperism compare to magical thinking? Something Deeperism happens primarily in one’s core, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings (but ideas and feelings must play a big part of Something Deeperism, because ideas and feelings play a big part of how we understand and relate to life — human meaning requires ideas and feelings), and minimally in one’s hopes and feelings. Magical thinking, at its worst, occurs in the opposite landscape: primarily in one’s hopes and fears, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings, and minimally in one’s core.
But it seems possible that between the most ego-tripping of magical thinking and a Buddha-level Something Deeperism there is a big gray zone — big enough to include even recurring notions about how somebody is the one for you. There’s few choices as important in one’s life as who you chose as your mate. A good choice will help most people live their best lives; and a poor choice is going to make it more difficult for one to be safe/thriving/joy-overflowing. So it makes sense to seek spiritual guidance in this choice, and it seems possible that one’s sense of Reality might be willing to weigh in, sometimes perhaps even unbidden, and say: “Don’t let this one go.”
Obviously, possible insights gained in the gray zone of wisdom deserve less credence than insights gained in a more concentrated spiritual effort. But no insight is unassailable: we humans will never get it completely right and must constantly self-assess, and -critique, and we must always be open to reinterpretations of our particular ideas, feelings, observations, and experiences.
Long Version
[Needs to be edited]
Something Deeperism is the general worldview that there is a Truth and people can relate meaningfully to It — just not in a literal way.
A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager: that the most fundamental aspect of life is a Love that chooses everyone, and we can relate to meaningfully to that Love: It can help us to feel/think/act more and more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing; and helping us to understand better and better that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”.
Magical thinking is when, for example, you are lonely and wishing that some particular person would be your person, and then you see a heart drawn somewhere and take it as evidence that you and that person are meant to be together forever and you’ll never have to be lonely every again.
But what about when you keep being overwhelmed by the sense that someone is the one for you? What if it just keeps blaring through you that he or she “is the one” — sometimes in words that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in feelings that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in combinations thereof? Is that just magical thinking, or might it have an appreciable spiritual component? Or, even if it doesn’t have a spiritual element, could it at least count as insight into your feelings for someone?
And is magical thinking always completely cut-off from spiritual Reality? Is it not conceivable that What Is might sometimes give us signs to help point us in the right direction?
A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager, but is also wary of the fundamental spiritual error: pretending one’s ideas and feelings about Reality are identical with Reality.
This fundamental spiritual error is so pernicious that everyone makes it all the time. People who claim they don’t believe in or are agnostic about things like “Truth” and “Goodness” and “Reality” (concepts that point towards the Absolute, as a opposed to merely relative notions) are not immune: deep inside we all cannot help but assume we have meaningful insight into what is actually going on, and what is truly best; and we all over and over again clutch desperately (at least partially) onto xyz set of ideas and feelings about how our life is Absolutely OK because we possess, or will be Absolutely OK, if only we can attain this or that set of specific circumstances.
Dogmatic religions and philosophies have a tendency to exacerbate this fundamental spiritual error. Witness the fundamentalist Christian force feelings of certainty onto ideas she cannot (deep within) understand, believe in, or even care about. Witness the need of the confirmed atheist or agnostic to have a handle on reality: they are clutching so tightly because deep inside they are calling that “relative reality” “Absolute Reality”.
All religions and philosophies are to some degree dogmatic: we need some clear and solid ideas to construct coherent worldviews out of. But to the degree a religion and/or philosophy is Something Deeperistic, that set of guiding principles has built within it a self-assessing and -correcting practice of returning over and again to an awareness of the fundamental human conundrum:
Our own feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree that we make and win the fundamental spiritual wager (we can only understand, believe in, or care about our own ideas, feelings, and actions to the degree that we can real insight into a Love that chooses everyone and helps us follow and make sense of the universal values [aware, … joyfully sharing] and helps us to perceive how that Love shines through everyone and binds us all together);
BUT
Our ideas and feelings about a fundamental spiritual Reality cannot possibly be identical with a fundamental spiritual Reality.
Something Deeperism addresses this fundamental dilemma by noting that we can’t understand what literal knowledge about anything — let alone anything so clearly prior to our ideas and feelings as Reality would have to be — , but that we also don’t require literal knowledge of anything to relate meaningfully to it.
With the so-called “literal” knowledge of mathematics, we move precise logic-stones around in accordance with our inner impulse towards logical rules (like how a child feelingly holds and moves a stone around in a creek to feel/think/move it into the right spot in a dam: the child’s hands do not literally understand the stone, and neither does the mathematician’s mind literally understand the logic-objects she is moving around). The precision of mathematics comes at an epistemological price: we cannot prove that the underlying rules of our own thought are True, or true, or even worth bothering with. This doesn’t matter: it is enough to make practical use of mathematics and to appreciate its Beauty.
With the more “poetic” knowledge of concepts like “Truth”, “Goodness”, “Holiness”, “actually meaningful”, and “actually truer and more preferable”, and “Pure Love” we are still feelingly moving thought-objects around, but now one of the thought-objects is a vista beyond what our ideas and feelings can precisely define. Math qua Beauty also gazes at a vista beyond what our ideas and feelings can precisely define, but we can do math by bracketing the endeavor off from Beauty and just following our inner sense towards logic. If we bracket our thinking about “Pure Love” off from our experience of “Pure Love” we lose all meaningful traction in those thoughts. This is because the point of thinking about “Pure Love” is not to solve clear-cut scientific problems, but to act in accordance with what is not only prior to specific ideas and feelings, but is prior to all feeling and thinking.
The Something Deeperist works poetically with Pure Love like the poet works poetically with whatever she’s painting. A poet points towards a moment in the woods or a lover’s embrace and the reader, uses empathy to feelingly recreate the poet’s experience and sense-of-things. The Something Deeperist organizes her feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love shining through everything (and thus each conscious moment) and poetically (not with literal precision, accuracy, or certainty; but still with adequate precision, accuracy, and certainty for the task at hand) relates to and interprets that Pure Love in her feeling, thinking, and acting.
Both pretending that we don’t need Truth and pretending that we can have literal Truth are distortions that cause one to lose sight of the fundamental task of relating poetically with the Truth. That is the core of Something Deeperism: growing one’s relationship with the Truth in the only way possible for humans: poetically.
Something Deeperism is an open-ended task. Every moment we drop our current sense of Reality and start over. We don’t forget our previous ideas and feelings and how well they did or didn’t seem to relate to Reality; we just let go of our certainty of them and open up again for the Pure Love that must shine through everyone if this life is to be meaningful/tolerable to any of us.
In practice, Something Deeperism looks something like this: I seek the Light shining through my core that I sense to be my most essential self. I seek that same Light from others. I seek that Light beaming out of all sentient beings and also through everything (but in sentient beings the Light becomes the fundamental element within their conscious moment, and that makes the Light more relatable to us). And from here I make a little poetic sketch of how I should at that moment think/feel/act. Then I let go of everything and watch how that sketch reacts with the Light and me and the outside world and others; and then ground again in the Light in myself, others, and through everything; and then I use that grounding and what I learned by observing the results of my last little poetic sketch to make another small, gentle, cautious guess about how I should then and there feel/think/act.
How does Something Deeperism compare to magical thinking? Something Deeperism happens primarily in one’s core, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings (but ideas and feelings must play a big part of Something Deeperism, because ideas and feelings play a big part of how we understand and relate to life), and minimally in one’s hopes and feelings. Magical thinking, at its worst, occurs in the opposite landscape: primarily in one’s hopes and fears, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings, and minimally in one’s core.
But it seems possible that between the most ego-tripping of magical thinking and a Buddha-level Something Deeperism there is a big gray zone — big enough to include even recurring notions about how somebody is the one for you. There’s few choices as important in one’s life as who you chose as your mate. A good choice will help most people live their best lives; and a poor choice is going to add make it harder for you to be safe/thriving/joy-overflowing. So it makes sense to seek spiritual guidance in this choice, and it seems possible that one’s sense of Reality might be willing to weigh in, sometimes perhaps even unbidden, and say: “Don’t let this one go.”
Copyright: AMW
