Browsed by
Author: Bartleby

Mark’s Yard Sonnet

Mark’s Yard Sonnet

Remember neighbor’s yards: sharp overgrown
All jut and jab through chainlink gray-glint fence;
Or placid matted greens and dust-brown tones—
Belike your own, old Mark—whose shag basement
Did spill upon white clean square concrete slab,
Whose pebbly-crumbling drive’s end now escapes
My sun-on-smog reconstruct photo-lab.
A shed? Garage? Empty weedcrossed estate?
The magnet debacle, clear summer sun.
Cops, Robbers; Cowboys, Indians; days on the run.

AMW/BW/Peoria

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

A Something Deeperist Writes To A Different-Ist, Trying to be friends

A Something Deeperist Writes To A Different-Ist, Trying to be friends

You asked what I believe.

Well,

I believe there’s more to this life than atoms, void, animal impulses and chance. I think there’s a Light that is the Truth shining through each conscious moment and we can and should follow our inborn push towards that Light and the awareness, honesty, respectful kindness and joyful sharing that the Light demands of us. In this way, we can get better and better and understanding and following the Light, at becoming Light in the world. However, the Light is prior to ideas and feelings, so we cannot have literal/direct/definitive insight into the Truth. We need to keep seeking as we keep working to live the Truth we’ve discovered. This operation should be safeguarded by the traditional mechanisms of religion: humility, selflessness, honest reflection and self-critique, personal decency, compassion, a community of fellow believers.

The impulse towards religious faith is good but goes too far when it puts ideas and feelings about why life matters ahead of engagement with the inner Light that alone knows how and why life matters. The impulse towards skepticism is good but goes too far when it puts the need to avoid intellectual and/or emotional errors ahead of the engagement with the Light within that alone knows that and why and how accuracy matters.

Voila what I believe! How much progress I’ve made down the path is another question.

I’m a Something Deeperist. I made up that name and precised-up the ideas, but it is basically the tradition I was raised in. We were raised Christian, but with the understanding that other religious traditions can also point towards the Truth. My grandfather, though an American Baptist minister, was a universal salvationist and my mom’s theology is also liberal. My father was raised fundamentalist Christian, but changed course as a young man and reads a lot of Sufiism and writings from other mystical traditions.

Maybe our spiritual notions are at a bit of an impasse. I mean, from my perspective, none of us really quite understand or care about our own dogmas–since they are just ideas and feelings, and, though ideas and feelings are important and necessary tools for humans to navigate life, they don’t quite make any sense to any of us–. Therefore, I don’t worry too much about what people think they believe as long as they forgive me my own human-sized delusions on that front and agree that the main thing is that within us all that knows that and how life matters, and that that inner something demands aware honest thinking and feeling and competent helpful selfless joyful communal living. Still, I’m not to be dissuaded from my general view of things and I understand if you think my notions are incompatible with yours. Also, I am aware of the gap between my beliefs and my wisdom. I think it is better to aim beyond your current wisdom-level than to avoid hypocrisy at all costs; but I still think I am a little too far from wise and don’t fault you for agreeing.

Anyway, that’s my impromptu essay.

Just Want This To End Sonnet

Just Want This To End Sonnet

This tumble-down swirl-you-down take-you-out
Throughout. Keeps shoulders tensed, back crinkled curved.
“Just want this to end” blank quiet-shout pout.
“Can’t take another day of this” mind swerved
To steal its rest from half-rendered daydreams
Of success, escape, romance, shaking off.
All tired: shoulders heart knees toes and schemes.
“What is the forward way? Please help me” soft
Oh never mind anymore, so it goes
“Just someone to talk to” in lusts implodes

AMW/BW/Whatever

Political Something Deeperism

Political Something Deeperism

As a private theophilosophical position, Something Deeperism suggests an individual work to get more and more insight into that and how the undoubtables are True.

With “undoubtables” I mean those beliefs and values without which human thought cannot make sense to itself:

we should think and act aware and clear (to the degree we don’t abide by these principles, we turn our thoughts to mush, and lose control over them);

we should be honest with ourselves and think logically and make progress towards our inner sense of “more preferable” (to the degree we don’t abide by these principles, we have no system for choosing one idea or action over another that makes any sense to us; we turn our thoughts to mush and lose control over them);

what we say and do actually matters, and other people are essentially like us and also matter, and we should all treat each other with kindness, respect, and mutual appreciation (to the degree we don’t believe in and abide by these principles, our life has no meaning we can believe in, understand, care about, or even stand; our feelings and thus our thoughts turn to mush and we lose control over them).

To these, you could arguably also add communication and Truth:
If our ideas and feelings cannot meaningfully communicate with one another, and/or there is no Truth within our conscious experience able to tell our ideas and feelings what is actually going on, what actually matters, and what is actually preferable; then how can we meaningfully steer our own thoughts and actions in a way that actually means anything to us?
And if we cannot communicate meaningfully with other human beings, who can stand the loneliness? And what meaning can we make out of everything we know–the bulk of which came from interactions with other human beings that we thought involved communication.

Naturally, just because a belief or value is undoubtable (ie: to the degree you doubt it, you doubt your own thought’s meaningfulness), doesn’t mean it is True; and just because you assent to a belief or value, doesn’t mean you know that it is true or True or understand what it means.

For this reason, Something Deeperism does not request blind faith in the undoubtables, but requires rather that one keep working to better and better understand that they are True and how they are True. Human thought is ideas, feelings, and etc all working together. The way forward is to assume a Truth shining through one’s conscious moment that one’s ideas and feelings can relate meaningfully, though of course not literally/definitively/1:1 to (the Truth is what is actually the case; not ideas and feelings about what is actually the case); and then to constantly work to discover, understand, accept, follow that Truth.

How to know how well one’s attaining that never-ending goal (never-ending because there will always be a mismatch between the Truth and our ideas and feelings about the Truth, and thus always some estimating/fudging/revising required)? Attached to the seed of wisdom within (the push towards awareness, clarity, honesty, decency, competency, loving kindness, shared joy), is knowledge of guardrails: “am I putting my lusts, greeds, vanities, fears ahead of treating others with respect and kindness? To the degree I answer ‘yes’, I’m going the wrong way”; “am I mean, am I cruel, do I get off on watching others suffers? To the degree I do, I’m going the wrong”; “am I doing this because it satisfies my greeds and/or ego; or am I doing it to help another person?”–things like that.

Something Deeperism is very compatible with the religious life. It is a philosophical argument for heading into a spiritual path and for keeping your spiritual path focused the Light that tells us we are all in this together and must be respectful and kind to ourselves and one another, the Light that alone knows that and how our life is meaningful: to keep fighting against our tendency to make Gods out of ideas and feelings: be they simple gimme-gimmes, or deeply-felt narratives about why our life is meaningful.

Something Deeperism seeks to keep dogmatism and skepticism in their proper places: in service of an ever-growing insight into that and in what way the undoubtables are actually True. Because that is the only path that allows for coherent thoughts and actions. Therefore, when thought-tools like dogmatism or skepticism are used in a way that undermines that path, they undermine their only possible meaningful purpose.

But what about for groups? What about for a political theory? Must we convince everyone of the preeminence of Something Deeperism before we set out a framework for shared government?

No! All we need to do is to make this point: whatever your belief system is, to the degree it is meaningful to yourself or anyone, it refuses to compromise on those values without which human thought is meaningless to itself (awareness, clarity, honesty-with-oneself, competency, kindness, shared joy, etc); and it also refuses to compromise on those values without which coherent public discussions and actions are impossible: accuracy, competency, honesty, and clarity in public debate; anti-corruption in politics and business.

People often agree to those values, but then let themselves and others set them aside in the name of some justifiable ends, or because they claim their opponents can’t or won’t abide by them, or simply because “you gotta be realistic”. Naturally, life is not perfectly clear-cut; however, the fate of all of us and the world depends upon how we humans manage ourselves; and while we don’t know everything and don’t share all the same beliefs, we should all be able to agree that to the degree a human is on the right track, that human shares certain basic values (obvious things like awareness, clarity, honesty, open-hearted/mindedness, decency, loving kindness; an honest search for accuracy, for competency, for what’s best for everyone; etc), and so it behooves us to keep working to at least protect those basic values that we do all share and that we can therefore all get on board with, and without which none of us can either understand our private lives or public discourses.

The more corrupt an individual or a state is, the easier it is for low impulses (greeds, lusts, vanities, lazinesses, delusions, cruelties, etc) to indulge their cravings and rule the moment, and the harder it is for high impulses (the ones we’ve been advocating for throughout this essay) to stand up for what is right and rule the moment. We want to always work to push against corruption in ourselves and in our state.

Ideas and feelings often tempt us; they want to count as Gods; and so they often fool us into supposing we are behaving well, or at least well-enough, when deep within we know we are heading down the wrong path. That is corruption in an individual. We can push against it by pursuing the basic spiritual values with an understanding that human insight into the Truth is an ongoing process of better and better organizing ideas and feelings around the Light within, and so requires constant effort and refinement.

But what about in the public sphere? How do we push back on the corruptions within the state? It seems like the starting point is to admit that they are a more fundamental issue than our personal political agendas because they create the framework within which our personal political agendas can be fairly tried. And we should only want our personal political agendas to be pursued if they are actually superior, and we should know that we cannot have successful long-term policies without building consensus. Therefore, we should all demand clear, honest, non-corrupt governing from everyone–not just those whose policies we disagree with. This is correct; but would it even be enough if everyone agreed to it? Most everyone is willing to nod at it, and that clearly isn’t enough. I don’t know what to do.

Here’s something: Recall that personal Something Deeperism has two main tenets: moral relativism is a hopeless slip-and-slide so you need to accept some basic spiritual values–the ones without which you cannot understand, believe-in, or care about your own thoughts and actions; however, blind faith just causes you to mindlessly clutch ideas you don’t understand, which also causes you to lose internal-meaning and traction within your own thoughts and actions. If we apply the same principles to political Something Deeperism, we’d have the demand for protecting our shared spiritual values (already made), but we’d also have the demand that we better understand and follow them, this time as a group. That would mean that part of what we’d discuss in public discourse would be “what is awareness, accuracy, honesty, decency, kindness? How to know they actually matter? How to know when we’re adequately aware, accurate, … ?”

Can we have that conversation in a productive way if some of us are atheists, some are fundamentalists of this or that religion, some are liberals of this or that religion, some are secular humanists, some think abstract ideas are unhelpful, etc? Or would this just invite chaos and discord? The political Something Deeperism was supposed to be less demanding than the individual Something Deeperism: we’re not asking everyone sign on to Something Deeperism, just that they agree that we can publicly share certain core values because, while we may feud about many details, we can still agree that we can and should demand valuing and pursuing honesty, accuracy, competency, kindness, and so on from ourselves and others in the public sphere. With political Something Deeperism, I was just trying to get us all to see that we have shared fundamental values, so we can all communicate with each other and work meaningfully together–to the degree we as a collective don’t jettison those values. OK, but wouldn’t everyone already agree to that? I don’t know; I feel like we slip away from it quite easily and I thought that if we were to all go through this logic together, we’d see that slipping away from our shared values is not acceptable: it causes each of us to betray our own individual values and to thus lose meaningful traction in our own ideas and feelings; and it causes us as a group to lose our ability to share meaning and thus coherently discuss ideas and make choices. In short, it invites confusion in at both the individual and the group level, and that invites corruption in, and that is bad for everyone. I thought if we would just go over this reasoning together, well then,
we’d,
we’d all agree to demand more and more clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, kindness of our elected officials; we’d all ag

AMW/BW

Something Deeperism vs Literalism

Something Deeperism vs Literalism

From the point of view of an individual, Something Deeperism implies working to better and better learn that and in what way awareness, clarity, honesty, competency, kindness, and most of all selfless love are the Way; while simultaneously discovering and understanding the Truth this way leads to and that also leads to the Truth. Ie: there’s a seed of wisdom within each of us that one must unpack for themselves in order to live in a way that they can understand, believe in, care about, and, well, stand. A philosophy of Something Deeperism wouldn’t claim that the foregoing is true; merely that it is either True, and one can find a way to better and better understand that and how it is True, or we humans have no way to coherently choose one thought over another, one action over another (because unless awareness … is really onto something, as opposed to just being another ultimately perhaps-meaningless value judgement; what way of thinking and acting do we have that really means anything to any of us?).

When one tries to dispense with awareness … Truth … awareness, one runs into the problem of relativism. If as far as we know everything is just perhaps-pointless impulses mixed with logical conjectures that may or may not have any ultimate meaning, how can we say anything meaningful? How can you say, “everything I say may be ultimately meaningless” in a meaningful way? And how can you say, “everything I feel may be ultimately meaningless” in a way that feels meaningful to you? To the degree one assumes that things like awareness, clarity, honesty, competence, and selfless love; one ceases to be meaningful to oneself, and all of one’s thoughts, including that assumption turn to mush. Hence Something Deeperism’s suggestion: accept these undoubtable values: don’t pretend you can coherently doubt them; all that does is make you lie to yourself, confusing your thoughts further. And so you remove the only meaningful steering wheel your thought can have, which allows your thought and action to be hijacked by greeds, lusts, vainglories, and all the normal nonsense; plus, you feel all the time like your mouth’s stuffed with cotton balls.

However, when one claims literal knowledge of the Truth, one runs into many problems. We cannot stand outside of our own thoughts and assess how they measure up to some objective standard of Truth: for all they can reason to on their own, our ideas and feelings don’t relate to the Truth in any meaningful way, if there is a Truth at all. So then one offers the idea of faith: accept the literal Truth of, for example, the scriptures and go from there. But then you run into the same problem as the relativist: you’ve opened yourself up to turning off the only meaningful steering wheel your thought has. Indeed, the relativist’s mistake is really just a variant of literalism. Human thought is simply not capable of literal/definitive/certain/1:1 insight. Even if a dogma you accept as literally True somehow turned out to be literally True (which I don’t think is possible, since dogma’s are ideas held with feelings, but whatever is going on is whatever is going on, not ideas and feelings about whatever is going on; but, again, for the sake of argument, supposing … ), there’s still the problem of how you are going to interpret that Truth in your day-to-day life. You, with your merely human ideas and feelings: you are not going to interpret the Truth perfectly (even supposing they could recite words that somehow connected perfectly the the Truth). But literal knowledge implies perfection: no room for error, misunderstanding, or confusion. I submit to you: even if a human could have literal knowledge, that knowledge would be meaningful only if the human had insight into that and how it was True. Hence Something Deeperism’s suggestion: don’t just blindly accept and follow dogmas, but gain insight into them.

Literalism is a misunderstanding of human thought. We are not formal systems. We are ideas, feelings, and etc all working together, and our own thought is only meaningful to us if it follows its own rules: logical rigor is one of them, but not the only one, and not the most fundamental one. Logic knows that unless there’s really a point in what we say and do, there’s no point in being logical. That is not at all to say that we can dispense with logic. We cannot make sense to ourselves if we do not think logically; we cannot choose our thoughts coherently, in a way meaningful to us. It’s just that logic cannot coherently be used to doubt meaningfulness and other values without which our thoughts ceases to believe in itself. The mistake of literalism is to pretend human understanding is identical with assenting to principles and following logical reasonings based on those principles. That is just a little portion of human understanding.

Something Deeperism suggests we accept those dogmas without which human thought have no meaning to human thought, but do so remembering that those dogmas are meaningless without insight into that and how they are True. Literalism suggests we need to accept xyz ideas as true or True (depending on a given literalism’s flavor) and then use reasoning to convert these truth or Truths into other literal beliefs and practical decisions. Something Deeperism suggests we find a way to organize our ideas and feelings around the Truth shining through our conscious experience better and better, with the goal of gaining more and more insight into that and how it is the case that there is a Truth shining through our conscious experience. Literalism thinks you either know it / believe it, or you don’t. Something Deeperism thinks knowledge and belief are things of degrees. Literalism suggests we need to assent to True dogmas and then interpret them. Something Deeperism suggests one organize one’s ideas and feelings better and better around the Truth within, understanding that one will never perfectly translate the Truth into ideas and feelings.

AMW/BW

Failed again

Something Deeperism – Midway Between Dogmatism & Skepticism

Something Deeperism – Midway Between Dogmatism & Skepticism

Something Deeperism is the middle way between excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. I have an inner joy that tells me love is real and that I must pursue ever more and more insight into that inner joy and that the way to succeed in this endeavor is through more and more awareness, clarity, honesty, competency, kindness, gentleness, love, sharing and giving. If that inner joy is not really onto something, I have no way to discover thoughts and actions that really mean anything to me, that I really understand, care about, or am interested in. To the degree I fail to make progress in the inner calling to better and better understand the truth of that inner calling (both that it is true and in what way it is true), I lose traction in my own conscious moment: my ideas and feelings become less and less meaningful to me / to themselves / to this series of conscious moments. Therefore, I should not sacrifice anything to the task of gaining more and more insight into the joy within by seeking ever more awareness, clarity, honesty, competency, kindness, gentleness, love, sharing, and giving.

If an intellectual idea or feeling or (as is most often the case in human thought) a combination of ideas and feelings causes me to lose engagement with the inner joy, that that idea, feeling, or combo is leading me astray. For example, if I focus on my idea of God and what God thinks of me and other people and etc. more than I focus on finding God within, then my religion can actually lead me away from God. For another example, if I focus on avoiding intellectual errors at all cost and lose sight of the fact that intellectual accuracy only matters if there’s something that is actually True, actually meaning, actually worth aligning one’s ideas and feelings with—well, then, my skepticism has undermined the only possible meaningful use of scepticism: helping me to get closer to the Truth.

Both excessive religious fundamentalism and excessive skepticism misunderstand human thought.
Human thought is not a perfect science; our ideas are not perfectly clear objects. When we use completely precise definitions to perfect certain aspects of our thought (into, for example, mathematical reasoning), we necessarily jettison other aspects of our thought (for example, the ability to speak meaningfully about absolute concepts like “meaning”, “truth”, and “goodness”). That’s not to say rigorously defined intellectual disciplines have no place in human thought or that we cannot fit meaningfully into a human’s journey as a whole. The point is merely that human thought is not just ideas, nor even just ideas and feelings. It is ideas and feelings plus intangibles like awareness, meaning, love. You can have theories about what these intangibles are, but you cannot capture them with theories—they are experiences, not ideas about experiences; and they provide the meaningfulness without which none of us can care about anything, including theories.

Human thought (ideas, feelings, and whatever else is in a human conscious moment) loses meaning to itself to the degree it does not meaningfully engage with the Absolute (ie: what is really going on, what really matters, what should really be done; as opposed to opinions, theories, feelings about what is going on, … ). And if we try to turn the Absolute into perfectly clear ideas (in practice often tied to feelings of certainty), we are shift our core conscious focus from what is actually going on to mere ideas and feelings about what is actually going on: we miss the mark. That is true if we convince ourselves that we know exactly how to interpret xyz holy scriptures, or if we convince ourselves that we should not have faith in anything except doubt. In both cases, we’ve turned some notion—some mixture of ideas and feelings—into our Absolute (even if, as in the case of radical skepticism, we refuse to countenance the idea of the “Absolute”: we’ve still clenched our dogma with the sense of THIS IS RIGHT!, and so have tried to make an intellectual idea into what is really going on, which, of course, is deeper and wider than intellectual ideas).

You’ll note that I sometimes use “I” and sometimes “we” in the above. That’s because part of what the shared joy tells us, and part of the inner insight whose Truth we must discover in order to understand, care about, believe in, and engage in our own thoughts and actions, is this: we are all in this together and are essentially the same and, just as my ideas and feelings can adequately communicate with each other and the Light shining through my conscious moment, different human beings can adequately communicate with one another.

Something Deeperism entails the never ending attempt to become more aware, honest, kind, generous, good, decent, loving: to keep working to become more and more truly competent as a whole being—from the Light out through ideas and feelings into this shared space where we interact with others likewise rooted in the Light.

How to prove the above? Or how to say when, for example, one’s spiritual insight is “adequate”? There is no philosophy or religion that can be 100% proven by ideas. Our ideas do not perfectly capture concepts like “meaning” and in and of themselves, there’s no reason to suppose ideas actually mean anything. The above is only meant to point adequately towards a sense of things within us all, and to help us to hold it up together for a moment and think about what conclusions we should draw from it.

Dr Doctor Von Aenywey

Shrugs and “sure”s provided by BW & AMW

Susan Runs The Edges (prose)

Susan Runs The Edges (prose)

There’s a big difference between the world of Water Runners, Tree People, Plainsmen, Mountain Folk, Sea People, and The Flying Ones and our world.

On our world, all the humanoids have a common ancestry, an essentially identical physical makeup, and the ability to produce fertile offspring. That is to say, we are all the same species. And so while we may sometimes form identities and organizations based along racial lines, when different human populations smash together, we inevitably begin to desire each other and to mate and share children; and so soon enough, even without possessing enough wisdom to always innately see past superficials and into our core commonality, given enough time calm and freedom (within a given time/place/power-system), we inevitably fade into one another body, heart, mind and culture.

On Planet X, all the humanoids evolved from other animals. They don’t find each other particularly attractive (I mean, there’s always going to be somebody …), and they cannot produce fertile offspring (we know because, again, there’s always somebody). So their humanoid identity is not as fluid as ours.

However, on Planet X, all humanoids possess opposable thumbs (granted, the Air Ones’ thumbs are on their feet), and roughly human heads and limbs (OK: a shark-like tail replaces the Sea People’s legs, and their earless noseless grey-blue heads flow into their hulking forms so seamlessly that it is difficult to discern where head ends and neck begins or where neck ends and body begins; and the Air Ones have wings instead of arms; and the Plainsmen look more like antlerless elk than humans as they bound across the plains with long arms tucked along glistening torsos), and brains with the awareness and intellectual and emotional complexity to sense the Truth shining through everything and—given the right ideas, disciplines, and supports—to adequately translate spiritual insight into human words and deeds.

Divinity students can debate whether the opposable thumb pulled the brain into consciousness or consciousness pulled the various creatures along towards itself, using opposable thumbs and the tool-making, signaling, and hand-holding they make possible to enlarge minds and hearts. But whatever the ultimate origins, the fact remains that all humanoids on Planet X evolved opposable thumbs first, and spiritual awareness second. Despite their different physical family trees, all humanoids can, with a modicum of spiritual maturity, perceive their common spiritual origins, and so while the different species of Planet X humanoids have not, at least in the era where our story begins—roughly equivalent technologically and politically to the bulk of North America right before European arrivals—ever lived peaceably under a cross-species government; however, though they are as a group far from free of speciism, they don’t generally go so far as to claim either that other humanoids lack souls or that non-humanoid animals have individual souls akin to the eternally spiritually- and ethically-bound cores humanoids enjoy.

Personally, I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how much awareness, to take two widely separated examples, a dog or a pillbug have. It is hard to imagine that dogs don’t at least catch a little sense of the divine joy and eternal presence of the Soul Light. But what about pillbugs? Their sense of the holy must be quite tiny—musn’t it? Since they are almost like machines, having very little presence within their own desires and panics. But even supposing dogs own some sense of the holy, can a dog be wise?, can a dog grow spiritually to a degree warranting an individual soul? Some say when a human misbehaves, s/he’s reincarnated as a dog or, in extreme cases, a pillbug; and then s/he has to work back up to human form. But does this make practical sense? Compare the number of individual humans to individual animal lifes, and it seems that you soon run out of human-souls to fill all the animal bodies. So then some animals have animal souls or perhaps no individual soul (being only hulls around the One Soul), but some animals have doleful remorseful oh-so-penitent human souls?? Explaining, perhaps, the rare cockroach: one with more shame and ego than the average bug??? (I’m being facetious: this is not a phenomenon I’ve ever observed; although I grant you I’ve made little to no effort to discover spiritual differentiation within cockroaches.)

Given such considerations, I’m wont to cross out the whole idea of individual souls and replace it with a buddhisty notion of spiritual energies that perhaps continue after death, but that must eventually dissolve into the One Soul. No, I’m sorry, but I cannot see my way to a belief in individual souls—at least not eternal souls. Please don’t be alarmed by these metaphysical musings! If they happened to point adequately well towards Reality, that wouldn’t imply that the you who now exists will necessarily die upon death: maybe there’s reincarnation into other creature life and/or into spiritual beings until one finally flows into God; and while I cannot believe in or hope for the eternal continuance of any spiritual energy except God Light’s, everything that ever was could still remain as a memory of which God had awareness both from the outside (God’s infinite perspective encompassing all things) and the inside (God looking through from that being’s individual perspective, and so in some sense retaining its identity, although this is a little worrisome, because then wouldn’t all kinds of horrible states remain forever, not just in cases of complete spiritual disaster, but also infinite moments of everyday delusions and follies—wouldn’t those moments also have to hang forever in God’s two-sided memory??).

Fortunately, we humanoids are not required to riddle out eternal mysteries within our limited little lives. And so let us accept what is required for human joy and decency, and which anyway blares unambiguously through our ever conscious moment: we’re all in this together and must work to be ever more aware, clear, honest, kind, wise, good, joyfully together (true: you cannot define these goals perfectly in words; but words can still point our intellectual/emotional thinking towards an adequate sense of these goals, a sense that will grow as we get better and better at reaching said goals). Let us accept what we must know to win any traction in our own thoughts and feelings, and work to know/understand that knowledge better and better (by better and better organizing our ideas and feelings around the Light within that is both Reality and The Truth, and thus capable of sharing Certain Knowledge with one’s thought-as-a-whole, though naturally—owing to the mismatch between What Is and ideas and feelings about What Is—not perfectly/literally/definitively/1:1, but instead as insights that can, given enough awareness, clarity, honesty, and open-heart/mindedness, get better and better); let us not fret our small mortal noggins overmuch over details which we’ll not anyhow ever figure out, and which we could not really make much sense or use of even if we were somehow gifted with the “whole story”; no, let us stick to the basics: awareness, clarity, honesty, kindness, wisdom, goodness, joyful all-inclusive community.

Susan had told her parents she needed to go run the edges—to clear her thoughts, of late scattered and confused, as if she were a watermouse caught in an eddy, frantically and mindlessly panicking. Her father told her not to journey past her limits (second bend downriver [a little over a mile]; the advent of the tumble rapids upriver [a little less than a mile]); her mother told her not to be late for dinner (dinner always at sunset). They both told her to obey rules that she already knew about. She agreed to obey the rules she’d already planned on obeying and which you might argue they needn’t have mentioned, seeing as they were well established and faithfully followed, and slipped into the cool clear gently rippling river beneath their cabin door.

Susan chases the edges, like the elders had instructed.
Everything moved as one as she skates across the waters.
The river wide as a lake out here; far from town.
Susan’s town of bamboo rafts and shacks floats silent
in the rounded distance, at the edges of her eyes.
She follows slow-spreading green round a rocky bend.

A water skater, a river chaser, she-who-belongs.
How easy it is when you can!
Wide flapped froggy feet fold up down the center,
thin black legs stab into liquid glass, push against,
jam her spindly body the otherwise, setting up
a falling slice from that side’s folded flipper.

Nothing compares to water skating,
the concentration of never-hating.

On and on she flies, forgetting everything but
her motion, calm, the swoosh of her water strikes.
Deep inside, pushing out from within, searching
for the edges, to stay within yet go beyond,
to chase the edges, catch the light, know all joy.

The village out of sight when she unfolds her flipper feet
and skids to a spraying stop, standing breathless on wide
strange crinkling river flowing to a sea she’s never seen.
On the banks the Tree People gather timber in their way,
many on the lines and one flailing at the base;
two hatchets, steel glinting in passion’s blur.
A youth rests upon a rock, his short legs crossed.
She waves her thin webbed hand, he, long arm
thick as her torso, waves a broad flat hand.

Susan’s overcome by joy and fun
She’s able, she’s one
Who runs the river
That leads into the sea.
Focus on gratitude
on the wonder of running
with those who rule the rivers,
who travel to the sea.

At dinner Mama wonders what Susan’s seen and heard.
A squick-squick bird diving beneath the water
coming up empty-beaked.
The Tree People hunting timber.
Waterhoops rolling wild–she had to jump over them.
Mama tsks.
Father shakes his head.
When will the council address this matter?
The waterhoops are outgrabe!

BW/AMW

IDF – Effective Web Communication #16

IDF – Effective Web Communication #16

Interaction Design Foundation asked us the following questions about how to make our website meet the requirements that bring consumer trust and loyalty.
We, too tired to resist, answered without verve:

How can you demonstrate integrity?
Money-back guarantees; clear and succinct product descriptions; clear reasoning and clearly good intentions in essays; make contact info on front page and respond to people who write; product reviews that include unfavorable as well as favorable reviews

How can you increase familiarity with your company?
Put a short About Us blurb on the bottom of the homepage and link it to a FAQ page; make contact info on front page and respond to people who write

How can you demonstrate benevolence?
keep everything clear and concise

How can you demonstrate competence?
product testimonials, avoiding errors, making site clear

How can you demonstrate partnerships with reputable companies?
We could have a page about who makes the totes and other physical products

How can you lend to the perception of a high market orientation?
give surveys asking people what book else they’d like us to offer and other changes they’d like to see; if some wish is overwhelming, go with it, explaining why we did

What does it mean to develop a high quality website?
Easily navigable, clear, free of errors, pleasant and satisfying to use because with minimal confusion it brings you valuable content

How can you use a typical interface while maintaining originality?
writing style and content can be original within a standardly laid-out website

The importance of clarity, honesty, and kindness in public discourse

The importance of clarity, honesty, and kindness in public discourse

What is good and bad?
How should a society think and act?
What should it prioritize?
What limits should it set on its citizens?
Is it enough to keep the peace and let them find their own way?
Is corruption inevitable?
How bad is it?

It is customary among US politicians to praise the people and credit them with whatever good befalls the nation.
Inaccurate.
US citizens are like everybody else–mostly working for their daily bread and looking after their own.
If things go better for the US it is due to a system with enough checks and balances that when one group starts to overreach and corrupt the government, there are enough strong opponents there to push back on the evildoer.

People can’t get along.
They say it is the other side’s fault.
The truth is the fault is always corruption: within oneself and between people.
We could spend time debating who is more to blame than who. We all have our ideas about that. I certainly have mine.
But is it not better to use our time at the crux: fighting against loose-thinking, dishonesty, unclarity, meanness, selfishness, greed within ourselves and within the government?

Politics must start where we can all agree and it must constantly be brought back to that point, otherwise we cannot journey together to political thoughts and actions.
Just as an individual human’s thought cannot be meaningful to her if she thinks unclearly, dishonestly, or unkindly (her brain cannot follow logic that fails to meet the first two requirements, and her heart cannot follow logic that fails to meet any of them), a society cannot think and act meaningfully together if they allow their public discourse to become unclear, dishonest, and/or unkind (no one actually follows the conversation; the conversation just becomes part of a war of noise/propaganda).

So let us begin again and begin again and again: Where is the awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, loving kindness, true togetherness? There we have a chance. Everywhere else we slip, we slide, we proudly sink the ship.

AMW/BW