[As of Sunday, 11/24/2024, the below is begun, but not edited. We’ve only gotten as far as individual Something Deeperism. Then comes shared Something Deeperism. Then wisdom memes. Then the spiritual value of representative democracies. I don’t know why we spent the morning on this essay, when we were already working on an overview of our last few decades of big ideas. In general, we cannot explain why we keep rewriting this essay. It seems to be a type of intellectual/emotional tick or spasm.]
Nothing new under the sun.
Let’s see if we can paint the project in terms of old ideas that have been kicking around the world for centuries millennia or some other big chunk of human history.
Something Deeperism is the general worldview that people can relate meaningfully to the Truth, just not in a literal, definitive, or exclusive way: We can organize our feeling, thinking and acting around the Truth; and relate to It poetically — our ideas and feelings imperfectly but still meaningfully pointing-towards and -away from the Truth, and thereby imperfectly but still meaningfully flowing into and out of the Truth; rather than literally understanding the Truth so that our own ideas and feelings about the Truth might be considered “True”.
This view of spiritual wisdom holds that no human ideas and/or feelings are ever identical with the Truth — which is infinite, eternal, and perfect; and which therefore does not fit into human ideas and feelings. The best we humans can do is organize our feelings and ideas around the Truth and relate meaningfully enough to It to flow adequately-along with It. Human wisdom is thus not an endpoint, but an ongoing process of self-observation, -analysis, -critique, and -adjustment.
Something Deeperism therefore sounds a lot like concepts like the “perennial philosophy” and “spiritual universalism”: There’s not one religious path to spiritual growth, but many; and the main factor determining spiritual growth is not your dogmas, so much as how well you use your dogmas to transcend your dogmas and worship and follow God, rather than worshipping and following your own ideas and feelings (about God, or about No-God, or whatever your big and little notions of the moment may be).
We’ve gotten in the habit of motivating Something Deeperism in this way:
Your ideas and feelings are meaningful to you only to the degree that you abide by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-together/-sharing); but deeper than that, your ideas and feelings (including ideas and feelings about the universal values) are meaningful to you only to the degree that your ideas and feelings relate meaningfully to a Reality = Love. Why? That’s just the psychological situation we humans find ourselves within. Except to the degree our feeling/thinking/acting flows off of Reality = Love, we cannot understand, believe in, or care about our own f/t/a; and we shoved about by external circumstances like our own notions*, other people’s notions, and the twists and turns of the prevailing winds.
*We count our own notions as “external circumstances” because underneath the sense that we must organize our f/t/a around and relate meaningfully to Reality = Love in order to be meaningful to ourselves, are two assumptions: Except to the degree Reality = Love (1) is What Is, and (2) we can base our lives on a meaningful relationship to It, our lives don’t mean anything to us. That’s because any other reality or Reality tastes like soap in our mouths — too lonely, boring, and pointless to build a moment around, let enough a life. And so our only hope for internal coherency (meaningfulness to ourselves) is that our own notions are not the essence of our experience, but are just some chains-of-feeling-and-thinking flowing through our conscious moment, and which can be good and helpful only to the degree they are shaped by a Reality = Love shining at the core of each conscious moment.
We don’t try to prove that Reality = Love is the Truth, or that we can relate our feeling, thinking, and acting meaningfully to Reality = Love. Instead, we suggest a kind of Pascalian Wager:
We’ve nothing to lose by seeking Reality = Love within each conscious moment, and everything (meaningfulness to ourselves, and thus the ability to meaningfully travel with our own feeling, thinking, and acting to our own conclusions — rather than bounce haplessly about as hopes, fears, and other desperate emotions fight for supremacy of our conscious moments) to gain.
And then we say, “And why not? Why not posit a Reality = Love shining through each conscious moment? If there is a Reality, it would seem reasonable for It to shine through all these illusionary trappings. And why couldn’t we relate meaningfully to Reality = Love? Just as we can get better and better at relating ideas and words to feelings by being more and more open and honest with ourselves; why couldn’t we get better at relating feelings, ideas, and words better and better to a Reality = Love shining through the core of each conscious moment by being more and more open and honest with ourselves?”
That’s like a Pascalian Wager. Sometimes we go past that attitude and claim that everyone is already a Something Deeperist. Because we all cannot avoid the realization that we require Truth to be meaningful to ourselves (we can’t really believe in the various relative truths we sometimes try to steer our thought by), but that we also can’t be meaningful to ourselves unless that Truth is infinitely loving and won’t let anyone down ever — a Reality that doesn’t always care for and salvationate everyone is not a Reality we can understand, believe in, or care about. And we all cannot avoid the realization that the Truth would have to be infinitely wider and deeper than our little ideas and feelings about the Truth; and that confusing our own ideas and feelings about the Truth for the Truth actually points us away from the Truth, and causes no end of human suffering and bullshit. And so we all know that our only hope is to find Reality = Love and organize our f/t/a around It, working to relate more and more meaningfully to It, while always fighting our own tendency to declare (at least with our feelings, if not always with our ideas) our own f/t/a the “Truth!” And then sometimes we go even further, and say that we can’t help but always find ourselves somewhere within the process of attempting to organize our f/t/a around and relate meaningfully to Reality = Love; and so our only real options are either (1) to pretend we do not find ourselves within a poetic/non-literal spiritual quest, or (2) admitting we do find ourselves in such a quest, and trying to make the best of that reality.
Some might argue that we can’t know that everyone is essentially the same, and we cannot therefore assume that with the forgoing we’ve been describing everyone’s essential psychological spot. But we consider the essential sameness of all conscious beings to be fundamental to the assumption (Reality = Love is True, and we can relate meaningfully to this Truth) that we must demonstrate to ourselves in order to be able to understand, believe in, or care about our own f/t/a. We’re not able to relate meaningfully to Reality if it is not equal to Love; and so a Reality in which others are not essentially the same as we are would contradict the only Reality that could be meaningful to us — such a Reality could not serve as a firm foundation for our f/t/a.
[Also note that we humans learn via empathy (my father stubs his toe, he makes certain facial expressions and gestures and uses certain words, and I map his facial expressions and gestures onto my mind-body, and thereby learn what he means with words like “owe” and “hurt” and “God damn stupid legos everywhere!”), so if we humans are not all essentially the same, how can we make any sense out of everything we “know”? All our “knowledge” is based on interactions with other humans and their artifacts.
Also note that we can’t actually believe we humans are not all essentially the same: The notion is too lonely and boring to seriously countenance.]
With this “firm foundation” we betray our debt to Descartes, who sought a firm foundation for his thinking by doubting everything until he landed upon the (to his way of thinking) undoubtable thought of “I think therefore I am”. You can further in tracing that debt by noting that Descartes ended up working his way to a proof of the existence of God based on the fact that a clear and distinct idea of God’s essence is enough to demonstrate the existence of God to the meditator, because necessary existence is included within the essence of God.
Descarte’s Ontological Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Section 1. The Simplicity of the “Argument”:
One of the hallmarks of Descartes’ version of the ontological argument is its simplicity. Indeed, it reads more like the report of an intuition than a formal proof. Descartes underscores the simplicity of his demonstration by comparing it to the way we ordinarily establish very basic truths in arithmetic and geometry, such as that the number two is even or that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to the sum of two right angles. We intuit such truths directly by inspecting our clear and distinct ideas of the number two and of a triangle. So, likewise, we are able to attain knowledge of God’s existence simply by apprehending that necessary existence is included in the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. As Descartes writes in the Fifth Meditation:
[1] But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the idea of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God? Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number that some property belongs to its nature (AT 7:65; CSM 2:45).
One is easily misled by the analogy between the ontological argument and a geometric demonstration, and by the language of “proof” in this passage and others like it. Descartes does not conceive of the ontological argument on the model of a Euclidean or axiomatic proof, in which theorems are derived from epistemically prior axioms and definitions. On the contrary, he is drawing our attention to another method of establishing truths that informs our ordinary practices and is non-discursive. This method employs intuition or, what is the same for Descartes, clear and distinct perception. It consists in unveiling the contents of our clear and distinct ideas. The basis for this method is the rule for truth, which was previously established in the Fourth Meditation. According to the version of this rule invoked in the Fifth Meditation, whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing. So if I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence pertains to the idea of a supremely perfect being, then such a being truly exists.
…
If we change the “idea” of God’s essence to a “whole-being insight (all aspects of one’s conscious moment — ideas, feelings, and the Reality = Love shining through each moment — working meaningfully, though of course not literally/directly or exclusively/definitively together) into Reality = Love“; then we can see how Descartes’ belief that we could intuit God’s existence via a clear and concise idea about God’s essence is very similar to our sketch of an experiential proof for the existence of Reality = Love. Like Descartes, we would seek to clarify our f/t/a to the point that we could perceive our own conscious moment as it really is, and we hope to find therein a Reality = Love that we can relate meaningfully to. If we read Descartes’ proof of God primarily as a sketch for how one might climb through one’s conscious moment to an intuition of God that included the Reality of God within that intuition, then it is very close to our sketch of an experiential proof of Reality = Love. Such arguments are also not far from Buddhist notions like using dogmas as ladders to the Truth, rather than pretending dogmas can contain the Truth.
We don’t usually think of the project in terms of Descartes’ ideas, but instead compare it to Plato’s arguments in his Republic.
In his Republic, Plato argued that human psychology included distinct appetite, honor-loving, and reasoning aspects; and that the best aspect should rule the rest, and that only the reasoning aspect had any idea what was going on (the other aspects aren’t even trying to figure out what’s going on, but merely demand we satisfy their cravings for food, honor, or et cetera), so clearly it should rule. But how should the reasoning aspect reason? Doesn’t it need to follow what’s Best? But what is Best? Well, the essence of Goodness, the essence of Bestness, the Form of the Good — clearly that’s Best. But how to follow the Form of Good when It resides in the realm of perfect Forms, and we’re so mundane? Oh, I know: we can clarify our minds and thus our apprehensions of the Forms or essences of all ideas, and gradually work our way up to the Form of the Good. Well, at least the Philosopher Kings can: They can work their way up to the Form of the Good, drop back down to reality with that insight still imprinted on their thought, use that insight to make good decisions for the whole community, and then climb back up …
That’s basically what we’re doing here at Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Extraordinaire.
First we note that reason itself is an appetite: Left to its own devices, it keeps mindlessly demanding more and more intellectual certainty — even though humans cannot really conceive of perfect intellectual certainty. And so the only thing that should rule the whole is the Form of the Good, i.e. Godlight i.e. God i.e. Pure Love
We organize our feeling and thinking around the Pure Love (the only thing that truly exists) that shines through everything (including each conscious moment; Pure Love creates, sustains, shines-through, and love-lifts this entire interconnected flowing-together of creation), and relate our feeling and thinking poetically to (pointing adequately towards, while taking care not to pretend we are literally, exclusively, or definitively grasping) Pure Love. And then we drop down to our task and write with our minds/hearts still seared by the infinite Light of infinitely joyous infinite giving (to give another poetic description of what the poetic description “Pure Love” aims at). And on and on, up and down we travel, always sinking deeper and deeper into the Love that chooses and is enough for everyone, and always flowing more and more gently/truly off that Love.
Well, that was the plan, anyway.
THE AUTHORS TAKE A MOMENT TO STRETCH
So how far have gotten?
Just up to individual Something Deeperism, I’m afraid. And we didn’t even mention Camus or Kierkegaard. Oh, and we left out how radical skepticism did indeed prove itself a self-defeating logos.
