I saw you gazing all-after that woman, young, her fertile curves and bright eyes radiating the eternal beauty of youth-in-time.

When?

And you said in your heart, “Come here, and be my little girl!”

I don’t think so! I don’t think hearts are even capable of speaking

Deep in your heart of hearts you declared, “Get over here, I am going to cuddle your brains right out!”

I don’t remember that.

And isn’t that outward ogling and inward leaning — or should I say, outward desperate grasping and inward desperate collapsing?! — the true bedrock of all your grand metaphysics, your spiritual politics, your selfless salvationating of the nation!?!

What? This is ad hominem! It’s a logical fallacy.

No, it’s tugging down of the curtain to reveal the same old monkeys at the same old levers.

No! Well, our Something Deeperism does account for both the mundane and spiritual elements within human beings. We human-things require meaningful insight into a Reality that is ultimately bound in and through and for spiritual Love: To the degree we lack such an insight, nothing makes sense and life tastes like soap. But human meaning is in large part made up of feelings and ideas. Therefore, we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we can discover and relate our feelings and ideas to a spiritual Love shining through each conscious moment. Therefore, we can no more escape our mundane gears and levers than we can escape our need to found that whole wretched contraption upon spiritual insight and joy.

You just want the same thing as everyone else: a happy little safe little cozy little home with your little girl in your selfish little me-and-mine world!

No! God forbid! Well, we’ve often observed that people are iffy. We mostly just want to sneak off into our own private happinesses with family and friends. We want spending money from meaningful work, but also free time and down time and me time and chill time — all wrapped up in pretty homes, cool threads, nice families, fun trips, good food. We’ll have idealistic phases, but most of us decide pretty soon that we don’t really have too much timespace for anything except our own little gardens. And even our most ardent idealisms are generally moderated by our love of comfort, and/or perverted by the persistent human daydream that our longing for Absolute thriving and security — which can only be meaningfully answered by an Absolute, that is to say: a spiritual, Love — can be meaningfully answered by some kind of material and/or mental Absolute Victory — some grand story about romance and/or cozy home and/or happy family and/or glowing skin and/or big career and/or political power and/or … . But those human follies are all the more reason to choose Something Deeperism: Something Deeperism works with people as they really are: it sees our strengths and weaknesses, and works with our strengths to overcome our weaknesses.

What strengths? What weaknesses? You’re just jonesing for a pretty face to tell you that you’re better than you deep down know yourself to be.

First of all: I don’t jones! I don’t even know what that means. I can’t keep up with the jonesing.
Second of all: Our strength is conscious spaces wide and watchful enough to meaningfully relate the mundane — the hoots and hollers of animal passions and beetle-brained worries — to the spiritual Reality — the Pure Love that creates, sustains, love-lifts, and shines through this interrelated explosion of happenstances called “reality”. And our weakness is our longing to answer our vague longing for always-safer, always-more-thriving, always-more-certainty, et cetera with material/mental goods. The vague longing can of course only be meaningfully answered with spiritual growth, because we can only have perfection insofar as we are one with perfection — which is not a material or a mental thing, but is only the Love beyond all ideas and feelings, beyond all our daydreams about, “If I can just get, or do, or say, or know, or blah blah blah xyz”.

“Come here, baby, I need you like a enraged hand needs a smothering glove; and I am only too willing to admit it.”

Look. I mean. You have to understand!
People are iffy, but
It remains true that
(1) We all are meaningful to ourselves only to the degree that we
(a) follow the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate loving-kind, joyfully-sharing),
(b) address the fundamental questions (what is really going on?, what really matters?, what is love?, how do I fit into what is going on so as to best accomplish what really matters?, how to best use my love?),
and
(c) follow the standard spiritual practices (meditate, pray, study, contemplate, fellowship, serve; but most of all practice loving kindness — the gentle resolve to know ourselves and everyone else as we really are: feelings and ideas arranged around Pure Love) —
And that
(2) all of that is only meaningful to us insofar as it is grounded in and helps us to better and better organize our feeling, thinking and acting around the Love that chooses everyone — the spiritual Love that is enough for all, with infinite Love left over. The Love bursting out the seams of every moment.

I’m going to take a time-out here to go back to the locker room and rally my team for a less boring second half.

As I was about to conclude slash slam-dunk:
Because we are iffy — neither so wise as to be confident of our own goodness, nor so foolish as to have no idea what “goodness” might look like — we ought to adopt individual philosophies that help us to grow our relationship to spiritual Love;
and we ought to adopt group philosophies that
(1) allow us each to grow our own relationship to spiritual Love in a way that is meaningful to us,
and that also
(2) allow us to work meaningfully together by together remembering
BOTH that
(a) all humans share the universal values, fundamental questions, standard spiritual practices, and the spiritual Love without which nothing is OK and with which everything is OK
AND that
(b) all humans share the fundamental error of confusing mundane notions with spiritual insights — confusing our stories about ourselves with the Absolute Perfection that we, whether we admit it in words or not, all cannot help but seek.

What? How’s that supposed to work?

How’s what supposed to work?

Any of it. Especially the last bit. What group philosophy is going to allow us to all find the Truth in a way meaningful to us; and also allow us to work meaningfully together by creating a framework that acknowledges and works with the essential, spiritual sameness of all human beings, as well as our shared weakness for labeling — in some manner and degree aloud and in some manner and degree in confused urges — our own feelings and ideas as “THE GREAT AND ETERNAL ANSWER/TRUTH/GLORIOUS-VICTORY!!” ??

Something Deeperism is the best philosophy because it is a verbalization of the philosophy that all humans already follow deep inside.

How now?

We all know none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us except to the degree that they help us to live in and through the Love that chooses everyone. And we all know that the universal values, fundamental questions, and standard spiritual practices can help us keep at the essential human task of better and better organizing our feeling, thinking, and acting around the Pure Love shining through each human moment. Well, it is more accurate to say: We know we need such a Love and for It to explicate the universal values, fundamental questions, and spiritual practices; and so we know we should seek to find and better and better relate to a spiritual Love shining through each conscious moment, and that that seeking should be bounded by fidelity to those values, questions, and practices; and we also know that since we’re seeking to relate our finite ideas and feelings to an Absolute Love, the process will be an imperfect, ongoing one — requiring constant self-analysis, -critique, and -adjustment.

Let’s grant for the sake of ending this conversation in the near future, that we all know that we need to abide by the universal values, meaningfully address the fundamental questions, and make some meaningful use of the standard spiritual practices — most fundamentally the practice of loving the Light with all we are and seeing that same Light shining through all others. And that we need to do all this in the service of better and better discovering, relating to, and following a Pure Love shining through each conscious moment.

OK, great. I’ll grant that. I was actually arguing for it. Just perhaps, I mean: let’s remember the caveat that we’ll never perfectly relate feelings and ideas to what is prior to feelings and ideas; so what we’re seeking is an ongoing, self-critiquing and -correcting organization around and poetic (meaningful but not literal, definitive, or certain) interpretation of Pure Love — not some daydream about literally capturing the Truth once and for all in our scrawny little hearts and minds (conscious space is perhaps infinite, but human hearts and minds are decidedly finite).

Right. So, granting — for the sake of time and energy — that Something Deeperism is a good philosophy for individuals to adopt, we move on to the difficulty of a shared / public Something Deeperism. How do we create a system for meaningfully sharing feelings, ideas, responsibilities, and powers not just within a human conscious moment, but between human conscious moments? You’ve said the system should acknowledge our shared nature as creatures that imperfectly relate the spiritual to the mundane, and it should exploit our core strength — i.e., we have conscious spaces capable of meaningfully relating mundane ideas and feelings to spiritual Love — and mitigate the damage done by our core weakness — i.e., we can never perfectly relate our ideas and feelings to spiritual Love, and we all to some degree always confuse mere ideas and feelings with The Great Answer to Life, which is not any specific idea-feeling combo, but is instead the gentle, ongoing, imperfect, self-critiquing and -correcting work of trying again and again to better and better live in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone.

Yes, I’ve said something along those lines. Deep down, we all know we need to relate our ideas and feelings to the Truth for them to be meaningful to us, and that we all to some degree confuse our own notions for the Truth; and that we therefore need to adopt philosophies and create systems and put ourselves in situations that help us get better at relating ideas and feelings to the Truth rather than pretending they are the Truth — both as individuals within our own conscious moments and as groups between the conscious moments of all of us.

Indeed. And we’ll grant Something Deeperism is the best individual philosophy because we’ll grant that it merely describes what we all know deep inside in our psyches and our hearts and our bones and perhaps even in our souls. But what kind of a philosophy, system, and situation can do that for groups of people, for nations states even?

Liberal representative democracy, founded on the insight that we humans are all in this together, and all have inborn, indelible rights including, but not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s a good system of government because
(A) it allows everyone to seek the Truth in ways meaningful to them, and to think about and discuss both the spiritual Truth and mundane truths without fear of reprisal — what good is a “Truth” or “truths” you voice only to stay out of trouble? — ;
and because
(B) by
(1) limiting individual powers
and
(2) — via regular fair elections and free speech — allowing the citizens to serve as a final check on madness, ill-will, incompetence, and corruption in government WHILE these citizens also all together help steer their shared government & shared conversation;
liberal representative democracies involve all citizens
(it is important to involve everyone: how can we share responsibility if we don’t share power?; and how can we meaningfully relate to each other or to our shared government if we don’t share both?)
in a system designed to safeguard
(A) the universal values
(Those values without which no one’s worldview is meaningful to anyone, and without which no one can believe in their own ideas and feelings, nor their group’s collective actions. These values are therefore the natural common denominator for groups of individuals to agree to together prioritize. Of course, we cannot perfectly together safeguard aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing because we often lie to ourselves and others about such things. However, since we are dealing with human values rather than spiritual revelations or inward religious sentiment, we can at least to some degree jointly monitor how well we are implementing these values in our shared conversation and government.)
and
(B) a form of government where free people to seek the Truth and truths in ways meaningful to them; and use their insights to together nudge their nation away from the worse and towards the better.

In this way, a well-functioning liberal democratic republic selects for helpful behavior (for honest, clear, competent thought and action in the service of win-wins — in the service of what’s best for all / and against corruption, madness, ill-will, and incompetence) and thereby fosters an environment where people can have their cake and eat it too — where one can be both decent and successful.

Contrast this with a thugocracy, where might makes right, and “truth” is whatever you have to say to stay out of political prison; where the only “competency” sought is getting and staying in power; and where you either have to acquiesce to a system of unchecked crime that seeks not win-wins but winners-crushing-losers, or you have to risk the material wealth, health, and safety of yourself and your loved ones.

A liberal democratic republic is a spiritual good.

Authors: BW and AW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson

Why the same essay over and over?
Never get it quite right.
How to get it right enough?

Individual Something Deeperism suggests we individual conscious spaces can and should better and better organize our feeling/thinking/acting around Pure Love, and in this way interpret what is prior to f/t/a better and better into f/t/a — but that of course this process cannot be literal or definitive, but must rather be a poetic, ongoing task.

Group Something Deeeperism would do the same, but widen the scope to coordinate individuals better and better around Pure Love, that they might better and better together follow Pure Love. But groups are different than individuals. And so different procedures and safeguards are needed for individuals and groups and for groups of different sizes. We nominate liberal representative democracy for governments because we think they can