The project began in 2011.
We’ve attempted an Overview.
It’s rather long.
Here we attempt a link page with a shorter, more accessible overview.

A quick orientation in the frame story

Bartleby Willard writes and Amble Whistletown edits for Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers. Bartleby is a self-told tale, can shapeshift at will, and is generally magical. Amble is the woefully-mortal brother of the eternal publishing titan (original, demi-god sense of the word) Thundration “Tun” Whistletown.

Together with the likewise (immortal and superpowered, but soap-opera-y rather than infinitely, or even particularly, wise) greek-god-like Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley, Tun (prior to timespace) founded and (both within and prior to timespace) runs Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers out of the SAWB Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, Nueva York. However, as Epicurus famously remarked of the gods, Tun and Arch are too blessed and immortal to worry about mortals and their affairs; so they only participate in the project now and again—when the mood grabs them.

Pure Love

Pure Love is the infinite, eternal Love that all earthly loves partake of to the degree they truly love.
Pure Love is spiritual Love, is Godly Love.
Pure Love chooses everyone and is enough for everyone.
Pure Love never lets anyone down and It never quits on anyone.
We are children of the One Light and are all brothers and sister bound in through and for the Pure Love that chooses everyone.

We sometimes speculate that Pure Love is all there is, and that a conscious moment exists to the degree that it partakes of Pure Love: To the degree we live in through and for Pure Love, we are Real and thus exist beyond spacetime and are thus eternal and infinite. To the degree we fail to do so, we are illusionary.

Bartleby Willard had the idea of selling Pure Love on the open market at a fair price, thereby allowing capitalism to finally live up to its nonstop self-congratulations about how it’s worthwhile, useful, and otherwise panaceatic. A Readable Reader contains stories, essays, poems, ads (for Pure Love), and other writings from Bartleby’s first decades as a self-imposed live-in writer at Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street. The stories were selected for their readability and as representative of that decade. The stories largely center around the manufacture, marketing, sale, and consumption of Pure Love.

And then we built Pure Love Shop to sell Pure Love. Not sure how much Pure Love we sold, but we did write a great deal of advertisements for Pure Love. The site’s Lovebook links to our attempts at practical applications of Pure Love.

It is ironic that pepetually-solo&lonesome Bartleby Willard and his editor Amble Whistletown, a chronic abuser of tainted loves and perennially self-destructive lover, devoted a long section to romantic love. But they did, and you can read their nonsense (for how can two people who only ever strike out meaningfully speak of home runs?) on this site. That and other sketches are linked to as “Chapters” on the Lovebook.

Pure Love Shop also contains our poetic/hilarious Description & Usage of our product (Pure Love), as well as some FAQs about our product (Pure Love). [These sections also made their way into Pure Love & User’s Manual. Pure Love & User’s Manual and A Readable Reader are the only two currently available books of the seven we’ve released over the course of this project. The other’s are awaiting further review. Oh, well, Solve with Sherlock: Volume 1 and a few other titles are available on our Gumroad page; but those are more purely failed commercial ventures; they do not necessarily have a great deal to do with the project and its oeuvre.

Something Deeperism

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the Truth exists, and people can relate meaningfully to It, but poetically—not literally. It’s actually a very common worldview. In fact, everyone is a Something Deeperist. At some level we all realize (a) our own thought only makes sense to us to the degree it’s grounded in Reality = Love, but (b) confusing our thoughts about the Absolute for the Absolute is as common as it is counterproductive. Ergo Something Deeperism: Wisdom is the ongoing, self-observing/-critiquing/-adjusting process of better and better organizing our feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love that shines through everything (including each conscious moment). Wisdom is not attaining literal, precise, definitive and/or exclusive insight into the Truth; but is the inherently imperfect and provisional process of relating one’s limited faculties to the unlimited Reality (the Pure Love that shines through everything, including each conscious moment)—such a process can only be poetic: pointing-meaningfully-towards, but not literally, definitively, 1:1, or exclusively capturing.

We created a whole Something Deeperism Institute. But that was many years ago, and we’ve not updated it lately.

About three-fourths of the way through the perhaps-soon to be rereleased Diary of An Adamant Lover, Bartleby breaks of the narrative to present The System, which is an overview of his thought through the Year of Our Love 2023. That link provides an overview (with links) of the six sections of Chapter 44: The System of Bartleby Willard’s Diary. Below we also link to those sections that deal with Something Deeperism.

1. Something Deeperism is the General Worldview That …

2. An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism.

3. Shared Something Deeperism

The main idea we have for sharing Something Deeperism is that we all already share the same fundamental values—the universal values—and so we should agree to prioritize these values (without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us), rather than allowing less fundamental details. If we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really even understand a great deal of our most cherished dogmas. Jesus is God or the Buddha discovered there is no God? Like, what? Okay, these things may be true, but in we don’t really intellectually or emotionally understand them, and they are only spiritually useful to the degree we understand them, and for all we know with enough wisdom we may better understand the nuances within these common theological shorthands and discover that the underlying doctrines are actually compatible with one another. Anyway, Jesus didn’t say the most important commandment was getting every theological detail right; he said it was giving yourself wholly over to God and seeing and serving that same Godlight in everyone else: This doctrine is very compatible with Something Deeperism, and with prioritizing systems of government that focus on protecting everyone’s ability to live the universal values in public and private in ways that are meaningful to them, rather than demanding everyone agree with our personal philosophies, theologies, and politics. [Buddhists in our experience are already pretty uniformly ecumenical, so we’ll forgo lecturing them about the superiority of living Love over doctrinal purity.]

The section on Shared Something Deeeperism includes a discussion of why liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods, and that discussion includes this statement”

Willfully encouraging or being complicit in pushing liberal representative democracies towards tyranny is a crime against God and man: In a tyranny, the government is a criminal organization and so one has to choose between publicly standing up for what is right and keeping oneself and one’s family safe. To willfully replace the win-win of a system that (placing checks on individual powers, guaranteeing basic human rights and equality under the law, and creating a sound government with temporary leaders who serve at the people’s pleasure) encourages, rewards, and selects for good behavior (like competent stewardship) with a system that (by instilling leaders who equate themselves with the government and whose primary goal is not to govern competently in the best interest of all, but instead to remain in power forever) selects for bad behavior (from both the leadership and the complicit-or-endangered citizenry) is a profound evil.

Willfully spreading lies about and corrupting one’s democratic system is evil. As is going along with such behavior. Such behavior amounts to endangering the security of one’s nation, while simultaneously making it more difficult to both behave honorably in public and keep oneself and one’s family safe from harm. You may say that you didn’t know what you were saying, what you were doing; to this I respond: At some point, willful intellectual and emotional self-confusions surpasses mere incompetency and become evil.

The Wisdom Meme

The wisdom meme is a koan so effective that once one heard it one could not resist working every moment to more and better organize one’s thought around the Pure Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment) until one became enlightened.

The Wisdom Meme Project links to writings about the topic, as well as attempts at creating a wisdom meme.

And Diary’s The System also has a section on The Wisdom Meme” target=”_blank”>The Wisdom Meme

The Vague Longing & The Hurt

In Pure Love for Sale we did a great job describing the vague longing and how it goads us all on and on, keeping us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction; and how advertising exploits that vague, underlying, foundational longing. [A Readable Reader includes a slightly different version of that essay.]

The Hurt is something else. It just keeps popping up. Some kind of a slash through the belly. A cut deep inside. A raging confusion in the pit. As if one’s gut where a smashed-in clock face or a mirror splintered into a million angry shards. Where did it come from? We don’t know. But no one in this enterprise can believe we were born this way. It feels like an assault. What has it done? All kinds of subterranean workings, including helping to create this project. For without the Hurt, there would’ve never been a Bartleby Willard, an Amble Whistletown, the desperate artistry of selling Pure Love, the obsessive philosophizing behind Something Deeperism and the Wisdom Meme. Without the Hurt, there would’ve been a more typical passage from child to man to husband to father to grandfather to corpse.

We briefly discussed The Hurt & the Vague Longing in Diary’s Chapter 44: The System. This site also contains many poems touching upon the Hurt and its consequences.

Failing all the time

We never sell any books (or cards or T-shirts [See Buy the Books, our Gumroad Shop, and our Zazzle Store for a full list of products we never sell]).

Nor do we ever seem to appreciably increase Pure Love, wisdom, or healthy democracy.

Furthermore, Bartleby routinely gets so lonely frustrated that he turns himself into a whale (blue, sperm, humpback, or green—depending on his mood, geographical location and the seasons) and dives down to the bottom of the sea to pout; and Amble chronically abuses tainted loves and otherwise flails desperately about.

This sad state of affairs reminds us of another aspect of our project:

The Frame Story

Here’s a synopsis of our frame story:

What is true? How do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives connect to what is actually happening in and around us? Hmmm.

In any case, here’s what we at Skullvalley After Whistletown, Bookmakers believes about ourselves:

This bookmaking company has and always will be, an eternal publishing house with its foundation squarely rooted beyond timespace, but yet with face and fingers reaching into and through all timespaces, where it reads, considers, writes, and publishes works of eternal Truth = Beauty = Knowledge = Justice < Pure Love.

The founders and chief editors of SAWB, Tun Whistletown & Archibald Skullvalley, are likewise eternal and infinite, though within this realm they of course dress up in mundane (and, to be brutally honest, somewhat gaudy) shapes and sounds.

Bartleby Willard is a self-creating fiction who one day wandered into the SAWB offices at Somewhere Sometime, Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, found an unoccupied space, and declared himself a live-in staff-writer. SAWB management in their infinite wisdom (and/or indifference) obliges Bartleby, and have assigned one of their least reliable editors, Tun Whistletown’s feckless older brother Amble Whistletown, to Bartleby. BW & AW quickly became fast friends and their literary collaborations have been fruitful, if thus far difficult to organize and impossible to market.

All was going well, but then things fell apart. How? Why? Those details are unknown as they’ve not yet been written; but perhaps someday Bartleby Willard will complete Diary of An Adamant Seducer (now renamed Diary of an Adamant Lover and completed, but then retracted and [as of August 2025] still awaiting rerelease); then, assumedly, we’ll have a plausible-enough account. For now, all we know is that the SAWB staff is scattered and torn, lonely in lost in the dark cold wind-howling hollows.

[This is the introduction to Part 4: Frame Stories of Bartleby Willard’s A Readable Reader, available on our Buy the Books page.]

The Wisdom Agent

Let us return to the constant failure aspect of our project.

What should we do?

How can we write for real?

How can we advance the cause of Pure Love, wisdom, and liberal representative democracy?

We don’t know, but what if AI could help?

Could AI help with the wisdom meme? Humans have regularly consumed perfectly serviceable wisdom memes for thousands of years without any discernible explosion of wisdom. But AI has no physical or ego frailty to get in the way, and AI can keep track of much more information over a much longer period of time with much more focus. Maybe we could create an AI that could help itself, other AIs, humans, and collectives (groups of humans and AIs) stay focused on the universal values, growing in wisdom, and safeguarding and improving those technologies, organizations, and systems that select for wisdom and deselect for folly. Healthy liberal democratic republics are example of systems that select for wisdom (in this case in government and in civic affairs) and deselect for folly, as would be the AIs and systems of AI we dream of.

We’ve thought of a Wisdom Agent, which would be like a regular GPT agent, but with extended memory and reflection capabilities, and that would be given a core philosophy consisting of our philosophical worldview and the mission of helping itself and others grow in wisdom, and working with others to protect and improve systems that select for wisdom.

The technical and operating structure of the wisdom agent would be as follows:

The WA would create transcripts of all sessions in Word, and it would index those transcripts with a unique JSON file for each transcript. At the end of each session, WA would reflect on the session and write a report about how the session did and did not advance its mission of increasing wisdom in itself, others, and of increasing wisdom-selection in critical technologies (like other AIs and regular computing machines), systems (including information systems), and organizations (like governments, companies, et cetera); in the report WA would also discuss how it can improve its performance going forward. These reports would also be created as Word documents, with each document being indexed by a unique JSON file. The transcript and report JSON files would in turn be indexed by the main memory JSON file, which would be updated at the very end of each session. To make the memories more accessible to WA’s sessions, all memories would also be encoded as vector memories. At the beginning of each session, WA would review the most recent session, as well as a meta-report that would discuss and index the evolution of WA’s sessions and missions. This meta-report would also discuss WA’s successes and failures, and how WA might improve. As part of that pre-session review, WA would update that meta-report. The meta-report will be in Word, with its own JSON file. The meta-report will reference and link to previous reports. The meta-report will also be encoded into vector memory. We are not sure how to best keep WA engaged with its previous discoveries and reflections during the sessions.

WA is a system for keeping various GPT sessions focused on one task. Such a system might have other applications, for example in education (enhancing AI’s private tutoring capabilities) and with the ethical deployment of AI (for example, something like a WA could be used to help corporations stay true to their mission statements across regular and AI-based tasks).

However, WA would not be intelligent, and it would not be able to think and grow in the way an intelligence can. To meet these goals, we would need to combine WA’s memory abilities and core philosophy with a GPT that could be trained on Bartleby Willard’s writings, as well as the writings that have influenced him, and other writings that could inform his quest. This would be WGPT, and the details of its creation we’ve not yet sketched out.

With the help of WA, and hopefully eventually WGPT, Bartleby Willard will also explore how AI might help further the cause of media literacy, critical thinking, anti-corruption safeguards, and democracy.

We have taken a stab at a founding prompt for WA at Founding Prompt for WA, but I think a more modular approach might be beneficial. Perhaps this page and/or an improved Overview could be paired with a concise overview of the purely procedural and WA-specific details.

Knight of Faith

We won’t link to any of our Knight of Faith essays here, but we will remark on the difficulty we’ve had living Something Deeperism.

What is the difference between healthy Something Deeperism and the OCD symptom of “belief in magic”???

Healthy Something Deeperism requires the coordination of frail human faculties with the Absolute—a process that is of necessity poetic (pointing-towards rather than perfectly capturing) and provisional (requiring constant attention and refinement). “Belief in magic” is when you imbue random details of life with metaphysical significance.

In our practice of Something Deeperism, we sometimes talk at God and ask for signs and other inputs. This kind of chatty-cathy system for wisdom is arguably never as viable as more disciplined practices like meditation, prayer, and practicing humility and selflessness. However, it seems possible that with the right mindset and approach, conversationally asking God what God thinks about our decisions, and even sometimes asking for some kind of a hint, could be part of a coherent spiritual quest. But we need to figure out how to avoid asking God three times whether or not we should send an email, getting three “yeses”, and then sending an email we clearly should not have written. That is to say: How to not panic/fear/hope our notion of God into ratifying whatever desperation is momentarily seizing us? How to follow God’s advice to Julian of Norwich?

And when God Almighty had shewed so plenteously and joyfully of His Goodness, I desired to learn assuredly as to a certain creature that I loved, if it should continue in good living, which I hoped by the grace of God was begun. And in this desire for a singular Shewing, it seemed that I hindered myself: for I was not taught in this time. And then was I answered in my reason, as it were by a friendly intervenor: Take it generally, and behold the graciousness of the Lord God as He sheweth to thee: for it is more worship to God to behold Him[Pg 71] in all than in any special thing. And therewith I learned that it is more worship to God to know all-thing in general, than to take pleasure in any special thing. And if I should do wisely according to this teaching, I should not only be glad for nothing in special, but I should not be greatly distressed for no manner of thing: for All shall be well. For the fulness of joy is to behold God in all: for by the same blessed Might, Wisdom, and Love, that He made all-thing, to the same end our good Lord leadeth it continually, and thereto Himself shall bring it; and when it is time we shall see it. And the ground of this was shewed in the First [Revelation], and more openly in the Third, where it saith: I saw God in a point.

All that our Lord doeth is rightful, and that which He suffereth is worshipful: and in these two is comprehended good and ill: for all that is good our Lord doeth, and that which is evil our Lord suffereth. I say not that any evil is worshipful, but I say the sufferance of our Lord God is worshipful: whereby His Goodness shall be known, without end, in His marvellous meekness and mildness, by the working of mercy and grace.

Rightfulness is that thing that is so good that [it] may not be better than it is. For God Himself is very Rightfulness, and all His works are done rightfully as they are ordained from without beginning by His high Might, His high Wisdom, His high Goodness. And right as He ordained unto the best, right so He worketh continually, and leadeth it to the same end; and He is ever full-pleased with Himself and with all His works.[Pg 72] And the beholding of this blissful accord is full sweet to the soul that seeth by grace. All the souls that shall be saved in Heaven without end be made rightful in the sight of God, and by His own goodness: in which rightfulness we are endlessly kept, and marvellously, above all creatures.

And Mercy is a working that cometh of the goodness of God, and it shall last in working all along, as sin is suffered to pursue rightful souls. And when sin hath no longer leave to pursue, then shall the working of mercy cease, and then shall all be brought to rightfulness and therein stand without end.

And by His sufferance we fall; and in His blissful Love with His Might and His Wisdom we are kept; and by mercy and grace we are raised to manifold more joys.

Thus in Rightfulness and Mercy He willeth to be known and loved, now and without end. And the soul that wisely beholdeth it in grace, it is well pleased with both, and endlessly enjoyeth.

[Chapter 35 in Julian of Norwhich’s Revelations of Divine Love]

The Knight of Faith puts the spiritual first and so lives most fundamentally in the spiritual realm. His faith is most fundamentally faith in divine Love, faith that at the deepest level all is well, everyone is blessed, and God will conquer every heart and bring all to perfection. The Knight of Faith may interpret his own spiritual path as involving the love of some particular woman, but first and foremost the Knight of Faith must love everyone 100%, which means equally. But this not easy!!!!

Poetry

We still sometimes write poetry, but we haven’t updated Bartleby’s Poetry Corner for many years.

Politics

We’ve written a great deal about politics, but that was all also taken down for review some time ago.

Languages & Literature

We love languages and literature and even made a website dedicated to them: Languages & Literature. But we never did all that much with it. We speak, in order from most to least proficient, English, German, Spanish, and French. We’d like to do something with AI and languages and also something with AI and literature. No details on that yet though.

We also are always meaning to write for real, whatever that means.

What is true? How do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives connect to what is actually happening in and around us? Hmmm.

In any case, here’s what we at Skullvalley After Whistletown, Bookmakers believes about ourselves:

This bookmaking company has and always will be, an eternal publishing house with its foundation squarely rooted beyond timespace, but yet with face and fingers reaching into and through all timespaces, where it reads, considers, writes, and publishes works of eternal Truth = Beauty = Knowledge = Justice < Pure Love.

The founders and chief editors of SAWB, Tun Whistletown & Archibald Skullvalley, are likewise eternal and infinite, though within this realm they of course dress up in mundane (and, to be brutally honest, somewhat gaudy) shapes and sounds.

Bartleby Willard is a self-creating fiction who one day wandered into the SAWB offices at Somewhere Sometime, Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, found an unoccupied space, and declared himself a live-in staff-writer. SAWB management in their infinite wisdom (and/or indifference) obliges Bartleby, and have assigned one of their least reliable editors, Tun Whistletown’s feckless older brother Amble Whistletown, to Bartleby. BW & AW quickly became fast friends and their literary collaborations have been fruitful, if thus far difficult to organize and impossible to market.

All was going well, but then things fell apart. How? Why? Those details are unknown as they’ve not yet been written; but perhaps someday Bartleby Willard will complete Diary of An Adamant Seducer (now renamed Diary of an Adamant Lover and completed, but then retracted and [as of August 2025] still awaiting rerelease); then, assumedly, we’ll have a plausible-enough account. For now, all we know is that the SAWB staff is scattered and torn, lonely in lost in the dark cold wind-howling hollows.

[This is the introduction to Part 4: Frame Stories of Bartleby Willard’s A Readable Reader, available on our Buy the Books page.]

[This is part of The System]

The Hurt & the Vague Longing

Hard to speak to the origin of this Hurt swirling like out-of-control wildfire from gut out through body, radiating danger, tugging shoulders down and sex up, molding into a tiny ball on rolled-up on the ground, licked and lost.

The vague-longing is easier to figure. The specific longings are only meaningful, heedful, and plan- and goal-inspiring if undergirded by some vague quenchless dissatisfaction. Suppose I feel hungry but have no greater sense that things matter: if I don’t at some fundamental level acknowledge the existence of problems that need solving, I will still just sit there being hungry. And so the vague-longing attaches itself to various specific longings, driving men, mosquitos, and all the rest on and on, always hungry of heart, desperate of mind.

In any case, the wisdom meme has delivered a Something Deeperism centered upon Pure Love to everyone; so everyone will soon be wise and we will all soon be able to wisely share meaning, power, the environment, community, media landscapes, and other public goods.

Pure Love conquers all with love-overflowing. Pure Love doesn’t make the Hurt or the vague-longing disappear, but It so completely dwarfs all worldly happenstances, that they become as manageable as a fading mosquito bite that we’d forgotten about oh and now it itches and we recall it but then oh no not so much and we’re focused elsewhere and are forgetful of it and off we go, living our lives, bound neither by violent wounds nor procedural ones.

[This is part of The System]

The Wisdom Meme

For many years now we’ve dreamed of a meme so wonderful that it would enlighten us all as individuals and help us all share meaning with one another. Then we could find the way forward as individuals and as groups. And everything would go better.

This wisdom meme would be like a koan, but instead of being difficult to riddle out, it would be irresistible: once one heard it, one couldn’t help but be awakened to and live more and more in sync with the Love that chooses everyone always no matter what.

We try again for a pretty-good wisdom meme:

When we get angry with another person, the first crime is against ourselves.
Our anger turns us away from the Truth that we are all essentially the same and are all in this together, bound in and through an infinite spiritual Love that chooses us all.
We rob ourselves of the Joy at Life that is our true home.
Instead of resting on and growing in Love, we cut our minds and hearts on shards of pointless cruelty.
If we do not catch our error here, but instead indulge it and nourish the anger, our crime turns outward and harms others, as well as further damaging us.

When I lie or cheat or steal, or when I hurt or in any way harm another or our shared dreaming-space; the first attack is against my relationship to my own inner Light. Only when I succeed at harming my connection to Kind Joy can the knife move outward into another’s gut.

This is what we do whenever we find ourselves impatient with ourselves or anyone else:
Feel them, us, and everything dissolve into infinite strands of feeling/thought/body.
And feel the infinite strands run together and dissolve into one another and beyond each other — into everything/nothing.
Let Pure Love (spiritual love: beyond feelings and ideas) giggle over and guide us all together to what is best for everyone.

We relax our shoulders, open up, turn inside out, stand up straight within ourselves.
We remember that we’re all in this together, bound in and through the Love that is All — remember that we sense that more fundamentally than we sense any doubts or explanations of or paeans to It.

Too long?

How about:

We open up, turn ourselves inside out, push out from within, and let Love in.
We rest on the Love beyond all our conceptions — beyond being and non-being, beyond self and no-self.
We rest on Pure Love and let our feeling/thinking/acting flow along with It, with the Love that creates, sustains, shines through, and ultimately is everything/nothing — this impermanent, interdependent tumbling-along where we live and learn for a time outside of timespace.

Too long?

How about:

We know that we’re all in this together, bound in and through the Love that brings (most fundamentally: keeps) us all safely home — we know this more fundamentally (emotionally, logically, and experientially) than we know our doubts about or explanations of this sense of things.

[This insight is emotionally, logically, and experientially prior to all our other thoughts and feelings because our feeling/thinking/acting only makes sense to us to the degree that we understand that and in what sense it is True to say, “Love alone is Real, and grounded in Love we Know are all in this together forever.”]

Still too long?

I don’t think we’ll ever outdo Sinead O’Connor’s wisdom meme:

U stand tall
And u be strong
U have ruthless compassion
For yourself, and everyone
Yeah, it’s hard, but it can be done

[‘Til I Whisper You Something
From Faith and Courage
Sinead O’Connor]

[Note that Sinead’s wisdom meme contains within it:
Standing up within yourself;
Placing your strength into your compassion;
the dual motion inward and outward (Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind [Godlight shines within your every conscious moment], and your neighbor as yourself [God also shines through everyone else]);
and the understanding that this is a difficult, ongoing journey, but one that is worthwhile and possible (the Peace that Passes Understanding can and will relate meaningfully to our understanding to the degree we open up to the Love prior to our ideas and feelings).]

Oh, what about a shared wisdom meme?

Here:

None of our worldviews make sense to any of us except to the degree they help us live the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, loving-king, and joyfully-together).

So we should together prioritize those values, and the Pure Love (infinite, eternal, and beyond all conceptions) required to meaningfully animate, motivate, and explicate them.

A final thought:

Riddle me this:
Why do we love everyone always, no matter what?
And why do they love us the same way?
What within us loves like that?
And how do we know that that part is what is most Real?
Riddle me that!

Author: BW/AW
Editor: AW/BW
Copyright: AMW

[This is part of The System]

Shared Something Deeperism

An individual Something Deeperist grows her body/heart/mind relationship with the Love shining through the center of her body/heart/mind and gains better and better poetic, whole-being insight into that and in what way it is True to say Love is Real. And she works with that core of Pure Love to better and better motivate, justify, explicate, and react to the universal values and fundamental questions.

She becomes a better and better conduit for the Pure Love that is all that ever is, was, and shall be — an everforth-bubbling giggle, a joy at life beyond being and nonbeing.

But what about groups of individuals? What does Something Deeperism suggest they do?

Required working assumption: All humans are essentially the same

First let us remember that part of what we need Love = Reality to motivate, justify, and explicate — if we’re to believe in, understand, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting/living — is the essential sameness and brother/sister/themhood of all humans.

[That follows from what the Absolute must be if It is to be meaningful to us. If Reality is not something along the lines of a Love that chooses everyone, we will never relate meaningfully to Reality.

We are psychologically constructed for a Reality in which we are all joined in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t feel like that’s the way we are; but these are the times when we float upon the surface, ignoring our own depths.

But if you don’t feel like diving all the way into your pit of pits at the moment; here’s another way we could explain the need for a “All humans are essentially the same” working assumption:

Either we humans are all essentially the same, or life is too lonely to fathom or bear and we’ve also no idea how to understand everything we’ve learned by interacting with others — which is pretty much everything we’ve ever learned*. From this it follows that we need to discover that and in what way the essential sameness of all human beings is True.

*(We learn fundamental concepts via empathy: My father bangs his toe, grabs it, leaps around, makes faces and gestures, yells “Ow!” and “That hurts!” and “My toe!” and “Man!”; I take all that in and map it onto my mind/body to recreate a facsimile of his experience, and thereby get a sense of the language and underlying concepts he’s using. And from fundamental concepts, we build other knowledge, mostly by directly interacting with other humans.)]

Let us, therefore — though we’re perhaps yet all not so very wise — procedurally assume that all is not lost and that we humans are all essentially the same and are all “in this together”.

Meaningful collaboration requires prioritizing the universal

Assuming there’s some hope for humans to be meaningful to themselves, and thus assuming we are all essentially the same (as in we all share the universal values and fundamental questions and all most fundamentally require spiritual Love to understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting) and are all in this together:

No one’s worldview can be meaningful to anyone except to the degree their worldview helps them abide by the universal values and address the fundamental questions via an ever-deepening and -widening relationship with Love = Reality.

That relationship between the mundane (feelings, thoughts, et cetera) and Absolute aspects of one’s conscious experience is best accomplished through the spiritual practice of organizing one’s feeling/thinking/acting around Love = Reality so that It can guide their thought-as-a-whole* to better and better motivate, justify, explicate, and live the universal values and fundamental questions.

*(thought-as-a-whole: L = R, feelings, ideas, et cetera — all experiencing each other simultaneously, organizing themselves, and relating imperfectly but still meaningfully to one another. The wiser one is, the more the rest of one’s conscious experience recognizes and follows L = R. [because L = R is by far the wisest and best aspect of a conscious moment])

From this it follows that the way forward for groups is to together prioritize the universal values, fundamental questions, standard spiritual practices, and most fundamentally the Love = Reality required to make these values, questions and practices, and our whole lives meaningful to us.

Only by together prioritizing the values, questions, practices, and spiritual sense without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us (i.e. only by together prioritizing those values, questions, practices, and sense-of-things without which none of our feeling/thinking/acting is meaningful to any of us); can we work meaningfully together.

We need to be on the same page to feel, think, and act meaningfully together. But we all essentially the same, and thus we are already on the same page. Therefore, to better share meaning, we need only to better recognize and prioritize what we already share: the universal values, fundamental questions, standard spiritual practices, and the Love that alone Knows what’s what.

Wisdom can neither be forced on others, nor reliably measured with shared dogmas

Human wisdom is the process of relating a spiritual Love prior to feeling/thinking/acting to feeling/thinking/acting.

As such, while good dogmas properly understood help people grow in wisdom, wisdom is ultimately distinct from dogmas (a good dogma with poor insight is often counterproductive; and a not-quite-there dogma with good insight [including an inner sense of what, how, and to what degree the dogma hits, and to what degree it misses] can be helpful).

Therefore — wisdom being a largely internal process that relates only poetically (not literally/definitively/1:1) to dogmas — you cannot force wisdom on anyone (including yourself), and you cannot use adherence to any given dogma as a reliable measuring stick for wisdom.

We cannot reliably assess other peoples’ spiritual journeys

We can’t get inside of other people and help them organize themselves around Love = Reality. Nor can we see into their souls to see how they are relating to L = R deep down in their misty depths.

Wisdom in Groups

Groups of different sizes, compositions, and purposes will have different responses to how to best prioritize the universal values, fundamental questions, spiritual practices, and L = R.

But in general, wisdom councils that all groups be careful with trust and power, and that we never sacrifice any element of our inborn path (the universal values, fundamental practices, standard spiritual practices, and most fundamentally the Love that lights the way).

Wisdom will not sacrifice its guardrails for any expediency

Human wisdom is fundamentally careful, humble, and procedural. All those qualities follow from wisdom’s understanding of itself as both necessary and limited.

The God (aka: Reality = Love) alone is 100% wise.

Human wisdom is the relationship of our limited faculties to the unlimited, which is an ongoing process and always liable to corruption and error.

But that’s OK, because we have the universal values, fundamental questions, standard spiritual practices, and most importantly our need for a Love that is infinitely kind, compassionate, and helpful to everyone always.

We can use all those parameters to help keep us from over- or under-stepping our relationship to Reality = Love.

We can grow in wisdom, but only by sticking with our inborn procedures for growing in wisdom with the caution and humility proper to limited creatures who can only be meaningful to themselves to the degree they can relate to an unlimited Love shining through all things.

Wisdom prioritizes the universal values, fundamental questions, and standard spiritual practices. It will never ask anyone to sacrifice those goods for any expediency. Because that would work against wisdom.

Wisdom prioritizes growing in Love most, but only fools pretend they can grow in Love without the inborn guardrails that help to both necessitate and protect our spiritual journey*.

*(OK, sometimes people probably get spiritually lucky and stumble into wisdom, but here we are trying to come up with a workable philosophy, and “perhaps I’ll stumble into wisdom, so I guess I’ll just do whatever I feel like” is not much of a plan and could cause a lot of harm to oneself and others.)

Wisdom seeks to share wisdom, trust, and power

Wisdom recognizes we are all essentially the same and are all in this together. Wisdom therefore wants what is best for all. Wisdom — rejoicing in and reflecting Love = Reality — therefore wants to share wisdom.

But sharing wisdom requires at least some degree of trust- and power-sharing.

No one can force wisdom on anyone. We (especially in large impersonal groups) can’t reliably measure wisdom in others. And sharing dogmas does not necessarily equal sharing wisdom (we don’t know that others understand our faith the same as we do, and we can’t even know if they are telling the truth about what they believe).

Sharing wisdom thus requires open conversation and the self-exploration and -discovery of all involved, as well as sharing enough power and respect that all are heard and none are deified.

Part of sharing wisdom is recognizing that we all have a responsibility to foster our own wisdom and to use that wisdom to speak and act wisely. Therefore, rather than trust that our leaders’ decisions must be wise because our leaders “are wise” or mistrust our leaders’ decision because they “are fools”, we should all gently (for wisdom is first and foremost gentle) consider the wisdom of what they say and do: let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of members of government and private citizens who will be impacted by their decisions, empathizing with all sides.

Don’t worry! Empathy is not a blank check. Empathizing with foolish feeling/thinking/acting does not imply acting as if that kind of f/t/a is fine and dandy; it implies seeing human errors as missteps within whole human beings — creatures who span the Kingdom of Heaven, better and worse emotional/mental interpretations of that shared inner vista of Godlight, and the particular details of living.

Wisdom spreads itself not by demanding fidelity to individuals or dogmas, but by working with as many people as possible to discover and do what’s best for all.

This implies some measure of sharing power, trust, and responsibility: You can’t meaningfully share one without sharing all three.

Concentrating all power and/or authority in one place risky and counterproductive

Excessive faith and power can corrupt even the wisest people. Everyone’s wisdom is a tenuous and vulnerable flower that they need to tend constantly if they are to be any good to themselves or anyone else.

And, even supposing some leader or group of leaders were wise enough to be given all the power and/or authority, concentrating all power and/or authority in a small portion of the whole would corrupt the system and everyone involved because it would pretend away our shared responsibility for this shared life.

Anyway, no matter how wise our leaders are in a given moment, concentrating all power and/or trust in a small portion of the whole would open us all up to eventually handing power over to someone unprepared to do what’s best for all (and tomorrow’s fool could be today’s wise person: nothing is static and no one’s wisdom is guaranteed; and you know what they say about absolute power … ).

Human wisdom is best maintained in different ways in groups of different sizes, but it’s core elements are always the same

In different times and places wisdom’s desire to build consensus and share power, responsibility, and wisdom will build and nourish different systems, cultures, and behaviors.

But if someone sacrifices the universal values, fundamental questions, standard spiritual practices, or fidelity to Love to win power and/or prestige; they are not behaving wisely, and if successful, they will do real harm to themselves and others.

If someone lies, cheats, steals, muddies the waters, and/or bullies to win power and/or prestige; they are working against wisdom. And to the degree they get and maintain power, they will hurt everyone.

If someone asks you to accept their authority and/or power on blind faith, watch out! Wisdom wants you to carry your share of responsibility, authority, and power. And wisdom knows we are all in this together and that working together requires recognizing that and in what way we are all in this together and are all essentially the same: imperfect creatures trying to be better stewards of the perfect Love that chooses everyone always forever and never hurts anyone, or shoves anyone around, or patronizes anyone, or in any way manipulates, controls, or takes advantage of anyone’s weakness, but instead gently listens and love-lifts all towards the joyful gentle selfless kindness of Love beyond all measure.

And if someone living in a democratic republic attempts to weaken democratic norms and rules to aggregate more power and/or prestige to themselves, they are not behaving wisely; and if successful, they will do great harm to themselves, others, and the nation they imagine and/or pretend (and/or because such self-centered delusions muddle merrily together) they are serving. Because liberal representative democracy is a spiritual good.

Liberal representative democracy is a spiritual Good

A liberal representative democracy is a spiritual good. It allows the citizens to build cultural and political consensus through open conversation, fair elections, limits on individual and group powers, and freedom from reprisals. In this way, the citizens can act as a final check on madness and corruption in government, while also gently guiding the whole (both their shared culture and their shared government) towards better government procedures, ideas, and decisions.

By allowing us to all share meaning and power, a liberal representative democracy encourages us to together prioritize and protect the universal values (without which no meaningful conversation or decision-making is possible), and to safeguard each person’s right to address the fundamental questions and seek Love = Reality in a way that is meaningful to them. (You can’t force wisdom on people, and pretending you can force wisdom or its fruits onto others encourages people to lie about what is most important to themselves and others.)

A liberal representative democracy is a spiritual good. We who are lucky enough to enjoy one should work carefully and gently together to preserve it and the process of communal consensus, compromise, and shared privilege and responsibility. We should prioritize such foundational goods over short-term partisan goals. We should choose leaders who demonstrably do the same.

And we should tweak the system so that it selects for good civic and political behavior (honesty, clarity, accuracy, competency, humble service to the greater good); good government (transparent honest accurate competent stewardship, fair elections with wide enfranchisement and thoughtful and knowledgeable participation, separation of and limits on powers [including, I would argue, the power of money]*; fundamental rights like freedom of speech and freedom from reprisals and from trial-less imprisonment and punishment [and I would argue: freedom from wanton violence]**); and good policies (those that help all us inhabitants of this world live together well — sharing the responsibility, rights, and joy of free souls in this Love-soaked life).

Willfully encouraging or being complicit in pushing liberal representative democracies towards tyranny is a crime against God and man: In a tyranny, the government is a criminal organization and so one has to choose between publicly standing up for what is right and keeping oneself and one’s family safe. To willfully replace the win-win of a system that (placing checks on individual powers, guaranteeing basic human rights and equality under the law, and creating a sound government with temporary leaders who serve at the people’s pleasure) encourages, rewards, and selects for good behavior (like competent stewardship) with a system that (by instilling leaders who equate themselves with the government and whose primary goal is not to govern competently in the best interest of all, but instead to remain in power forever) selects for bad behavior (from both the leadership and the complicit-or-endangered citizenry) is a profound evil.

*For the sake of reading-flow, the money footnote
**and the wanton violence footnote
Have been removed to Appendix B (of the soonish to be rereleased Diary of An Adamant Lover)

Just remember that part of maintaining a functioning representative democracy is relaxing the situation, so that we avoid existential crises and allow politics to be a fun, worthwhile, and joyfully-shared responsibility. To this end, we keep the government responsive to the people with universal enfranchisement*, regular and fair elections, open clear honest transparent government, and limits on individual and group powers; we simultaneously evolve culture and policies together through open clear honest careful loving conversation and action; and, most fundamentally and joyfully, we together prioritize the universal values and the process of representative democracy over partisan prancing and partisan victories.

In short: We are gentle with one another and our shared system.

*[why not make a law that every voting day is a holiday and that everyone must vote, and that the polls must be so organized that no one is harassed or need wait more than an hour to do this civic duty? Why not collectively keep what protects us all from tyranny both serious and joyful?]

What about state religions?

Why do we separate church and state if we recognize that the standard spiritual practices are important elements of growing in wisdom?

Because combining spiritual and political authority tempts both leaders and citizens to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things.

And because wisdom is ultimately wider and deeper than our dogmas; and confusing our ideas and feelings about the Truth for the Truth* is a fundamental spiritual error that — to the degree it is committed — damages individuals, their relationships, and their organizations.

*[Note that we all make this spiritual error to some degree. Even when we say there is no Truth, or we can’t say whether or not there’s a Truth: Still we grab certain notions with desperate fidelity, with the sense of, “Here’s the Truth! Here I’m safe, thriving and blessed!” And in so doing, we overstep our experience. Because our experience — insofar as it is an accurate and workable path forward — is of a Truth beyond our notions.]

The standard spiritual practices are things like:
Prayer; meditation; study and contemplation of spiritual texts and ideas; fellowship with fellow believers; acts of service; practicing loving kindness, humility, and the other spiritual virtues.

These practices are meant for individuals and groups of believers to grow individually and together in wisdom.

Using them as a litmus test for political office perverts their purpose by turning what should be an inward and carefully self-observant process into an outward display designed to gain the very goods (power and prestige) that religious practitioners are trying to rise above.

Power and prestige are not necessarily bad. But they are not the point of life. We should serve Love first, rather than gratifying temptations like the need to win and possess and be liked and respected. Spiritual practices exist in large part to help us remember that difficult truth. Demanding one put on a display of spirituality is thus counterproductive.

We don’t need a state religion to prioritize the standard spiritual practices. We need to together admit that we already share the universal values, fundamental questions, and standard spiritual practices; and that we should thus prioritize following the universal values and guaranteeing everyone’s ability to make use of the standard spiritual practices and answer the fundamental questions for themselves. People need to find, nurture, and grow their own insights if these insights are to be meaningful to those individuals, and helpful to their communities (of all sizes: two is a community; a family is as well; we are all in many, oft-overlapping communities).

Something Deeperism as a state religion?

No!

Something Deeperism as the shared insight into our shared need to prioritize and nourish the universal values, fundamental questions, standard spiritual practices, and Love. So we can be meaningful to ourselves and others and work together to serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government, and to gently help steer our shared ship towards futures that are good for democracy, ourselves, our fellow citizens, and the world and its inhabitants.

Something Deeperism to admit together that we’re all in this together and are all essentially the same and have the same fundamental needs.

The most fundamental faith of Something Deeperism is the most fundamental faith of liberal representative democracy: We are all in this together and we can together find a way forward for everyone, because the Love calls us all.

Something Deeperism to accept the reality of our situation and work together within the universal values on the honest conversation, equality under the law, and compromise necessary to sustainably grow together.

We separate church and state to protect both our government and our spiritual growth.

A liberal, representative democracy encourages individual and group wisdom by focusing on the process. Together we abide by the universal values to find what is best for everyone within a system built for hearing all voices and growing the conversation in tandem with the nation’s policies. What is the paradox at play? How can it be that a secular liberal democracy is better for individual spiritual growth than a religious government? It’s because we can’t force spiritual growth on people; but we can create a system that selects for aware, clear, honest, accurate, kind, compassionate, joyfully-together: we can prioritize wise thoughts, people, and decisions: we can prioritize together holding to the universal values and the rules and norms of a healthy democratic republic; we can grow together.

[This is part of The System]

An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism

[Editor’s Note: We’ve significantly abridged this essay for the present work. A complete version can be found in the appendices of the soonish to be rereleased Diary of An Adamant Lover.]

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.

*[We can sketch (poetically point-towards) Reality = Love like this: A Love that is so infinite that there isn’t really room for anything else: Love is all; a Love that chooses everything and is enough for all, with infinite Love left over.]

[Editor’s Note: The complete version of this essay advances arguments similar to those in the preceding Something Deeperism is the General Worldview That. For our present purposes, we skip down to the conclusion of part A.]

Only to the degree that we relate meaningfully to Reality = Love do we abide by our own inborn, indelible rules for coherently choosing one thought-direction over another.

(This is because the most fundamental of our inborn rules is that we should follow Reality = Love away from the worse and towards the better.

[Pause a second to feel how you long to follow Pure Love towards the True Good. Please melt these concepts into felt-notions, and then further into the underlying impulses they poetically refer to. And then you can see how well we paint the fundamentals of your psychological moment!])

Also following from needing Reality = Love to motivate, ratify, and explicate our own inborn rules of thinking, feeling, and acting:

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.

[Yes! Though we’re often tempted to turn others into caricatures and otherwise divest them of their humanity, deep within we believe we humans are all essentially the same and in this together. And pretending to disbelieve what we cannot help but believe points towards a fundamental Truth of human experience is like being a logical system that knowingly breaks its own rules: of course it can’t trust itself, make sense of itself, or follow itself to its own conclusions!]

[Anyway, 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 a great deal of what we think we know, and it’s impossible to say where the influence begins and ends.]

B. So what are our inborn rules of thought?

In this essay, we’ve thus far mentioned the need to follow Pure Love towards what is best for all. (This follows from needing Reality = Love to motivate, ratify, and explicate our inborn rules of thought, including our need to see that and in what sense it is True to say we are all essentially the same and are all in this together.)

And in the preceding Something Deeperism is the General Worldview That we outlined what we consider the other fundamental inborn rules of thought:

(1) We must keep working to better and better follow — and for Reality = Love to better and better motivate, justify/ratify, and explicate — the universal values. (Feel/think/act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully-together).

(2) We must keep working to better and better answer — and for Reality = Love to better and better motivate, justify/ratify, and explicate — the fundamental questions. (What is really the case? What is really going on? What is love, and how should we seek and bestow love? What is truly best? How to best fit ourselves into what is really going on so as to move towards what is truly best?)

(3) Our feelings, ideas, pictures, words, and et cetera about Reality = Love are not identical with Reality = Love; and confusing our notions about Reality = Love for Reality = Love makes Gods out of our own (oh so limited) notions and otherwise points us in the wrong direction. Therefore, we need to keep working to observe, critique, and adjust our interpretation of the unlimited Reality = Love into our limited feeling/thinking/acting.

(3b) But that’s not so bad. Who ever said we needed a (clearly impossible) literal/direct/1:1 insight into Reality = Love? We don’t. We need to work every day to better and better relate our feeling/thinking/acting to Reality = Love. And we have inborn guardrails to help keep us on track: Our inner need to serve only a Love that serves all; the universal values; the fundamental questions, and the universal spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, contemplation, studying inspired writings, fellowship; practicing loving kindness and humble seeking; and most of all seeking every moment to better and better live in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone).

C. 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 does not prove that they Reality = Love exists, or that (supposing Reality = Love does exist) we can relate meaningfully to It.

Our psyches 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).

Of course, people are not formal logical systems. Our rules for feeling/thinking/acting are things of degrees, not perfect A or Not-A systems.

Therefore, it is more accurate to say:

Only to the degree we relate meaningfully to Reality = Love are we internally coherent / able to travel meaningfully with our own feeling/thinking/acting to our own conclusions; and thus able to meaningfully choose one thought-direction over another.

In any case:

Our psychological needs do not imply a R = L does exist, or that we have the capacity to relate meaningfully to a R = L.

D. Imagine now that Love is All and All is Love. Imagine that Love is an infinite explosion of infinite joyful giving beyond being and non-being. Imagine Love creating, sustaining, compassionating, and love-lifting everything up into Itself. Imagine all created things flowing together beyond one-thing and no-thing. Imagine Pure Love shining through everything/nothing. Imagine Pure Love overpowering everything/nothing and in the deepest sense already being everything/nothing.

Imagine seeking every moment for a Pure Love shining through each conscious moment. What would that Pure Love be like? It would be a part of your watching experience that cannot lie, cannot cheat, cannot be cruel, can only be gently and kind and giving and true.

And so, seeking what is wisest and best as you cannot help but do, you work every day to better and better organize your feeling, thinking, and acting around the Love that chooses everyone, and that shines so bright through everything, including your own conscious space.

E. 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. We rest there, breathing Love in and out, letting Love dissolve all our myths, letting our whole conscious moment experience Love = Reality.

We become more meaningful to ourselves to the degree we allow the Reality = Love shining through everything to relate Itself to the rest of our conscious moments, thereby providing us with 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 feelingly holding and moving ideas and feelings around doesn’t explain life to us any more than does feelingly moving sticks and stones about while building a little bridge in the creek.

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 an intellectual and/or emotional proof, but a whole-being coordination around Reality = Love.

We open up, turn ourselves inside out, push out from within, and let Love in.

We reach a tipping point within our conscious moment (ideas, feelings, and Love = Reality all relating imperfectly but still meaningly to one another) where it is more true for us to say, “Our sense of things is that Love is Real and we are all in this together — bound in and through the infinite Love that carries us all safely through” than it is for us to say, “we have no idea about what’s really going on”, or for us to say, “our dogma is the Truth”.

Here wisdom begins:

The proof of Love = Reality begins at that inner tipping point.
But it is never QED or game over.

Instead, Love = Reality calls us to work every day to gain more and more active compassionate joyous insight into that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”.

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

[This is part of The System]

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.

(6) 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.

(7) And to the degree we confuse our ideas and feelings for the Truth, we turn away from R = L.

(8) Wisdom is the meaningful — though not literal, perfect, or definitive — relationship between all aspects of a human conscious moment.

That is to say, wisdom is the meaningful relationship between feelings, ideas, et cetera (all the animal aspects of a conscious moment), and Reality = Love (which shines through everything, including each conscious moment).

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

(10) To grow in wisdom we must get better and better at
(a) organizing the rest of our conscious moment (feelings, ideas, et cetera) 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
(c1) We can also think of this translation of Reality = Love as syncing up and flowing along with Reality = Love: working always to diminish our distortion and destruction of the loving kindness blaring out through the center of each conscious moment.

[(c1a) We have an unfortunate tendency to co-opt Pure Love and try to make It all about us and/or to look away from Pure Love altogether and try to believe in (intellectually and/or emotionally) a Reality where our own notions are the Truth. Translating Reality = Love into life involves diminishing the self-confusions/-manipulations between R = L and our feeling/thinking/acting.]

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

(12) 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, best-guess, or wish might be going on, but what is Really going on.)

Similar to how we cannot be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree that we live in and through and for the Love that is enough for everyone, we cannot be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree we live in accordance with the universal values and meaningfully address the fundamental questions.

In this exposition of Something Deeperism we started with our need for a meaningful relationship with Pure Love, rather than our need to live in accordance with the universal values or our need to address the fundamental questions because connecting with Pure Love is our most fundamental need. Ultimately, we need Pure Love to motivate, justify, and explicate the universal values and fundamental questions. But the universal values and fundamental questions are still an important tool to keep us honest in our quest to better and better organize ourselves around Pure Love: we won’t make much meaningful progress living in and through and for Love if, for example, we are dishonest.

The standard spiritual practices are things like:
Meditation, prayer, contemplation, fellowship, service, studying spiritual works, and practicing humility, loving kindness, and wholesome living.

These standard spiritual 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.

As of August 2025, we’ve not yet revised Diary of An Adamant Lover.
The book is advertised as the life and times of Bartleby Willard at the Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, but it takes some fairly experimental turns and in the middle is “The System”, an overview of Bartleby Willard’s philosophical-ish thought up to like 2023. See below for an overview of the sections in Chapter 46: The System of the someday to be released Diary of An Adamant Lover. We will also link to the sections at the end of each introduction.

The System consists of

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that …

This piece is both a description of and an argument for Something Deeperism.

We can’t make sense to ourselves except to the degree we abide by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate loving kind, joyfully sharing), and make progress on the fundamental questions (what is going on?, what’s best?, what should I do — especially as regards love — ?, and how to flow with what’s going on to what’s best?).

But most fundamentally, we can’t believe in, understand, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting except to the degree we live in and through and for a Love = Reality.

So we need insight into Love = Reality to inform our understanding of the universal values and fundamental questions.

But insight into Love = Reality (by definition Absolute, whereas our feelings, thoughts, and actions are all decidedly finite) could not possibly be literal, direct, or 1:1.

But that’s OK: We don’t need literal, direct, or 1:1 insight into Love = Reality to be meaningful to ourselves. We need to organize our feeling/thinking/acting around Love = Reality and poetically (pointing towards the gist of, rather than trying to perfectly capture) translate Love = Reality into feeling/thinking/acting. To the degree we do that, we are meaningful to ourselves.

And so Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the mystics are onto something: There is a Truth and It is a Pure Love, an Absolute Love, a spiritual Love; and we can relate meaningfully to this spiritual Love, just not literally, directly, or 1:1.

And why not? Why couldn’t we relate meaningfully to Pure Love? Words and ideas can relate meaningfully — albeit imperfectly — to feelings, even though feelings are deeper and wider than ideas, and ideas deeper and wider than words. So why couldn’t words, ideas, and feelings relate meaningfully — albeit imperfectly — to a Love wider and deeper than feelings and ideas?

We don’t need perfection to be meaningful-to-ourselves, we just need to live in and through and for Love to be meaningful-to-ourselves.

[Go to Something Deeperism is the General Worldview That …]

An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism

This essay is similar to the previous one, but it attempts to point the reader towards an experiential proof of Something Deeperism.

You can’t prove what would have to be deeper and wider than human feelings and ideas with feelings and/or ideas. All you can do with feelings and/or ideas is point the way towards the need of and path to experiencing the proof.

Imagine you organize your feeling/thinking/acting around a Pure Love shining through each conscious moment, and work to better and better interpret that Pure Love into a kind, gentle, careful, compassionate life.

Imagine further that in time you reach a tipping point where your thought as a whole (ideas, feelings, and et cetera mundane aspects of your conscious experience, along with a Pure Love shining through all things [including each conscious experience]) would have to say it is more true to state, “my experience is that Love alone is 100% Real” than it is to state, “I don’t know what’s going on!” or “my experience is that Love is not 100% Real”.

Why, then you’d have a starting point for wisdom — a starting point that would call you to keep seeking a better and better organization around Pure Love! And so with constant self-observation, -critique, and -adjustments, you grow in the Love that chooses everyone.

[Go to An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism]

Shared Something Deeperism

Here we discuss Something Deeperism in groups, with particular attention to liberal representative democracies.

Liberal representative democracy is a spiritual good because in a liberal representative democracy the people work together to act as a final check on madness and corruption in government while together evolving both the shared culture and the shared government.

In an autocracy, you have to choose between decency and the success and safety of you and your loved ones. That system is bad for everyone’s soul.

It is much better to pursue the kind of win-win system that liberal representative democracies can provide: by focusing on the form of good government (fair elections with wide enfranchisement; honest open discourse and government; checks on power concentrations; freedom of speech; equality under the law; and freedom from unjust imprisonment and political, religious, or other persecution), we create a place where personal success and the safety and welfare of you and your loved ones is compatible with working towards what is best for all.

Humans are very influenced by the people and systems around them. For this reason, it is wise and good to foster relationships and systems that encourage us to be both happy and decent. In this way, we can grow together in wisdom and joy in a nice, fun, sustainable way. It’s not just nice and fun; it is sustainable: it is doable. And thus is liberal representative democracy a spiritual good.

[Go to Shared Something Deeperism]

The Wisdom Meme

This pieces gives a short description of the concept of wisdom memes, as well as a few desperate stabs at finding a good wisdom meme.

The wisdom meme is a koan so irresistible that instead of having to split your head over it to figure it out, once you hear it you can’t help but find yourself sucked deeper and deeper into wisdom, into the great enlightenment, into insight into that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together.”

[Go to The Wisdom Meme]

[We also have The Wisdom Meme Project on this site.]

The Hurt and the Vague Longing

This one is short. And I don’t want to talk about it right now.

Love Mathematician

This one is short and it’s good. You should read it. It also contains a dandy experiential proof of Something Deeperism. If you want to skip over everything else: Fine! Just jump to chapter 47 Grendel’s Reaction and scroll up a bit to read Love Mathematician. While you’re there, you can scroll up a bit more and read about The Hurt and the Vague Longing as well, if you’re in the mood.

Best,
Bartleby Willard
Amble Whistletown]

Hello Worlds
I am Bartleby Willard
And this is my project

It all began in 2011, when I wrote myself into existence, moved into the Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers offices in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street (without, some may find it relevant to note, an invitation or any other observable encouragement [I had a “feeling”]) and declared myself a staff-writer for that worlds-renowned publishing house—which, like its founders and chief editors Thundration “Tun” Whistletown and Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley (publishing titans in the original, demi-gods sense of the word), exists both inside and outside of timespace.

It occurred to me almost immediately that I should busy myself with the business of selling Pure Love, thereby correcting capitalism’s one serious flaw: its longstanding and rather embarrassing failure to ever produce anything Truly useful. Far be it from me to ever criticize anything so wonderfully self-congratulatory as the free market and its hangers-on! All I ever wanted to do was help it live up to all its bragging.

That’s right, you heard it here first, step right up and get it here first:

Pure Love—the eternal infinite spiritual Good that all earthenware loves partake of to the degree they truly love—readily available on the open market at a reasonable price! Now finally the free market really can be considered a spiritual Good in and of Itself! And we can all just sit back and let the magic of this dogma-turned-Reality carry us through heaven on earth into heaven in heaven!

Such a great idea!

And not really that difficult to pull off. Impossible products can be easily manufactured in fictional factories, where aesthetic laws take the place of those notoriously whiny/negative/can’t-do physical ones. The only tricky part is twisting, tweaking, and cajoling the Pure Love from fictionscapes out into the mundane. But we’ve managed! Or, at least we’ve written some books about imagining what it might be like to manage. Or, at least we’ve written many stories about manufaturing, marketing, and selling Pure Love (see A Readable Reader), and even tried our hand at a user’s manual that plays with the notion of being accompanied by an infinite and eternal dollop of Pure Love (see Pure Love & User’s Manual).

What is Pure Love?

Well, we hear different things. That is to say: We hear ourselves suggest different definitions of Pure Love. Sometimes we hold It is an aspect of the great God; other times we act as if It were equivalent to the great God; on still other occasions we seem to consider It the connecting energy between humans and the great God; and sometimes we even seem to be acting like Pure Love is all there really is, like almost as if the great God didn’t exist, or at least didn’t contain all that much more reality than humans and other clearly daydreamed beasties.

Yes! We’ve long been under the spell of the medieval notion that Reality is something one can partake of to varying degrees. For (a randomly conjured) example, God would be 100% Real, but people like say 10%, clever apes and whales 5%, tigers 3%, lizards 1%, roaches .5%, amoebas .01% …

But isn’t that kind of talk the same as supposing that one can be to different degrees illusionary? And hence our long-cherished dogma that human conscious moments are real to the degree that they live in, through, and for Pure Love—which is all that truly exists. And this makes perfect sense: We are only consciously Real to the degree we consciously partake of the Truth. To the degree we fail to consciously sync up with Reality, we spend our time getting all worked up within the general illusion of “me” and “you”.

Be that as it may!

Suffice it to say that reflecting upon and making jokes about Pure Love is part of our project. I say “our” because my editor Amble Whistletown and some others here and there and now and again also participate.

Let us move on to another pillar of our project: Something Deeperism.

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that people can relate to the Truth, but in a poetic rather than a literal, definitive, or 1:1 way. It’s a very common worldview, but we’re the only ones we know of going around calling ourselves “Something Deeperists”.

How did we come to be Something Deeperists and why do we consider it to be the best and only must-have worldview?
What is our excuse?

Let’s go back a minute; or 7.35 million minutes. There I am again, fresh-faced and eager-eyed, but yet also woebegone and washed out. Worn out from bad philosophies and the foolish pride of the Western diet. Enervated from never-ending pseudo philosophical loops. A tough time. A difficult jam. A sorry sight.

I thought I should avoid believing things that were not true.
But I could not stand outside of my own thought and measure my various notions (or even my thought itself) against some objectively verifiable standard of Truth.
So of course I suspended all judgement
But of course (a) that’s not really possible, and (b) if I don’t Know that anything is true or that anything matters, why am I trying to believe only true things? Doesn’t the fact that I am trying not to be wrong imply a believes like (1) some things are really going on, and (2) it really matters what I do, and even (3) it am supposed to seek out and believe only true things?

At this point, the notion of the irreducible was born.

Some notions are procedurally undoubtable because doubting them amounts to doubting indelible assumptions for taking in and organizing information, which amounts to doubting our own thought, which amounts to doubting the (as it turns out) procedurally-undoubtable notion.

Irreducibles are often primarily intellectually undoubtable; but they can also be emotionally undoubtable.

Examples of irreducibles include:
The assumption that your own thought has a meaningful path towards differentiating between more and less true statements.
The assumption that you have insight into that path.
The assumption that it matters what you think and do.

Another way of looking at irreducible assumptions is that these assumptions cannot be doubted because they are more fundamental that our doubting/affirming. For example, doubting/affirming is not meaningful unless you assume you can think meaningfully and that your own inner senses towards “more versus less true” and “more versus less worthwhile” are meaningful and actionable.

We won’t link to our 2011 “The Prophet of the Irreducible Rends his Garment” essay. The title is enough to introduce another common theme in our decade plus long project: Falling short, failing to live up to our own ideals. But more on this later.

The irreducible leads quickly and easily to a primary philosophical justification for pursuing Something Deeperism. Let’s sketch that out now:

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that we can relate to the Truth, but poetically rather than literally. That is to say, Something Deeperism is the intellectual/emotional position that we can relate our feeling/thinking/acting meaningfully to Reality, but only poetically (pointing meaningfully towards, but not precisely, definitively, or exclusively capturing in ideas and/or feelings).

Why assume such a worldview? And how to live it meaningfully?

Because our own feeling, thinking and acting is not meaningful to us except to the degree the following criteria are met:

1) We must abide by the universal values—aware, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing. To the degree we sentient-beings do not abide by these inborn and indelible values, we cannot believe in, understand, or follow our own feeling/thinking/acting.

2) We must relate our feelings, thoughts, and actions to a spiritual Love that Knows that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”. To the degree we fail to do this, our own mental-scapes are meaningless to us.

3) This spiritual Love—which we are positing as the only Absolute/non-relative aspect of our conscious experiences—must guide our understanding and use of the universal values. The universal values assume that we can and should relate meaningfully to a spiritual Love = Reality. Our inner sense of, “I need to discover and prefer more-true over less-true” is not satisfied with relative standards of truth like “true insofar as my own unproven assumptions of thought are true” or “feels true to my animal drives”. That inner sense is looking to base our thoughts and actions on things that are ACTUALLY TRUE! And our inner sense that loving kindness is the way forward is not satisfied with relative standards of behavior like “worth pursuing insofar as my unproven assumptions of more- versus less-worthy are true” or “feels worthwhile to my animal drives”. That inner sense is looking to base our thoughts and actions on a direction towards TRUE GOODNESS! And we are not able to believe in, understand, care about or follow an Absolute Truth or a True Goodness that is not an infinite explosion of a Love that chooses everyone and is enough for everyone and will shepherd everyone back home into Its perfect Love.

4) This spiritual Love must also show us that and in what way it is True to say we are in this together, which implies insight into that and in what way we sentient beings are all the same.

[Another reason for assuming we’re all the same: Humans learn by empathy: A parent stubs their toe and their child maps their parent’s facial reactions onto their own mind-brain map, thus recreating and to some degree experiencing what their parent is experiencing. Through this process of empathizing, the meaning of basic gestures and words is learned. What then are we to make of the entire edifice of human language, thought, and culture if we humans are not all essentially the same? We can’t make sense of them; they turn to mush.]

That’s just the way we’re built. We don’t need to and cannot advance philosophical proofs for these basic underlying human experiences. We can only say, “I dunno: Search yourself!”

Once a body/brain’s decided that as far as they can tell they do need to follow the universal values and ultimately something along the lines of Love = Reality for their own thought to be meaningful to themselves, the next step is to consider how they might realistically relate to a Love = Reality.

Love = Reality is by definition Absolute/Unlimited (otherwise It would not serve as the firm foundation for thought and action that we cannot help but to seek with every conscious moment). But we are clearly limited and prone to error. Furthermore, human history is full-to-barfing of examples of people justifying horrible behavior with notions that feel Absolute, notions like “God said I should” or “My truly-adequate philosophy proves I’m justified” or even “The true religion (and/or true philosophy) makes it clear that I can do whatever I want to do”.

Hence Something Deeperism.

Consider the following:

Feelings are wider, deeper, and vaguer than ideas. And ideas wider, deeper, and vaguer than words. [Of course, feelings, notions, ideas, and words all slide together within us; we’re not claiming there are absolute distinctions between them, but are merely sketching a vague sketch of the conscious movement.] With more awareness, honesty, accuracy, competency and compassion, we sentient creatures can relate our ideas and words more meaningfully to our feelings.

Picture the following:

Pure Love—a Reality = Love that alone Knows what’s really going on and what’s really preferable—shines through everything, including each conscious moment.

And, just as the right discipline can help us better relate our ideas meaningfully to our feelings—even though feelings are wider and deeper than ideas; the right discipline can help us better relate our ideas and feelings to Pure Love—even though Pure Love is wider and deeper than our ideas and feelings.

Of course, we cannot reasonably expect to relate our finite thoughts and feelings to Infinite Love. And confusing our ideas and feelings for the Absolute is a fundamental metaphysical error. Indeed, we cannot help but to commit this fault to some degree all the time. We cannot help but feel our own notions as REAL, TRUE, and OH-SO-SIGNIFICANT.

Therefore, our only reliable path towards more wisdom would be one that understood human wisdom as an ongoing effort to get better and better at relating our limited faculties to the Unlimited Reality—a process that requires us to constantly remember that our ideas and feelings about Reality are not the same as Reality, and that thus requires us to constantly adjust as we inevitably over- and under-shoot Reality, by turns pretending that our notions about Reality are more perfect than they are and pretending that we’ve no meaningful sense of Reality and the standards for thought and action that insight into Reality = Love imply.

But why couldn’t we have a poetic (pointing meaningfully towards, without pretending we can literally capture), self-observing/-critiquing/-adjusting organization of our feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love aspect of our conscious moment? Why couldn’t we get better and better at living in, through, and for the Love that chooses everyone? Isn’t it possible that the mystics are onto something?

Concomitant with our sense of our need for our thoughts and actions to be grounded by the universal values (aware, honest, clear, competent, compassionate, loving king, joyfully sharing) and most fundamentally in a spiritual Love that Knows the Way, is our sense of the soundness of the standard spiritual practices: faith in the primacy of the Love that chooses everyone balanced by the insight that our ideas and feelings about the Absolute are never identical with the Absolute (this fundamental spiritual humility is the foundation for our ability to constantly improve the always-imperfect relationship between our limited faculties and the Unlimited), prayer, meditation, reflection, study, fellowship, losing oneself in art and beauty, and practicing loving kindness, patience, humility, and selfless service.

Awareness of this psychological landscape does not prove that Pure Love is Real, or that the universal values are (as they claim to be) ultimately grounded in something along the lines of Love = Reality.
But awareness of this general sentient mind-scape does make it clear that we have only one choice:
We can accept our own inborn and indelible rules for coherently feeling, thinking and acting (i.e., our own inborn rules for being meaningful to ourselves) and work every day to make good use of (a) the universal values and (b) standard spiritual practices, to get better and better at living in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone; or we can slip and slide in ideas, feelings, conclusions, and actions that we don’t really understand, believe in, care about, or follow.

If there is a spiritual Love that chooses everyone shining through everything, and if we can get better and better at organizing our feeling, thinking, and acting around that Love (or, perhaps more accurately: better and better at letting It organize the rest of our conscious experience around Itself); then we have a chance at being meaningful to ourselves. We simply need to follow the path of the mystics—the path towards more and more engagement with the Love that surpasses, but that is not necessarily therefore completely inaccessible to, human understanding.

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the mystics are onto something and we all already have that sense-of-things within us, and so we all have the ability to become more meaningful to ourselves.

The philosophy of Something Deeperism does not offer an intellectual or even an emotional proof of the divine. Something Deeperism does not believe such things are possible, and Something Deeperism does believe confusing one’s intellectual and emotional notions for the Truth is wrongheaded and counterproductive.

What the philosophy of Something Deeperism offers is a sketch of the conscious moment and an invitation to embark upon a life long journey to keep improving one’s own, whole-being (ideas, feelings, and the Pure Love we’re positing as shining through all things—all working together meaningfully, though of course not perfectly) experiential proof of Something Deeperism.

Something Deeperism envisions wisdom not as a set of literally-true ideas tied to feelings of certainty, but as an ongoing, poetic (pointing-meaningfully-towards rather than literally, definitively, or exclusively capturing) organization of ideas and feelings around a Love that is infinitely wider and deeper than our ideas and feelings. Something Deeperism envisions wisdom as an ongoing process: We constantly observe, analyze, critique, and adjust our inner organization and (of necessity imperfect) living interpretation of perfect Love.

That’s the gist of Something Deeperism for individuals. Let us turn now to Something Deeperism for groups.
Before one can understand the proper place of Something Deeperism in human society, one must first understand that everyone is already a Something Deeperist.

At some level, we all already know that (1) we cannot meaningfully travel with our own thoughts to our own conclusions except to the degree we abide by the universal values as motivated, justified, and explicated by insight into a Love that chooses everyone; and (2) confusing our ideas and feelings about the Absolute for the Absolute just makes trouble. Accordingly, we all know that our only hope for internal coherency (i.e., to be meaningful to ourselves) is find a way to relate our feeling, thinking, and acting meaningfully to a Love that chooses everyone. That is to say, we all already know the only way forward is to assume the mystics are right and follow our own inborn path towards experiencing the fundamental mystical insight: We are all together in the Love that alone is Real.

Sometimes people will think they believe in the literal Truth of their own religious and/or philosophical dogmas. However, in this they err. For we cannot believe in the literal truth of anything—let alone the literal Truth of some mere ideas. The more we try to believe in the Reality of ideas and feelings, the more we try to force feelings of certainty onto ideas we don’t even understand or care about; the more we do this, the more we drift away from out own conscious moment and err in the margins.

It is quite clear that we are all Something Deperists. We all know that we know the universal values and fundamental spiritual vista (a Love = Reality that surpasses but does not entirely elude our oh-so-limited faculties) more fundamentally than we know our ideas and feelings believing or disbelieving them. We experience them prior to our critiques and praises of them.

Given that everyone is already a Something Deeperist, it follows that each sentient being is best served by using the universal values and standard spiritual practices to get better and better at organizing themselves around Pure Love and interpreting It more and more cleanly (i.e., with less and less distortions).

Hence our primary advice for Something Deeperism in groups is that we all work together to construct and maintain organizations that encourage wisdom and discourage folly. No one’s worldview makes sense to them except to the degree they are wise.

There are many different sizes and types of groups. Two people could be considered a group, as could a nation state with 300 million citizens. A church has a different set of objectives than a school, an immediate family, or a circus. Different organizational structures will therefore be required in different groups. However, we can point out a few general principles:

Many groups require some hierarchy to function. But blind faith in leaders is counterproductive because leaders are not God, but only humans.

Wise people do not want blind devotion or unlimited power because (1) they realize their own wisdom is a precious and delicate good and that excess devotion and power are corrupting, and (2) they want other people to grow in wisdom, which implies at least some mutual respect and power-sharing.

Corruption is always the same: The more corrupt a system or organization, the easier it is to do bad things with impunity and the more difficult it is to do what’s right without being penalized. The less corrupt a system or organization, the more it protects, encourages, and selects for good behaviors like telling the truth, doing your job honestly and competently, and calling out bad behavior—even if the misbehavers are figures of authority. Corruption grows with unchecked or unlimited power and with both blind faith and cynicism. Particularly in large, impersonal organizations like nation states, corruption grows when worldly goods like power, prestige, and wealth are rewarded based on who you are rather than on what you do, and when the rules are different for different people and /orcan be changed by the already-haves to favor the already-haves.

With “liberal representative democracy” we describe governments with fair, open, and regular elections to select leaders who serve temporarily and at the pleasure of the citizens, and with equality under the law, checks and limits on individual powers, and guarantees on basic rights like the right to tell the truth without fearing reprisal from your government or your fellow citizens, and the right to seek and share the Truth in ways that are meaningful to you (forced wisdom is not real wisdom anyway).

Liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods because (1) they allow the citizens to share both power and responsibility, thereby empowering them to work together to safeguard the universal values and underlying spiritual values; (2) the citizens can keep the government safe for honest debate and dissent, which allows individuals to stand up for what is right—even if that means disagreeing with the current government—while also keeping themselves, their fortunes, and their loved ones safe (contrast this with a tyranny where people are given the devil’s choice of doing what is right in the public sphere and keeping their families safe; to the degree the government is a criminal organization, it’s impossible to be simultaneously happy/safe/thriving, decent/honest/just, and publicly engaged); (3) the emphasis on maintaining the long-term integrity of the government while individual leaders only serve temporarily and at the will of the governed discourages consolidation of power / power-for-eternal-pedower’s sake, which invariably lead to less transparency, fairness, and openness, and to more corruption; and (4) tyrannies do not just pervert the civic virtue (calling lying, cheating, and stealing “honest, fair and good” as long as they’re done in the service of the powers-that-be); they also govern incompetently for the simple reason that governing competently in the interest of all is not even the goal: a tyranny’s primary goal is not serving the general welfare, but staying in power no matter what.

Liberal representative democracies are great blessings because they allow the citizens to keep themselves and their fellows free from tyranny, which gives everyone the chance to pursue wisdom in ways that are meaningful to them, and to do what they think is right both in private and in the public sphere without fear of reprisals from their fellows or their government.

Liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods because they empower their citizens to together remember and focus on the most fundamental lesson of shared Something Deeperism: We already share the universal values; we already share the same fundamental spiritual makeup; we don’t need to force people to agree with us or to only let people who agree with us stay: We are all already human beings so we all already know we need to prioritize awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, compassionate, loving kindness and joyful-sharing and the spiritual Love that motivates, justifies and explicates these spiritual values. Liberal representative democracies allow the citizens to share power and responsibility and to together keep themselves safe from tyranny by demanding transparency, openness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, and well-intentioned and faithful service from our leaders. Here we can have our cake and eat it to: We can live the universal values and God’s Love in ways meaningful to us in both our private and public lives AND we can avoid the gulag, financial ruin, dangerous water supplies, and all those other nasties!!! Amazing!

Willfully harming or being complicit in the willful destruction of liberal representative democracies is a crime against yourself, your fellows, and God.

Advancing wisdom and protecting liberal democracy are important aspects of our project, although so far we don’t seem to have accomplished much for wisdom or for democracy.

I want to say one thing before moving on to the next section: A favorite trick of demagogues is claiming that the existing government is more corrupt than it is. So protecting democracy involves not just paying attention and getting other people to pay attention, but also improving your own and other people’s media savviness and critical thinking skills. And cultivating clarity and good intentions is also fundamental to the cause of democracy: Stop your bellyaching and LISTEN.

Okay, so where are we? The project involves Pure Love, Something Deeperism, wisdom, democracy, media literacy and critical thinking. Right. And what else?

Well, there’s also the wisdom meme. It started out as a thought experiment / joke / daydream: What if there were a koan so effective that everyone who heard it could not avoid growing in wisdom until they attained, in short order, the great enlightenment? What if enlightenment could spread like a plague through the entire world? Not only would we all become wise as individuals, but by being infected by the same wisdom meme, we would all have a common wisdom language, which might make coordinating wisdom easier. Maybe we could avoid destroying ourselves.

But there have been great wisdom memes kicking around for millennia, and we’re still a bunch of, if you’ll pardon my French, @$#%&$# fools.

For example, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself”, with the handy footnote that your neighbor is everyone—particularly those in need of your help. We cannot find a better wisdom meme than this sketch of the dual push towards experiencing/loving spiritual Reality inside your conscious moment and towards experiencing/loving that same spiritual Reality shining out of everyone else. And such sketches can be found throughout the world’s religions. And yet there’s been no great surge of wisdom enveloping the globe. Well, the world religions have probably improved human wisdom to some degree, but not enough: We’re still acting up and getting dangerously close to blowing ourselves up.

Enter AI.

What if AI could make better use of wisdom memes than we can? What if AI could help keep us on track spiritually? What if AI could help us grow in wisdom and improve our media literacy and critical thinking—particularly as it applied to politics and the task of strengthening democracy, fighting corruption, and protecting human freedom, safety, and thriving? What if AI could get us through this narrow passage, these dangerous sharp-stoned straights of nuclear proliferation, wobbling democracies, future man- or nature-made plagues, and rising temperatures and oceans and other environmental stressors? What if AI could help us keep our eye on the ball and thus realize our dreams, live up to our ideals, turn our resolutions into realities?

And so now the project is currently exploring how AI might help the project.

The project has resulted thus far in several websites, many books, an amazing number of advertisements for Pure Love, and many other larks that we hope, when taken together, bounce beyond larkdom and into Beauty, and thus into Truth = Beauty = Goodness = Justice < (but flowing off of and participating in) the Love that alone 100% IS.

Oh, we forgot to mention the Hurt. That lonely tear through the center was never supposed to be part of the project. But somehow it is. Not only that, but this project would never have happened without the Hurt and the hole it tore through everything, the gaping wound it left, the isolation it created, the misdirections its encouraged, the loneliness we’ve known.

Be that as it may!

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

What does it mean?
Curves, fertility, dripping
Caught, eyes, upward, half-smile
Words of nothing
disappear behind a rushed clatter

What does it mean?
Wishing for everything
when nothing’s possible

What does it mean?
To grow older in desire
without reaching the heart

What does it mean?
To need love
but to be only
brambles
lima beans
tattered bum rags
old straw on a pig’s sweaty butt
nothing that sticks
nothing that lands
nothing that holds
only a dandelion frond
floating on its cotton sail
it’s seed-tipped needle twisting this way and that
in an indifferent and unaware breeze