This is the Ah, money! footnote we removed from Diary of an Adamant Seducer.
We mean to tinker with it here.

*[Ah, money! The freedom to speak your mind without fear of reprisal is one thing. The freedom to pay to pummel everyone with your propaganda is not necessarily fundamental to freedom of speech.

Ah, money! If a large wealth gap harms civil community and democracy, we should consider redistributing more wealth from the top down. Attention should be paid to not de-incentivizing innovation and productive risk-taking; but allowing wealth to concentrate overmuch at the top can do exactly this: it can help the already-established use their influence to alter the rules of the game in their favor, and incline them towards resting on their laurels/super-yachts. Furthermore, the wealth generated within a system is to a large extent dependent upon the system itself. It is therefore both reasonable and just for the system to redistribute wealth if that redistribution is likely to help maintain the integrity of the system. This is not to say: tax all the money out of the rich, but was the US economy more sluggish, risk-adverse, lacking in innovation, or generally less productive in eras with comparatively low disparities between household net worths (in for example 1945-1975) than nowadays*??

We could implement a wealth tax and invest the money in green public works projects and incentives for investments in green energy and technology. That would reduce income disparity, create interesting and fulfilling jobs, and help us to jump into a more sustainable future.

*(In the United States of America:

In 1973, the real [adjusted for inflation] family income growth since 1947 was roughly equivalent in the 95th, median, and 20th percentiles. 2018, the 95th percentile’s real family income gain since 1947 was 180% the 1973 level; the median’s real family income was around around 130% of the 1973 level; and the 20% percentile’s real family income was around 20% of the 1973 level.

In 1913, the top 1% of household’s held 44% of the household wealth; the top .5% held 40% of the household wealth (that’s a total of 44% — not a total of 84%). By the mid-1920s, those numbers fell to about 36% (for the top 1%) and 28% (for the top .5%) of household wealth. But then the numbers rise steeply until 1929: 51% and 42%. Then there’s the stock market collapse and the share of wealth of the top 1 and .5% of households drops steadily and fairly precipitously until the end of the 1940s: 29% and 21%. And then the share of wealth of the top 1 and .5% of households continues to drop steadily but now pretty gradually until the end of the 1970s, when the top 1% of households owns 25% of the total household wealth, and the top .5% owns 18% of the total household wealth. And then the numbers head steadily upwards until by 2012, the top 1% owns 34% of the household wealth and the top .5% owns 41%.

See the graphs we estimated into the above sketches at:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality)

This graph shows the wealth distribution in the first quarter of 2023
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/
The top 10% of earners held 69% of the total household wealth; the top 1% held 31.3% of the total household wealth; the top .1% held 12.8% of the total household wealth. The bottom 50% held 2.4% of the total household wealth.]

roughly the size of a life

can’t stop the evil
don’t find the formula

pooped
out

Human freedom
myth?
all puppets on strings?

the nuance between
God is all and does all
and humans are free to chose as they will:
in that space between free and not-free
lies what?
free insofar as we are God,
insofar as our feeling, thinking, acting flows off of God shining through everything including each conscious moment
to that degree we are the first cause

but we’d wanted to stop the evil

Putin says Trump’s indictments are proof that US democracy is collapsing — that Biden is using the judiciary to go after political rivals. Putin says this to a room of world leaders and they applaud.
This is evil.
This is political evil.
I am scared.
Because much of the country and many in power are swinging merrily from the coattails of this kind of evil, are echoing it; are more than just letting it slide, are sliding down into the crime with it.

I am so scared.
And confused.

have no answer to this.
at a loss.

Copyright: AM Watson

please help.
The eagle falls
from dark from sharp from crags cut high above
the water moving greens blacks blues grays
The meadow it’s blowing in the wind above
the ocean down below
won’t you help?
can’t you?

Apologies to the scholars.
We’re going off memories and notions.

First and foremost:
I love you.

Now to a quick overview of Camus’s thought as reconstructed and guessed right here quick

In his essay for a new Mediterranean culture, Camus argued that it should defined by a respect for the limits of human existence. Not overstepping the bounds and pretending one has more knowledge or rights (particularly over others) than one finds within oneself.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argued that his time and place was caught on the notion that life was Absurd. He defined this sense of Absurdity as a conflict between to fundamental experiences: the sense that we need a meaning to life that we can understand; and the sense that we are not able to find that.

The question he asked was, if this is where we most fundamentally find ourselves (in an Absurd existence), should we kill ourselves? Or what?

The answer was: No. You can’t meaningfully address a problem by wishing it away. And killing yourself amounts to killing the question, not resolving it. Here he pointed out that you can’t make any progress except insofar as you stay where you are within yourself: Where do we find ourselves? In the Absurd? OK, then that’s where we are, and killing ourselves or pretending away one or both of the foundations of the Absurd sensibility (our need for a meaning to life that we understand and/or our failure to find that kind of meaning here and now) we look away from where we find ourselves in our conscious moment and thus have no hope for progress. We cannot progress without admitting where we are and working with that atom of consciousness, which in his case (and in the case of many of his readers) was that he needs to find a meaning to life that he understands and he is not finding one, and thus there’s a great frustration and alienation at the core of his conscious experience.

In the MoS, Camus then discusses the various way people dodge the Absurd. They make a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” into God; or they make an existential stand type “leap of faith” into somehow intellectually and/or emotionally creating meaning out of meaninglessness. In all cases, Camus argues that these thinkers (I think they were all from continental Europe and active in the 1800s and/or early 1900s) end up destroying the Absurd and thus dodge it rather than deal with it.

Camus resolves to not dodge the Absurd, and tries to draw the logical conclusions from staying there in that moment of a sense of fundamental frustration in one’s core longings and alienation in the world. He finds there three main truths of the Absurd condition:
Passion – One must remain passionately aware of the Absurd to keep it alive and remain present within it
Revolt – If one submits to the Absurd, then one destroys it; so to keep it alive, one must continue one’s revolt against it (against the Absurdity of life).
Freedom – In this passion and revolt, one is freed from hope and fear. Rather than living for hopes of some further (earthly or heavenly) perfection or fears of (earthly or heavenly) failure, one is free to fully enter one’s own conscious moment.

The essay concludes with “il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux” (“You have to imagine Sisyphus happy”). Sisyphus does have to roll a stone up a hill over and over again for eternity, but the good of the Absurd life is not better moments but more moments of lucid confrontation with one’s fundamental situation within one’s conscious moment, and Sisyphus gets to have moment after moment of rebellion against the Absurdity of his condition.

In Letters to a German Friend (written for the resistance journal Combat during Camus’s time in the French Resistance), Camus argues that the Germans were wrong to leap into violence, and the French were right to hold off on waging war, since violence is a last not a first resort; and now the French are at a material disadvantage due to this time spent wishing for and trying to maintain peace (they were, after all, occupied by Nazi Germany at this time); but they have the spiritual advantage of having waited until they understood that violence was absolutely necessary, and thus they are acting out of wisdom rather than folly. [this one I never read; I am going from scraps and summaries]

In The Rebel [also never read by me — at least not very far or very well], Camus says it is time to switch from the question of whether or not we should kill ourselves to the question of whether or not we have a right to kill others. The answer is No, because by embracing our individual lucidity of the Absurd, we have implicitly embraced the value that life matters; and why should it matter just for me?, if life matters, then surely it matters for others as well. Not only that, but every day we implicitly argue that life matters: we eat, we drink, we enjoy the sunshine on our faces.

However, sometimes violence seems necessary. A true rebel rebels not for his or her own sake, but for everyone’s sake. True rebellion recognizes that we all have the right to life and liberty and decent treatment, and says to oppression: “you have gone too far and need to be stopped”, and then works to free everyone from the oppression. The problem with revolution is that generally revolutions betray their own values because they forget that the reason for rebellion against oppression is to fight for a decent free life for all, and end up justifying terrible crimes in the name of grand theories and/or promises of future perfections (either in heaven, or — as in the case of communism and other philosophies of historical inevitability –, in some future earthly paradise that the revolution is creating, is building, will give rise to any day now).

An acceptable revolution would be one that remains true to its rebellion against lying to oneself and others — against pretending that the rebels have the Truth and/or they have special rights over others. But how to know if a revolution has remained true to its rebellion against lying to oneself? Well, we can at least say that the order created by such revolution should have no capital punishment and should promote and protect freedom of speech. Because, I guess, capital punishment says the state has the right to kill its citizens, and that oversteps our collective rights over one another; and if the whole point of rebellion is honesty to oneself and others, suppressing freedom of speech is a clear indication that your rebellion has turned into a new outfit for the same old oppressions.

Such is our recollection / guess of the gist of Camus’s thought.

What is divine love?

to be continued

Divine love
Where were we?
I want to speak with you
I want to hear about your day
And how you feel and felt
all through the day and other days and when you were younger and always

Divine love
where were we?
God is inscrutable
There’s no one to talk to
no, that wasn’t quite it
quit it

Divine love
where were we?

God is
And we go
And that’s so
we

Now
I remember exploding into infinite pieces
As a way to take a break from the hurt
And then you try to rebuild yourself better

Now
I’m wrong
what should I do?

Something Deeperism
never said
you should leave
the moment
where you want
a meaning to life that you understand
and don’t have one
but that
even deeper than that
there was a need for a Love
that won’t let anyone down
and the sense that that Love is there
calling to us all
caring for us all
and that for this life
it is enough
to wrap our thought and action
around that Love
and to ask always
to love better,
to better live the Love that could never let anyone down ever

All those windshields
you fly through
after so many years
of art
and now
time
skips itself

What is any good?
How can we forward
in this generation?

Turn the page

Copyright AMW

please God I think it’s time to burst this shell.
We’re sheltered long in lies all calcified.
Your Love shines bright both in and out this hell
of self we weave of hopes, fears, wounded prides.
Our hell’s a separation from You, our health.
Our hell’s a shell of self we fashion for
this mortal escapade. We need our selfs
to navigate our human lives. But sore
in heart, we seek to soar beyond all tales
told well or poor of self, no-self; of is,
is-not. We shan’t our shells shed. Yet we fail
not wearing, but believing shells. And with
a growing joy we gaze beyond belief
and disbelief, beyond the swords and sheaths.

Molting please
Sit up straight, shoulders back, head up, chest out
Let the Light in at the shoulders, chest, back, sides, waist, butt, everywhere
Let the Light flood in
and rest within the Light
Push out from within, turn inside out
The Light within must flow into the Light without
We must explode the beetle shell, the hard chitin armor:
that illusion pretending to separate the inner and outer Light.
That illusion that would co-opt the Light and fashion it into
“Me and Mine! Yummy Yummy Gobble Gobble!”

An inner motion. Turn the center-line inside out and explode outward.
All in one continuous moment of conscious action.

please

A lot of people are abused as young children but don’t remember.
Sometimes they never remember, sometimes they do but way later.
They don’t remember, but still their body and heart remember and the Hurt eats away at them.
This is a thing that happens — whether anyone wants to hear about it or not.

Either there’s a Love that chooses everyone and is enough for everyone with infinite Love left over AND we can connect with, relate to, and follow that Love; or there’s no hope for humans to ever be meaningful to themselves — no hope for humans to ever travel with their own feelings, thoughts, and actions to their own conclusions: no hope for humans to be coherent within themselves: no hope for humans to understand, believe in, or care about their own feeling/thinking/acting.

But we can’t relate to anything without relating our ideas and feelings to it. And ideas and feelings are limited, but Love can’t be limited if It is to explain to us that and in what way it is True (not a relative truth, but an Absolute Truth [as in: this is not just an opinion, best guess, and/or hope — this is what’s really going on]) to say “We are all in this together”. Therefore, we cannot relate our ideas and feelings to Love literally, 1:1, or definitively. And to the degree we confuse our ideas and feelings for the Truth, we turn away from the Truth (we worship false idols).

So we’re seeking not a literal description of Love that we then unpack. We’re seeking instead to organize our feeling and thinking around Love, and to poetically (pointing adequately towards; rather than literally define or describe) translating Love into our feeling/thinking/acting.

Growing in wisdom is improving the relationship between one’s feeling/thinking/acting and the Love that shares our conscious space with feeling/thinking/acting (the Love is supposed to be everywhere; so It should shine through each conscious moment).

Wisdom is thus an ongoing process, requiring constant effort. It requires self-observation, -critique, and -adjustment. And it requires poetry: we let all our preconceived notions fall away and open ourselves up to a moment of life — which is prior to our ideas and feelings about life; and then we sing again; and repeat.

How boring were all those existential stands, leaps of faith, nihilistic pouts, and romantic grabs!

I will wait here, God!, for you to tell me the Way gently, carefully, and clear as morning sunshine through an open window.

I will wait here, Love beyond being and nonbeing!, for you to flow through my feeling/thinking/acting and guide me on the path of insight into You — insight into that and in what way it is True to say “We are all in this together, bound in and through the Love that never lets anyone down ever”.

I will wait here without any meanness or greed towards myself or anyone.

I will wait here for the Love that only helps and never hurts.

…

Ah, but I can’t, can I?
Or at least I don’t, do I?

I’d be your humble servant, matchless Love.
But I amn’t, am I?

How now, brown cow?

The panic seizes me.
I was planning on having a glass of wine with a late lunch.
At the garden I smell the roses and enjoy the well-lit and fragrant green spiced with yellows, reds, purples, blues, in all hues, shadings, and musings.
The panic growing.
And soon drinking to simultaneously feed and relax the panic.

The panic is what?

There’s a vague longing that underlies all our specific longings.
The vague longing is vague, and so by definition can’t be satisfied by a specific answer.
Yet we constantly attach specific cravings to this underlying craving, in craven and doomed attempts to address it.
In this way we are pushed on and on through life, never satisfied.
If one’s an addict, the situation is even worse: we desperately fixate on a specific solution not just to the vague longing, but to all that ails us; every hurt we gather together in a tense panic, convincing ourselves that with one more drink we’ll make good our escape and … well, there things get kind of vague, since clarity and honesty is the enemy of addiction.

What would you have me do, God?

I wake up tense in the shoulders and all through.
I feel the panic all through.
I try to stand up straight and breath the Light in at all sides, and rest there, pushing out from within into the Light. I breath the Light out that It might explode through me and break me apart, that It might shatter my daydreams about real and not-real, that I might disappear into what is prior to I and not-I, that I might flow with the Love that is, I guess, the Light.

But where does it get me?

The hurt in my gut so deep and so painful.
A wound.
Feels like a wound deep inside.
Does not feel like brain chemistry.
Feels like I was hurt.

I recall no such hurt.
Still the hurt is my constant companion.
It was worse for me when I didn’t feel the hurt.
Then I was falling apart for reasons unknown.
Now I feel the hurt screaming from the pit of my gut out, chaotically swirling, instigating mayhem through my conscious space. I feel the hurt tensing my shoulders forward and down, curling my gut and sex around, rolling me into a little ball.
So then I try to straight out.
I try to stand up straight within myself and uncoil the hurting strands, to let them bleed free and clean out and let the Love explode through them.
But what happens?
I don’t know.
I keep stumbling.

A wisdom meme is needed.

Something short and sweet that could help me live for real.

What is it?

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

from Til I Whisper you Something by Sinead O’Connor.

Something like that.

We stand up straight within ourselves.
We let the Love pour in and let the Love explode out.
We have compassionate love for, and joyful delight in, ourselves and everyone.
We keep working to grow in, through, and for the Love that chooses us all.

I don’t know if that’s an improvement.
Maybe it’s a contemplation of her meme.

Stand up straight within yourself.
Let Love flood you and explode you.
Accept how the Love loves you and everyone.
Keep turning yourself inside out, opening up to the Love.
Let the Love guide you to gentle kind resolve for yourself and everyone.

Hmmm.

Stand up straight within yourself.
Let the Love beyond all being and nonbeing flood you and explode you.
Accept how the Love loves you and everyone.
Go with the Love to where It leads.
Start over and over.
Try and try again.

Hmmm.

… and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He [Jesus] said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. Love God above all else. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

A dual motion inward to the Love and outward in the recognition that the Love is in everyone, binding us all forever.

Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.

…

[https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation]

The practice that leads to the other shore is prajñāpāramitā: insight into the emptiness of all phenomena.
The Bodhisattva (awakening being) stands in emptiness.
This is known as the Prajñāpāramitā of the bodhisattvas;
not grasping at form, not grasping at sensation, perception, volitions and cognition.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita#Themes_in_Prajñāpāramitā_sutras]

Beyond being and nonbeing lies a Love beyond being and nonbeing.
Why?
How?
What is Love?

The wise rest on the impermanence and interdependence of all phenomena.
The wise rest on the Love beyond being and nonbeing that explodes through, dissolves, and ultimately is all phenomena?

The Love is not impermanent, nor is It interdependent on everything else.
The Love is what really is.
It is not a separate self-entity.
It is an infinite explosion of kind joy, of delight in creation, sharing, giving, exploring.
Love is prior to being and nonbeing, but It loves playing at being and nonbeing.
And that play is Reality as viewed from the perspective of impermanence and interdependence.
But that play is also Reality as viewed from the perspective of Love as Love: an infinite explosion of kind joy prior to being and nonbeing.
Is that how it is?

How to perceive things as they really are?
We can’t perceive them — they are beyond observer and object.
We can only awaredly flow with them like water droplets noticing themselves dissolved into the river, noticing themselves as the river, noticing themselves as neither being and nonbeing and thus noticing themselves as what?
But that’s prior to concepts.
We cannot reason and/or feel our way there.
We have to open up and let all our daydreams dissolve.

Hmmm

Meanwhile the cut saws through your gut.
Meanwhile the hatchet hacks at your belly.
Meanwhile your shoulders are always tense.
Meanwhile a twisted sickness and broken-hearted sorrow fills you.
Meanwhile your broken inside and can’t find a way to be yourself, particularly where you’d take your stand as man, take some woman by the hand, leave this lonely land for one you share with one you love.

Meanwhile

What now?

Pull the hurt out?
Barf the hurt out?
Spit the hurt out?
Intoxicate yourself beyond the hurt?
Talk the hurt out?
Confess the hurt out?

What?

What can be done but the let the hurt bleed?
Let the wound tell the truth about itself.
Let it bleed and return to the practice.
Over and over again, you stand up straight within yourself, breath in, let the Love in, rest on the Love, let the Love flow out. The Love is everything inside and everything outside. Let the Love win. Let gentle kindness and shared joy win. Let Love rule. How does Love rule? Love rules by doing nothing except being Itself. And the rest of a conscious moment follows not because it’s commanded to, but because it loves to, loves to flow along with the Love that only loves, that does not pull-towards or push-away, but that only Loves like Light only shines.

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

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.
(5) 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.
(6) And to the degree we confuse our ideas and feelings for the Truth, we turn away from R = L.

(6) Wisdom is the meaningful — though not literal, perfect, or definitive — relationship between all aspects of a human conscious moment: feelings, ideas, etc (all the animal aspects of a conscious moment), and Reality = Love (which shines through everything, including each conscious moment).

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

(8) To grow in wisdom we must get better and better at
(a) organizing the rest of our conscious moment (feelings, ideas, etc) 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.

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

(10) 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 might be going on, but what is Really going on.)

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

An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism

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.

(1) we have certain inborn, indelible rules for feeling/thinking/acting.
(2) And we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we follow those rules.
(3) And those rules require (a) accurate insight into a Reality infinitely beyond our feelings and ideas; and (b) accurate insight into that and in what way Reality is most fundamentally a Love that chooses everyone and will bring us all safely home (something like Reality = Love).

Explanation:

(1) We have universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, kind, joyfully-sharing/-together), and fundamental questions (what is really going on?, what is truly preferable?, and what to do with our love and where to seek love?).

(2) To the degree we don’t abide by the universal values and/or don’t adequately address the fundamental questions; we cannot believe in, understand, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting. Why? I don’t know. We’re just made that way. But try to have any faith or interest in your own ideas if they are muddled, dishonest, selfish, etc; you can’t. Or try to suppose you aren’t deep inside working to figure out what’s going on; you know you are lying to yourself and lose interest and traction in your own suppositions.

(3a) And these values and questions are not requesting relative insight, but Absolute insight. Again, this is just how human beings are.

Deep inside we cannot help but seek and even to some degree believe we are finding insight into (for example) what is really going on — not what we maybe suppose is going on; or would like to have be going on; or, accepting xyz unprovable assumptions, can scientifically verify is going on.

We can therefore make sense to ourselves only to the degree that we discover that and in what way the Absolute motivates, ratifies/justifies, and explicates the universal values and fundamental questions.

To understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting, we need the Absolute to help us abide by the universal values and address the fundamental questions. To the degree we lack this Absolute assistance, we slip and slide in nihilisms (“as far as I can tell all decision are choose-able!”) and romanticisms (“through faith I force my concept of ‘God’ [or ‘No-God’; ‘science’; ‘existential stand’, or etc] to be a firm foundation for choosing one decision over another!”).

[Note that these nihilisms and romanticisms are rarely explicitly stated. If they were, we’d see through them. Instead, we imagine our faith is of “God”, or we can somehow reason beyond faith (as if reason had a reason for faith in itself!), or etc. maneuvers in the self-imposed dark.]

(3b) But if we cannot discover a Reality that is infinitely loving, with enough kind joy for all with infinite left over; we cannot believe in, understand, or care about our own feeling, thinking and acting. And if the Absolute is not such a Reality, we cannot relate meaningfully to It. Why are we so sensitive? So needy? I don’t know. But there’s no point pretending to be what we’re not.

We can therefore only make sense to ourselves to the degree that we discover that and in what way the Absolute is something like a Reality = Love. To this degree, this Love can motivate, ratify/justify, and explicate the universal values, the fundamental questions, the standard spiritual practices, and (most fundamentally) our searing inner need for a Love that chooses everyone and that is infinitely more than enough for everyone.

We need to relate meaningfully to Reality = Love to abide by our own rules for coherently choosing one thought-direction over another.

Also following from our need to connect with a Love that chooses everyone:

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.

[Also, 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 very much of what we think we know, and it’s impossible to say where the influence of others, and the assumption they are like us, begins and ends within our own understandings.]

B. 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 doesn’t prove that they Reality = Love exists, or that we can relate meaningfully to It. It only demonstrates that we 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).

C. 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.

Over and over again we ground ourselves in the Love prior to our ideas and feelings, and try again to listen with every strand of our feeling/thinking/acting to the Love that alone Knows that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together.”

We become more meaningful to ourselves by allowing the Reality = Love shining through everything to explain Itself to the rest of our conscious moments, and to thus provide 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 they don’t tell us any more than sticks and stones that we feelingly move about while creating a little bridge in the creek while we’re young and easygoing.

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 a proof, but a project, a way of life, the way to life overflowing.

The wise, it is said, rest on impermanence and interconnectedness as seagulls rest upon the ocean breeze.
God, it is said, is Love and loves us all.

We like to play a game.
It is called wonder-wide.
How can it be that Thich Nhat Hanh finds no individual self-entity anywhere, including no personal God, but instead defines God as the capacity for infinite compassion within us all; while Julian of Norwich knows God personally, finds that God is everywhere, and hears God tell her that God loves her and everyone infinitely, that God delights in us, is pleased with us, is working with us to make all well, and assures us that at the deepest level, all is already well?

We like to play a game.
It is called cool-it.
Every time we find ourselves angry with ourselves or another, we imagine the infinite strands of feeling/thinking/acting creating their moment and our moment unravelling. We picture the Love exploding through them and us and everything. We breathe slow and careful and ask ourselves, “what’s so funny? what’s the giggly joke that saves us all, that loves us all, that is us all?”

We like to play a game.
It is called an experiential proof of Something Deeperism.
We open up, turn ourselves inside out, push out from within, and let Love in.

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

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 yourself of the Joy at Life that is your true home.
Instead of resting on and growing in Love, we cut your mind and heart on shards of pointless cruelty.
If we do not catch your 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 hurt 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.

Abiding by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully-sharing); prioritizing the fundamental questions (what is really going?, what really matters?, where to give and seek love?); and practicing the standard spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, study and contemplation, fellowship, acts of service, practicing humility, selflessness, loving kindness, and sharing joy) protects us from confusing ourselves and losing sight of the Love shining in and through and for all things.

When we allow ourselves to relate to anyone (ourselves or others) with anything but the careful compassion that knows and grows Kind Joy, we sin first against ourselves, and then against our neighbor.

The wise rest on impermanence and interdependence like seagulls float on the winds over the waters.

The wise rest on and are exploded through by the Love shining through, overtaking, and ultimately being everything and nothing — the Love beyond self and other, beyond being and nonbeing, beyond true and false, beyond all our conceptualizations.

Wisdom is to be torn asunder by the joy of the emptiness.
Emptied of our misplaced faith in the Reality of our own feelings and ideas, we are free to leave our narrow confines and know Love.

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.
Let Love overflowing giggle over and guide us all together to what is best for everyone.
We relax our shoulders and 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, explanations, or paeans of it.

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

Thanks to Thich Nhat Hanh for the insight that the wise rest on impermanence and interdependence.
And for his explanations of impermanence, interdependence, and emptiness (see Wisdom Meme Notes a couple posts back)

Crises of manhood.
Perhaps they go up as the income gap widens.
We’ve now reached the top-heavy arrangements that precipitated the Civil War and the Great Depression.
In both cases we didn’t really vote ourselves out of the crisis.
The crisis happened; the money from the top collapsed; and we started again.
Although at least with FDR and the New Deal and financing WWII, the highest incomes were taxed at very high rates, and much money was spent on public works, the social safety net, and a war to end all wars and fire up the economy.
I was always “wow! yeah, he’s right!” about Tony Judt’s statement about how it didn’t occur to those who thought that capitalism had to bring about violent revolution that the industrialized West might vote itself the income redistribution necessary for a healthy polity. And I still think it is a good point, but in that case, first the stock market crashed and the top and the wealth collapsed.

(?Is this the case? And the New Deal and its public works apparently didn’t go far enough to really get the engine humming again. What really did the trick was a terrible war fought far from the homeland. ?Is this the case?)

[Look at this Top Tax Brackets in the US, starting 1913 Starts very low, gets up to 73% by the end of WWI. Then starts dropping in 1922 and by 1925 it is 25%. The stock market collapses on October 28, 1929. FDR is elected 1932; in the same year the top tax bracket goes up to 63%. It goes up, especially with WWII and is 94% in 1944. 1945-63 it is 91%. 1964 it’s 77%. 1965-81 it is 70%. These are mostly boom years. What does that say about the idea that taxing the wealthy hurts business? 1982 to 1986 with Reagan at the helm, we’re still at 50%. 1987, the end of his tenure, and we’re at 38.5%, and we’ve hovered around there ever since. Right now we’re at 37%.

There’s a chart here A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequalities titled Income Gains Widely Shared in Early Postwar Decades — But Not Since Then. At the end of the 70s, the 95th, median, and 20th percentiles start to diverge a little. And then you see the bottom two categories trending slowly upward while the top category heads to the skies. So that by 2018 real family income (as a percentage of the 1973 level) is like this: The 95th percentile is making 180% of what the median household made in 1973 (a year when all three real family income levels [how much people have to actually spend] were just about equal); the median is a little over a 100%, and the bottom 20% is a little below 100%.

Is it not ironic that the collective nostalgia fueling “Make America Great Again” rests upon a time when everyone’s real family income was pretty much the same? It wasn’t racism that was nice about that time. It was having a regular job and being able to raise a family with it. And feeling safe. (The gun laws, as it happens, were much more restrictive way back when as well.) And having a functioning democracy that didn’t make you feel like every election was a battle of us versus them, where democracy itself hung in the balance.

In fact, the trouble with that time was racial inequality and the awful gash it tears through we who would be We the People. A nation finds its way forward as a nation. That means we listen to each other, we think together, we compromise, we seek together a newer world.

I would argue against raising the top income bracket, and instead implement a wealth tax and public spending with good jobs, training programs and other incentives to jump into the green energy future, and other redistributions focused on working together over handing-over money. Until we can get things to a healthier. Like maybe the top 95% is at 150% of the 1973 real home income; the median at 145%; the bottom 20% at 140%. I don’t. Something like that. With a wealth tax, you don’t have to worry so much about undermining people who maybe only have the occasional good year, or cannot perform their profession for a long time.

I don’t see why we can’t set policies with the explicit aim of both having a healthy economy and a healthy distribution of incomes. It is not true that the wealthy deserve the money they earn. No one deserves anything. And everyone owes some difficult-to-measure, but significant portion of their success to the system wherein they live and work. We should incentive industry and creative solutions to problems. But not at the cost of allowing economic power to entrench itself the way power always does.

The powers that arise within a nation state are always to some degree owing to the structures and organizations of that nation state. And all powers should be limited, otherwise powers game the system and instead of the wisest ideas winning out, those ideas that further entrench entrenched power win out. That is the way downward.]

Crises of manhood.
When I was a boy, he was a young man.
He said he couldn’t believe the union workers at the UAW.
Going on strike when they already made more than teachers in town.
With one guy who was only allowed to push a broom and when he found nothing to push, he sat around.
And they got more vacation than he could ever imagine getting.
And so on.
Many years later he worked in a right-to-work state as a middle-manager.
And he said, those guys at the top, they would send kids back into the mines if they could.
They’d tell themselves and everyone that it was best for the company and thus best for everyone.
So he saw that people just ain’t no good.
They bend everything to their advantage and never think they’ve got enough, never notice unfairnesses that benefit their little families and other ego-trips, but cannot take their eyes off perceived unfairnesses against their daydream lives.
And that was also the time that cell phones were just coming on, and he said, the first ones to have cell phones are the shop guys, and they are on them all day arranging which bar they’ll meet up at when their shift ends at 3pm.
And he said, men need to work. Otherwise they squirrel their lives away.
And he said, young men are dangerous. Society should find them good jobs and wives for their own sake and for the sake of society. Otherwise young men spin their wheels, make trouble, and spread their chaotic misery all over town.
And he said these things.
And they had some truth to them.
And we would every year take one long van ride to visit one set of grandparents in their mountain paradise, and a magically shorter plane ride to visit the other set of grandparents in their seaside resort.
And we were lucky and happy.
And also there at the place where he came face to face with upper management and went away with a worry in his belly, when we first arrived, there was a young shop guy with a young wife and two young women. And we helped them move a little ways across town to a little cheaper place. And years later he said he’d lent that guy money. He’d been so convincing. And there was the family to think of. But that guy never paid him back and he kept bumming money and moving his family to cheaper and flimsier places. And it was because while he did have his family to think of, he also had to keep buying drugs.
And so we learned that before you lend someone money, you should pause and think, maybe find out a little more of the situation, especially if you’re new to town.

And he said men are fools. We need to give them tasks to do even if those tasks don’t matter. Because men need to work and use that money to care for their families. That way they feel useful and are at least kind of right.

Then once there was a guy we knew who lost his job and couldn’t find a job; and I said something revealing indifference to this man’s plight. And so he looks at me, his face now beginning to show the wear and tear and lines of age and accumulation of chance or Fate, across the dining table. He said, “You have no idea what that does to a man.” And I was quiet. Because I saw that I didn’t have any idea about such things.

And so it went through the years.

A man needs to please his wife in the bedroom.
And go to work and provide for his family so they can have all the things that his time and place thinks a family is supposed to get.
Then he feels he’s doing a good job and deserves the love and respect he craves and maybe even gets.

Wise men rest on impermanence and interconnectedness like birds rest on the air. They enjoy the tranquil Beauty of impermanence and interconnectedness like a dolphin enjoys leaping out the water, arching through the strangely pressure-free and pricklingly emptiness of that strange world above the shifting lid of their homeland.

A man ain’t noth’in but a man.
He should let it go.
All those dreams of strength and power never meant anything compared to the early morning light when you stand on the dusty stony earth and smell the sage meld its essence to the dry Western air.

The more corrupt a state, the more people have to choose between success and decency. And success includes looking after your family, which is often considered a fundamental decency. This is why anti-corruption laws are important. A good place is one where you can thrive while helping others. A bad place is one where you have to cheat and lie and steal to get your children clean water and decent food.

A man is not what he thinks he is.
When he dies, the powers and pleasures that he believes belong to him evaporate and are no more.
When he dies he is left only with the Love that he learned to live.
For now he should be kind and gentle and think carefully before speaking and acting.
Time will carry him into the abyss soon enough.
Let him prepare by living here and now beyond life and death, beyond being and nonbeing, in the flow.

Viewed as permanence, emptiness unfolds into an infinite world beyond being and nonbeing, an infinite Love. Viewed as impermanence, emptiness unfolds into infinite worlds of impermanent interconnected shapes, motions, and notions.

A man should listen first, consider, and then speak.
A man should find a way to support his life that is helpful to others and healthy for his own person.
He should seek synergy and win-wins in his interactions with others.
He should play the game right.

Anyway,
we’ll go now
up into the pines
the mountains that circle our town
we’ll watch the river frolic within its bounds
and smell the air so dry and sure

Nothing like gender, race, creed, ethnicity, religion, nation, politics, nor even one’s personality: nothing like that is Real. We wear them for a time.
The clothes are helpful to the degree we use them to live the Love that chooses everyone.
That is all.
From dust to dust, but this abides:
Spiritual Love, the kind of spacious kind delight joyous and solemnly compassionate laughter with which all is OK, and without which, nothing’s quite right.

Author: AW/BW
Editor: AW/BW
Copyright: AM Watson (of the Sandspring Watsons, though the town forgets our barbershop, platform shoe and limp, spittoons in every corner, illegal blackjack with whisky in the backroom, and love of theological and political debate, hard-shelled in our faith, predestined to do alright hanging on to the curving edge of this dusty, well-lit but pleasantly and aromatically shaded spot)