Dear God, I am lonely and depressed.

Dear Person, I am also lonely and depressed.

But you are God, you are the cup running over — you are enough for yourself.

I know, but I’m still lonely. I find it lonely being the only free cause that ever was and ever will be. I created sentient beings so I could know somebody, but they’re not of my scale. There’s nobody I can talk to like an equal. You know, like a wife or really good friend, or somebody like that.

Well, huh, I thought the way prayer worked was that I asked you to help me live better and find a better way and then you did. I didn’t think you’d pray back at me.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! That’s what I need. Somebody who can hear what’s deep in me and be my friend, and not imagine I’m a god.

But you’re God!

Yes, I’m God, not a god. I’m everything and nothing. I’m the Light that creates, sustains, shines through, and compassionates everything. I’m not an immortal person with super-compassion and power over the elements. I’m God. I am everything and nothing. And it is lonely to be the only one.

I’m sorry, God, but that doesn’t fit into my theology. Obviously I don’t think you’re like some super wise powerful old man with a beard and wearing white robes that radiate celestial light. I think you’re everything and nothing, the fire burning down everything, the wheel within the clay, the Reality that Is and Knows the Way. So you can’t be lonely, like a person might be. It just doesn’t make sense. Do you think you could reconsider your situation and tell me that you are not lonely after all?

No, I don’t think so. Can we still be friends? Can we still pray together?

Oh, sure. Definitely. Hey, look, um, could you grant me a few wishes? There’s a few things that I …

I don’t want to be your genie, mortal! See! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Is there no one who will just be my goddamn friend?

Project: Biblical figures as poems
Start with John the Baptist
Gather relevant scriptures
For Jesus and his times, I think I’ll prefer Mark, since that’s generally considered to be the oldest of the Gospels.
I guess writings attributed to Paul are older, so where applicable they should be used too.
And figure out a good structure for each poem, for starters we’ll base them on poems by Yeats.

Mark 1 (Young’s Literal Translation)
1 A beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.
2 As it hath been written in the prophets, `Lo, I send My messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee,’ —
3 `A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, straight make ye his paths,’ —
4 John came baptizing in the wilderness, and proclaiming a baptism of reformation — to remission of sins,
5 and there were going forth to him all the region of Judea, and they of Jerusalem, and they were all baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
6 And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and a girdle of skin around his loins, and eating locusts and honey of the field,
7 and he proclaimed, saying, `He doth come — who is mightier than I — after me, of whom I am not worthy — having stooped down — to loose the latchet of his sandals;
8 I indeed did baptize you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’
9 And it came to pass in those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John at the Jordan;
10 and immediately coming up from the water, he saw the heavens dividing, and the Spirit as a dove coming down upon him;
11 and a voice came out of the heavens, `Thou art My Son — the Beloved, in whom I did delight.’
12 And immediately doth the Spirit put him forth to the wilderness,
13 and he was there in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by the Adversary, and he was with the beasts, and the messengers were ministering to him.
14 And after the delivering up of John [ie: after John was sent to prison], Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of the reign of God,
15 and saying — `Fulfilled hath been the time, and the reign of God hath come nigh, reform ye, and believe in the good news.’
16 And, walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon, and Andrew his brother, casting a drag into the sea, for they were fishers,
17 and Jesus said to them, `Come ye after me, and I shall make you to become fishers of men;’

Mark 6 (Young’s literal translation)
And having gone forth they were preaching that [men] might reform,
13 and many demons they were casting out, and they were anointing with oil many infirm, and they were healing [them].
14 And the king Herod heard, (for his name became public,) and he said — `John the Baptist out of the dead was raised, and because of this the mighty powers are working in him.’
15 Others said — `It is Elijah,’ and others said — `It is a prophet, or as one of the prophets.’
16 And Herod having heard, said — `He whom I did behead — John — this is he; he was raised out of the dead.’
17 For Herod himself, having sent forth, did lay hold on John, and bound him in the prison, because of Herodias the wife of Philip his brother, because he married her,
18 for John said to Herod — `It is not lawful to thee to have the wife of thy brother;’
19 and Herodias was having a quarrel with him, and was willing to kill him, and was not able,
20 for Herod was fearing John, knowing him a man righteous and holy, and was keeping watch over him, and having heard him, was doing many things, and hearing him gladly.
21 And a seasonable day having come, when Herod on his birthday was making a supper to his great men, and to the chiefs of thousands, and to the first men of Galilee,
22 and the daughter of that Herodias having come in, and having danced, and having pleased Herod and those reclining (at meat) with him, the king said to the damsel, `Ask of me whatever thou wilt, and I will give to thee,’
23 and he sware to her — `Whatever thou mayest ask me, I will give to thee — unto the half of my kingdom.’
24 And she, having gone forth, said to her mother, `What shall I ask for myself?’ and she said, `The head of John the Baptist;’
25 and having come in immediately with haste unto the king, she asked, saying, `I will that thou mayest give me presently, upon a plate, the head of John the Baptist.’
26 And the king — made very sorrowful — because of the oaths and of those reclining (at meat) with him, would not put her away,
27 and immediately the king having sent a guardsman, did command his head to be brought,
28 and he having gone, beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head upon a plate, and did give it to the damsel, and the damsel did give it to her mother;
29 and having heard, his disciples came and took up his corpse, and laid it in the tomb.
30 And the apostles are gathered together unto Jesus, and they told him all, and how many things they did, and how many things they taught,
31 and he said to them, `Come ye yourselves apart to a desert place, and rest a little,’ for those coming and those going were many, and not even to eat had they opportunity,
32 and they went away to a desert place, in the boat, by themselves.
33 And the multitudes saw them going away, and many recognised him, and by land from all the cities they ran thither, and went before them, and came together to him,
34 and having come forth, Jesus saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion on them, that they were as sheep not having a shepherd, and he began to teach many things.

Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews Book 18, Ch 5, 2

Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s [Antipas’s] army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, (for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise,) thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of this army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God’s displeasure to him.

Under this passage, Wikipedia has the following commentary:

According to this passage, the execution of John was blamed for the defeat Herod suffered. Some have claimed that this passage indicates that John died near the time of the destruction of Herod’s army in AD 36. However, in a different passage, Josephus states that the end of Herod’s marriage with Aretas’ daughter (after which John was killed) was only the beginning of hostilities between Herod and Aretas, which later escalated into the battle.[91]

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan differentiates between Josephus’s account of John and Jesus, saying, “John had a monopoly, but Jesus had a franchise.” To get baptized, Crossan writes, a person went only to John; to stop the movement one only needed to stop John (therefore his movement ended with his death). Jesus invited all to come and see how he and his companions had already accepted the government of God, entered it and were living it. Such a communal praxis was not just for himself, but could survive without him, unlike John’s movement.

The Stolen Child
From The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
Yeats in 1886 (age 21)

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

Three stanzas: John a voice in the wilderness; John and Jesus; John’s death

oh he’ll never pull it off
no way he’ll ever make it
he’s too much dogmatist
you can’t be a real poet
if you care more for
the answers
than the journey

whatever!
leave him be!
as if you had it all figured out
the shape of art
and the mirroring of Truth!

Song of the Ambitious Seeker

I will about to harken, to hark the raven’s call.
I must attend the morning, as mists swirl at the door;
I’ll make a promise clear, as solemn as the Fall
to walk the dawning, as the sunlights pour.

I will accept the cawing, the rustles and the flaps
I’ll hold a while still, just as some creature would
who kept no hidden thought, and traveled without map,
who gave no truth, but answered as it should.

no never mind my promise. I made it on mistake.
I thought there’d be an answer, a reason in the wild.
I thought I’d turn a seer — all through the veil to break.
But ravens only follow, follow meek and mild.

[But here your song it falters
it clatters and it breaks.
For wisdom only follows,
only follows tame and sweet
the fire in the hollows
where love and patience meet.]

Results: Too dogmatic! This guy is a rampant, an incorrigible dogmatist!

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

What did we do?
We used the structure of a Year’s poem to spitball a poem into being.
See the Yeat’s poem below.

WB Yeat’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Fist Stanza
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Form
u u u s u s u, u s u s u s
13 syllables – first three unstressed, then four s/u, then comma and then 6 u/s
u u u s u s u, u s u s u s;
13 syllables – first two unstressed, then two stressed, then u/s/u, then comma and then 6 u/s
u u u s u s u, u s u u s u s,
14 syllables – first three unstressed, then four s/u, then comma, then u/s for seven, except there’s a uu in the middle so it can still end on an s like the previous lines
u s u s u u s u s
nine syllables u/s, except a uu in the middle so it can still end on an s

huh

For the first three lines:
Each line trips lightly up to start of the alternating rhythm (for three beats), and then the comma in center of the line gives a solid rhythm even as two unstressed syllables create a little depression in the flow. But then the second half of each line keeps a pretty solid alternating rhythm and ends on a stressed rhyme. The wave starts slow and then builds at a consistent 45 degree angle for a while and then heads down at the same angle and ends abruptly

Song of the Ambitious Seeker

I will about to harken, to hark the raven’s call.
I must attend the morning, the misting at the door;
and make a promise clear, as solemn as the Fall
to walk in mists in which the sunlights pour.

I will accept the cawing, the rustles and the flaps
I’ll hold a while still, just as some creature would
who held no hidden thought, and traveled without map,
who told no truth, but answered as it should.

no never mind my promise. I made it in mistake.
I thought there’d be an answer, a reason in the wild.
I thought I’d turn a seer — all through the veil to break.
But ravens only follow, follow meek and mild.

[But here your song it falters
it clatters and it breaks
For wisdom only follows,
only follows tame and weak
the fire in the hollows
where love and patience speak.]

What we’ve been experimenting with here — well, it’s not your parents spirituality, and it’s not your grandparents spirituality, and so on, back and back, but it may well be your great*200-parent’s spirituality.

How? First and foremost we keep it real chill, real real cool.

How? So we’re like ice cold or maybe a little smooshy popsicle-ten-minutes-out-the-freezer cold; and then we just let loose.

I would call it, “Bend, don’t break sanity.”

I would call it, “Nouveau shamanism.”

I would call it, “Just let it out, man!”

The way it works? All day long you’re chatting with God, you’re chatting with people not there, you’re chatting with the heavens, every little twist and turn you drop into your gut and, say, “is this the way?”, “is she the one?”, “do I do X or Y today?” And then your gut replies, but in a way that unfurls through all of you so you end up with a “Yes” or “No”. And, yeah, you can fudge it, and yeah, you probably fudge it a lot, and yeah, that’s a flaw, but you don’t care, you just keep trying, just keep trying to throw your shoulders back, let go, and listen to your gut.

[I think before you ask your gut anything, you should stand up straight within yourself, push out from within and let the Light flow in and out like breathe!]

How does it work? I’ve seen mixed results in my own practice.

What’s the spiritual basis? Um, pretty shaky, pretty iffy, pretty weak. What you should be doing is meditating and praying for gentle loving kindness and the clarity to do what’s best for everyone. But instead you’re reading deer livers, tea leaves, gorilla knuckles, goat shit, and so on. Yup, you’ve thrown of millennia of spiritual thought and are right back at the most desperate, disjointed, and sprawling shamanism.

Why do we behave this way? How do we justify our actions? It’s because we suppose that there is a spiritual Reality, and people can interact meaningfully to It — just not in a literal/definitive/1:1 way. So then we keep trying to interact meaningfully with the Light by shining it from our bellies out through our whole conscious space and in that spiritual supernova we take our stand and listen for the rhythm. Well, that’s what we mean to do, but then we just keep needing to know if such and such girl will take our hand and keep us safe, or if such and so job will keep us cuddled in the bosom of usefulness with security, or what have you: We can’t take the pressure or the loneliness of careful, non-literal spiritual effort: We have to have answers! We need to hear we’re safe, loved, thriving! We need answers!!

Oh my God, we need answers! And Something Deeperism is so vague. And we want to hear about how we fit in. And Something Deeperism is so outward-focused, so unworried about guaranteeing our cuddly safe little home.

We can’t take opening the doors and standing naked in front of God. God loves everyone and wants what’s best for everyone, but what God thinks is a great life is not the same as what we think a great life is. God doesn’t think it’s a huge deal whether or not you find someone who rubs all your longings in all the right ways. God doesn’t think it’s a huge deal whether or not you get to spend mornings in a coffee shop writing stories and bobbing along to great moments in indie history. God thinks a great life is one spent loving everyone unconditionally, and each moment drawing the logical conclusions from this love. That’s so lonely; that’s so scary; I am so scared. I need to be held; I need to be safe; I need to be kept from harm; I need a nice apartment close to a lot of trains.

Dear God,

Please forgive me my desperate grabs at literal certainties about who I am, where I belong, who should hold my private parts, how I’ll be both successful and fulfilled, how I’ll be both happy and decent, how I’ll be.

Something Deeperism is difficult. I know I should ground it in some kind of coherent spiritual path, but I’m so lonely for so long. It wears me through like a lathe hollowing out a poor old hunk of last season’s oak. I just want someone to tell me we’re safe; and I can only believe that kind of talk from beautiful women, and then not just any beautiful woman, they also have to catch all these other hope-threads just so, and idunno, I really don’t, I just

Listen, God: Please do shape me to your divine purpose. No, but for real!: please do. I’m just afraid that it won’t feel right; or that I’ll end up deluding myself about what your divine purpose is and end up unfulfilled, unhappy, and not even wise or spiritually awake or anything, but instead just delusional about the Path.

Fuck, God: Where are you in all this? We chat all day long, but unbiased observers are convinced that I’m actually talking to myself all day long, and I can see their point — I really can, because You don’t challenge me all that much; I never leave my neighborhood or break out of my routine; I don’t spend much of myself on helping others; and when the going gets rough, I abandon my Something Deeperism and don’t even do a little casual spiritual centering / organizing my feeling/thinking/acting around the Light shining through all things.

Oh, man, how can I make progress in this life, God? Huh? In a way that I can stand; in a way I can sustain; in a way that doesn’t scare me off or make me shake apart like a plane flying too fast?

We need a doable spiritual path for me. What does that look like? Could you just give me a hint? A sign, maybe?

What is the sacred bond his words have broken?
What meant that thread of amity now snapped?
Now what?
You cannot unsay what’s been spoken.
You can’t go forward after having unwrapped
The casing that keeps the heart living.
He’d not seen how much he’d been given
And guessed he needed more
Than a shared smile.
But what’s worth more
Than a shared smile?
And what breaks more
Than breaking one?
Now what?

Short Version

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that there is a Truth and people can relate meaningfully to It — just not in a literal way.

A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager: that the most fundamental aspect of life is a Love that chooses everyone, and we can relate to meaningfully to that Love.

The Something Deeperist wagers that Love is Real and Love can help us to feel/think/act more and more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing — growing ever deeper and wider in a whole-being insight (ideas and feelings interacting meaningfully &mash; though of course not literally/1:1/definitively — with each other and with the Light shining through the center of our conscious space) into that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”.

Magical thinking is when, for example, you are lonely and wishing that some particular person would be your person, and then you see a heart drawn somewhere and take it as evidence that you and that person are meant to be together forever and you’ll never have to be lonely every again.

But what about when you keep being overwhelmed by the sense that someone is the one for you? What if it just keeps blaring through you that s/he “is the one” — sometimes in words that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in feelings that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in combinations thereof? Is that just magical thinking, or might it have an appreciable spiritual component? Or, even if it doesn’t have a spiritual element, could it at least count as insight into your feelings for someone?

And is magical thinking always completely cut-off from spiritual Reality? Is it not conceivable that What Is might sometimes give us signs to help point us in the right direction?

A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager, but is also wary of the fundamental spiritual error: pretending one’s ideas and feelings about Reality are identical with Reality — and/or pretending Reality ratifies your notions about and wishes for reality.

Both pretending that we don’t need Truth and pretending that we can have literal Truth are distortions that cause one to lose sight of the fundamental task of relating poetically with the Truth. That is the core of Something Deeperism: growing one’s relationship with the Truth in the only way possible for humans: poetically (not literally accurate, precise, and certain; but still adequately accurate, precise, and certain for whatever task is at hand).

The Something Deeperist works poetically with Pure Love like the poet works poetically with whatever she’s painting. A poet points towards a moment in the woods or a lover’s embrace or etc, and the reader uses empathy and the fundamental sameness of all human beings to feelingly recreate the poet’s experience and sense-of-things. The Something Deeperist organizes her feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love shining through everything (and thus each conscious moment) and poetically (not with literal precision, accuracy, or certainty; but still with adequate precision, accuracy, and certainty for the task at hand) relates to and interprets that Pure Love in her feeling, thinking, and acting.

Something Deeperism is an open-ended task. Every moment we drop our current sense of Reality and start over. We don’t forget our previous ideas and feelings and how well they did or didn’t seem to relate to Reality; we just let go of our certainty of them and open up again for the Pure Love that must shine through everyone if this life is to be meaningful/tolerable to any of us. [Over and over again, we make the fundamental spiritual wager while trying over and over again to drop the fundamental spiritual error.]

In practice, Something Deeperism looks something like this:

I seek the Light shining through my core that I sense to be my most essential self. I seek that same Light from others. I seek that Light beaming out of all sentient beings and also through everything (but in sentient beings the Light is a fundamental element within their conscious moment, and that makes the Light more relatable to us). And from here I make a little poetic sketch of how I should at that moment think/feel/act. Then I let go of everything and watch how that sketch reacts with the Light and me and the outside world and others; and then I ground again in the Light in myself, others, and through everything; and then I use that grounding and what I learned by observing the results of my last little poetic motion/interaction to make another small, gentle, cautious guess about how I should then and there feel/think/act. Over and over and over again we start from zero, from the Love that chooses everyone.

[That’s Something Deeperism in day-to-day decision-making. Maybe it looks different in certain types of meditation, prayers, and other spiritual exercises; but, in any case, Pure Love is always the core of Something Deeperism.]

How does Something Deeperism compare to magical thinking? Something Deeperism happens primarily in one’s core, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings (but ideas and feelings must play a big part of Something Deeperism, because ideas and feelings play a big part of how we understand and relate to life — human meaning requires ideas and feelings), and minimally in one’s hopes and feelings. Magical thinking, at its worst, occurs in the opposite landscape: primarily in one’s hopes and fears, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings, and minimally in one’s core.

But it seems possible that between the most ego-tripping of magical thinking and a Buddha-level Something Deeperism there is a big gray zone — big enough to include even recurring notions about how somebody is the one for you. There’s few choices as important in one’s life as who you chose as your mate. A good choice will help most people live their best lives; and a poor choice is going to make it more difficult for one to be safe/thriving/joy-overflowing. So it makes sense to seek spiritual guidance in this choice, and it seems possible that one’s sense of Reality might be willing to weigh in, sometimes perhaps even unbidden, and say: “Don’t let this one go.”

Obviously, possible insights gained in the gray zone of wisdom deserve less credence than insights gained in a more concentrated spiritual effort. But no insight is unassailable: we humans will never get it completely right and must constantly self-assess, and -critique, and we must always be open to reinterpretations of our particular ideas, feelings, observations, and experiences.

Long Version

[Needs to be edited]

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that there is a Truth and people can relate meaningfully to It — just not in a literal way.

A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager: that the most fundamental aspect of life is a Love that chooses everyone, and we can relate to meaningfully to that Love: It can help us to feel/think/act more and more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing; and helping us to understand better and better that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”.

Magical thinking is when, for example, you are lonely and wishing that some particular person would be your person, and then you see a heart drawn somewhere and take it as evidence that you and that person are meant to be together forever and you’ll never have to be lonely every again.

But what about when you keep being overwhelmed by the sense that someone is the one for you? What if it just keeps blaring through you that he or she “is the one” — sometimes in words that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in feelings that seem to arise unbidden, and sometimes in combinations thereof? Is that just magical thinking, or might it have an appreciable spiritual component? Or, even if it doesn’t have a spiritual element, could it at least count as insight into your feelings for someone?

And is magical thinking always completely cut-off from spiritual Reality? Is it not conceivable that What Is might sometimes give us signs to help point us in the right direction?

A Something Deeperist accepts the fundamental spiritual wager, but is also wary of the fundamental spiritual error: pretending one’s ideas and feelings about Reality are identical with Reality.

This fundamental spiritual error is so pernicious that everyone makes it all the time. People who claim they don’t believe in or are agnostic about things like “Truth” and “Goodness” and “Reality” (concepts that point towards the Absolute, as a opposed to merely relative notions) are not immune: deep inside we all cannot help but assume we have meaningful insight into what is actually going on, and what is truly best; and we all over and over again clutch desperately (at least partially) onto xyz set of ideas and feelings about how our life is Absolutely OK because we possess, or will be Absolutely OK, if only we can attain this or that set of specific circumstances.

Dogmatic religions and philosophies have a tendency to exacerbate this fundamental spiritual error. Witness the fundamentalist Christian force feelings of certainty onto ideas she cannot (deep within) understand, believe in, or even care about. Witness the need of the confirmed atheist or agnostic to have a handle on reality: they are clutching so tightly because deep inside they are calling that “relative reality” “Absolute Reality”.

All religions and philosophies are to some degree dogmatic: we need some clear and solid ideas to construct coherent worldviews out of. But to the degree a religion and/or philosophy is Something Deeperistic, that set of guiding principles has built within it a self-assessing and -correcting practice of returning over and again to an awareness of the fundamental human conundrum:

Our own feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree that we make and win the fundamental spiritual wager (we can only understand, believe in, or care about our own ideas, feelings, and actions to the degree that we can real insight into a Love that chooses everyone and helps us follow and make sense of the universal values [aware, … joyfully sharing] and helps us to perceive how that Love shines through everyone and binds us all together);
BUT
Our ideas and feelings about a fundamental spiritual Reality cannot possibly be identical with a fundamental spiritual Reality.

Something Deeperism addresses this fundamental dilemma by noting that we can’t understand what literal knowledge about anything — let alone anything so clearly prior to our ideas and feelings as Reality would have to be — , but that we also don’t require literal knowledge of anything to relate meaningfully to it.

With the so-called “literal” knowledge of mathematics, we move precise logic-stones around in accordance with our inner impulse towards logical rules (like how a child feelingly holds and moves a stone around in a creek to feel/think/move it into the right spot in a dam: the child’s hands do not literally understand the stone, and neither does the mathematician’s mind literally understand the logic-objects she is moving around). The precision of mathematics comes at an epistemological price: we cannot prove that the underlying rules of our own thought are True, or true, or even worth bothering with. This doesn’t matter: it is enough to make practical use of mathematics and to appreciate its Beauty.

With the more “poetic” knowledge of concepts like “Truth”, “Goodness”, “Holiness”, “actually meaningful”, and “actually truer and more preferable”, and “Pure Love” we are still feelingly moving thought-objects around, but now one of the thought-objects is a vista beyond what our ideas and feelings can precisely define. Math qua Beauty also gazes at a vista beyond what our ideas and feelings can precisely define, but we can do math by bracketing the endeavor off from Beauty and just following our inner sense towards logic. If we bracket our thinking about “Pure Love” off from our experience of “Pure Love” we lose all meaningful traction in those thoughts. This is because the point of thinking about “Pure Love” is not to solve clear-cut scientific problems, but to act in accordance with what is not only prior to specific ideas and feelings, but is prior to all feeling and thinking.

The Something Deeperist works poetically with Pure Love like the poet works poetically with whatever she’s painting. A poet points towards a moment in the woods or a lover’s embrace and the reader, uses empathy to feelingly recreate the poet’s experience and sense-of-things. The Something Deeperist organizes her feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love shining through everything (and thus each conscious moment) and poetically (not with literal precision, accuracy, or certainty; but still with adequate precision, accuracy, and certainty for the task at hand) relates to and interprets that Pure Love in her feeling, thinking, and acting.

Both pretending that we don’t need Truth and pretending that we can have literal Truth are distortions that cause one to lose sight of the fundamental task of relating poetically with the Truth. That is the core of Something Deeperism: growing one’s relationship with the Truth in the only way possible for humans: poetically.

Something Deeperism is an open-ended task. Every moment we drop our current sense of Reality and start over. We don’t forget our previous ideas and feelings and how well they did or didn’t seem to relate to Reality; we just let go of our certainty of them and open up again for the Pure Love that must shine through everyone if this life is to be meaningful/tolerable to any of us.

In practice, Something Deeperism looks something like this: I seek the Light shining through my core that I sense to be my most essential self. I seek that same Light from others. I seek that Light beaming out of all sentient beings and also through everything (but in sentient beings the Light becomes the fundamental element within their conscious moment, and that makes the Light more relatable to us). And from here I make a little poetic sketch of how I should at that moment think/feel/act. Then I let go of everything and watch how that sketch reacts with the Light and me and the outside world and others; and then ground again in the Light in myself, others, and through everything; and then I use that grounding and what I learned by observing the results of my last little poetic sketch to make another small, gentle, cautious guess about how I should then and there feel/think/act.

How does Something Deeperism compare to magical thinking? Something Deeperism happens primarily in one’s core, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings (but ideas and feelings must play a big part of Something Deeperism, because ideas and feelings play a big part of how we understand and relate to life), and minimally in one’s hopes and feelings. Magical thinking, at its worst, occurs in the opposite landscape: primarily in one’s hopes and fears, secondarily in one’s ideas and feelings, and minimally in one’s core.

But it seems possible that between the most ego-tripping of magical thinking and a Buddha-level Something Deeperism there is a big gray zone — big enough to include even recurring notions about how somebody is the one for you. There’s few choices as important in one’s life as who you chose as your mate. A good choice will help most people live their best lives; and a poor choice is going to add make it harder for you to be safe/thriving/joy-overflowing. So it makes sense to seek spiritual guidance in this choice, and it seems possible that one’s sense of Reality might be willing to weigh in, sometimes perhaps even unbidden, and say: “Don’t let this one go.”

Copyright: AMW

He never learned to consider his audience.
He always just shoves essays at them, expecting them to strain until they hear what he wishes they’d hear, and which, they could hear, if only they were right inside his mind in the moment he’s daydreaming about how they’ll hear him.
An author should first employ empathy, and second expect a little from his readers.
But this guy does things backwards: first he expects a great deal of empathy from his readers, and second he throws in a little grab at fellow-feeling.
This is a failed authorship.

It was a wind spinning waters
that broke our town in two,
drowning those who fought her.
I went to get the glue,
the magic fix-all glue

A milk cow floating bloated
dipped with the churning flood
past a rooftop all eroded
(no shingles, only mud).
I raced to fetch the glue,
our magic fix-all glue

But the waters kept on rising,
pushing homesteads all asunder.
And with currents crazy writhing,
I found it little wonder
that this glue: it would not hold,
and puffed bodies bobbed and rolled.

I had to find a better, a better fix-all glue.
But the torrents kept on twisting.
I tumbled like a feather, not knowing what to do,
I fumbled the glue, watched it listing,
sinking out of view

I’m sorry that I failed you
my family and my friends
I’m sorry that I failed to
fix our village on the bend
of a sleepy river
that always served us well
until she delivered
every bit of us to hell

I’m sorry that I failed us
my family and my friends.
I would blame the gale plus
a narrow in our glen.
But I know that’s not the story,
I know it’s not the truth.
The glue I stole or borrowed
was dried-out from disuse.

I’m sorry I let you down,
my people in my heart.
I lost you as our town
drifted wide apart.
It seems I never learned
the sacred gentle art
of dropping those concerns
that do not grow the heart.

copyright: AMW

(This essay needs work.)

How does a person make good decisions?
How does a person make any decision at all?
It always feels to me like forces inside and outside make rapids that I float along on, trying to keep my face out of the water. And then it’s like I notice I’ve done or not done something and it feels like I’m supposed to claim responsibility for what I have done or not done — as if I chose to do it, rather than just sort of notice that various words and deeds had fallen out of me and now appeared to be the proximate causes of various situations; situations I can neither particularly fathom, nor particularly inhabit.

The fundamental spiritual wager is that Love is Real, and every mundane thing is only worth doing to the degree it occurs in and through and for the Love that Knows we are all in this together and that alone Knows what is really going on and how we can fit into what is really going on in a way that is wisest and best.

Why make this wager? Because we humans can only understand, care about, and/or believe in our own feeling/thinking/acting to the degree that our feeling/thinking/acting is aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, kind, and joyfully-sharing inside of a Reality that loves everyone and has a path and a home for us all — all of which implies an implicit belief in spiritual values and our need for spiritual insight, and also an implicit need for the spiritual Reality to be infinitely compassionate, kind, and inclusive.

How do we know that the above is true for humans?

I dunno: Search yourself!

[Note that accepting the above as “true enough to serve as a starting place in my conscious moment” rules out any talk of “philosophical zombies” (the notion that other humans might have no consciousnesses) or even any talk of “maybe other people are fundamentally different than I am”. Part of what we are above admitting we cannot psychologically make any sense of is the notion that others are not fundamentally like us and thus share the same fundamental vistas/circumstances — including the ability to perceive and meaningfully interact with spiritual Love (the Love that doesn’t let anyone down ever).]

For now, let’s agree that a human will attain and maintain internal coherency (meaningfulness-to-oneself) only to the degree that that human both accepts and (at least to some degree) wins the spiritual wager we sketched out above.

How can we succeed here? We need insight into the True Good (aka: Pure Love; aka: Godlight; we are pointing imperfectively but not therefore meaninglessly towards vistas we assume all humans share) in order to understand, believe in, and care about our own feeling/thinking/acting. However, ideas, feelings, and actions about the True Good are not identical with the True Good (which, if It is to be what It must be for It to serve as a firm foundation for human feeling/thinking/acting, must be prior to our self-awaredly-limited feeling/thinking/acting); and confusing ideas, feelings, and/or actions about the True Good for the True Good is counterproductive: to the degree we make that mistake, we focus on our own hopes and fears rather than on the True Good.

How can we succeed here? We need insight into a spiritual Reality that loves everyone infinitely and will not abandon anyone; and that spiritual insight must be meaningful to our feeling/thinking/acting (otherwise it will not be meaningful to us); but confusing our own feelings, ideas, and/or actions for spiritual Reality is a classic spiritual error.

Imagine the mystics are right. Imagine that Pure Love is all there is, that Pure Love creates, sustains, shines through, and in some sense is this interconnected expanse of mind and matter (whatever mind and matter are, and not worrying about whether they are truly ultimately distinct from one another or not). Imagine that Buddha Nature is a formlessness that creates, sustains, and shines through all formed things, which flow together as one, and which ultimately flow into and are Buddha Nature. Then Pure Love shines through each conscious moment; and it also belongs to the mystical vision to believe that humans can relate meaningfully to Pure Love — albeit not in a literal/ way: the wise person’s words and deeds point towards the Light, but no one can fit the Light into words and deeds. So then we’re set! We just need to inhabit the mystical vision and we should be able to organize our feeling/thinking/acting better and better around the Pure Love shining through all things.

But what would such an adequate organization look like? And what feelings, thoughts, and actions would it give rise to? And what will keep us from making the classic spiritual misstep of mistaking our own hopes and fears for God’s Truth?

It seems to some degree we must misapprehend Pure Love. To some degree we must make the classic spiritual misstep of mistaking our own hopes and fears for God’s Truth.

But this is true whether or not we consciously accept the spiritual wager. We humans cannot help but seek and to suppose ourselves in some degree and way finding the True Good (regardless of the ideas we may toss about at the top of our conscious thought). Witness the self-proclaimed “nihilist”: why all this arguing and/or dramatic posturing if deep down his “there’s no Truth!” did not feel to him like a great Truth — giving him the certain meaning that he needs to feel himself infinitely safe, sound, and cared for?

So our choice is not between whether or not we make the spiritual wager: we will make it. Our choice is whether or not we consciously accept this psychological inevitability and whether or not we choose to keep consciously working to progress within this inevitable, underlying spiritual wager.

It’s scary to consciously accept the spiritual wager. Because if you let the spiritual wager remain a subconscious activity, you can more easily fool yourself into believing that your main interest is succeeding at straightforward tasks compatible with your own hopes and fears: good job, nice spouse, comfy life; and/or this or that type of human greatness (including — to the degree we turn them into ideas stapled to feelings of certainty — spiritual goods like “righteousness”, “salvation”, “wisdom” and “goodness”).

However, in the end, the more we dodge and/or pervert the spiritual wager, the less meaningful our own feeling/thinking/acting is to our own feeling/thinking/acting: we don’t travel with our own f/t/a to our own conclusions: we inhabit our own lives less and less: we more and more desperately (with whiter and whiter knuckles) cling to notions and choices that mean less and less to us.

That is why we are better off consciously making the spiritual wager. Even though it means we have to accept the possibility of finding that we must give up some goods/loves/preferences we currently believe we cannot bear to part with.

But the spiritual wager assumes that we must translate what is prior to our ways of experiencing, thinking, and choosing into our experiences, thoughts, and actions. So consciously making the spiritual wager in no way guarantees that we will not continue to confuse our own notions for God’s Truth. And humans are imperfect, so there is no way to guarantee that we will avoid either categorical errors (ie: adopting a fundamentally inadequate worldview) and/or particular errors (ie: specific critical misapplications of one’s worldview).

Our goal cannot be perfect wisdom, but only enough wisdom to continuously self-critique and self-correct — enough wisdom to keep growing in effective kind delight.

Ideas, feelings, and actions cannot have literal insight into Pure Love. But they could have poetic insight into Pure Love. Just as both author and reader recreate — through empathy — the poet’s solitary walk along the beach; both the doer and the watcher of words and deeds that flow with minimal contortions off of the doer’s minimally-contorted experience of Pure Love can — again through empathy — get some sense of the Light underlying those words and deeds.

Sounds reasonable enough. But in practice, this is what happens to me: I chatter at God, with no particular sense that God is answering my queries or steadying my feeling/thinking/acting’s interface with Godlight. A girl’s name pops into my head and I decide once again — contrary to all appearances — that she must be the “one”, even though it really isn’t very surprising or eternally-suggestive for the name of someone you are constantly obsessing over to sometimes pop into your head.

Maybe if I could get more insight into empathy. Since empathy is how poetic insight is transmitted, and it is also at the core of the spiritual wager: if the spiritual wager is correct, then others really are like we are and the correct perspective really is seeing divine Light shining in and through ourselves and everyone else.

So let’s think a little about empathy.

First, let’s consider how empathy makes communication, and poetry in particular, possible.

Some people argue that we can’t know what others mean when they speak of pain. They say it is as if someone is looking at something in a box only they see and naming it “pain”, and we don’t know if they are seeing the same thing in their box when they say, “pain” as we see in our box when we say “pain”. To these people I say: that’s not something we need to believe.

We learn concepts like “pain” by observing people using the concepts and mapping their external states onto our internal states. We recreate their internal states by reversing the mapping of our internal states onto our external states. We learn to associate their concepts by empathizing with them.

We may not be able to prove that empathy works, but if it doesn’t, then life is psychologically unbearable and also completely incomprehensible, since (1) we need the Light to exist and to shine in everyone and (2) the foundations of everything we’ve learned came from interactions with others — if those foundations are based on illusion, what are we to make of all our knowledge? So, as above, we find ourselves not proving that the spiritual wager is True, but rather demonstrating that our best bet is to find a way to find out that and in what way the spiritual wager is True.

Communication is possible because empathy is possible. And communication about spiritual Truths is possible because we all share the same fundamental vista of Pure Love shining through, accepting, and love-lifting us all. We don’t know that that’s all True; but we know that we need to discover that and in what way it is True if we are to understand, believe in, and care about our own feelings, thoughts, and ideas.

Poetry is possible because language can paint a picture that the poet viscerally inhabits. Because the poet is inhabiting her painting as they create it, the painting reflects her inner vistas — her feelings and vague senses of things, and how the ingredients mix together with ideas and a vague underlying spiritual sense to create a unique moment that she is both entering (or, if it’s based largely on a previous experience, re-entering) and actively shaping via her poetic contemplation of that moment. A poetic contemplation is a whole-being contemplation: you feel it from the core (spiritual Light) out through perceptions, feelings, emotions, vague notions, ideas, and words and deeds. A good poem reflects that whole conscious moment as it interacts with a specific set of ideas, experiences, observations, etc.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I am I horrible poet. Because my poetry doesn’t do that. Am I a horrible poet, or is my theory of poetry overly idealistic?

Does my poetry ever do that? How could I create enough space while still remaining adequately technically alert?

Setting the question of your essay writer’s own poetry to one side; the point is that poetry presupposes that we humans are enough like one another that we can communicate experiences by sinking into those experiences as we sing of them. Poetry presupposes that the poet’s ability to awaredly inhabit both subconscious and conscious experience leads to word choices that other people’s subconsciouses will then be able to reconstitute to create essentially similar experiences. That is how art works: the artist expresses their experience in objectively vague but fundamentally clear ways, so that the beholder of the art is able to journey into the artist’s moment and share in the artist’s contemplation of a whole human moment. Art works via empathy, via the faith that we are all essentially the same and can speak meaningfully with one another — even (or especially) about vague, experiential aspects of life that are too wide and deep to fit into literal descriptions.

Is the spiritual path akin to the artist’s path? Is the spiritual path a conscious immersion in the whole human moment with the goal of both transforming and expressing each moment by asking one’s feelings, thoughts, words, and deeds to better and better harken to and reflect the Pure Love shining through each conscious moment?

When does art lead one astray? I am thinking of this:

Dutch behavioral biologist Maarten ‘t Hart, hired by Herzog for his expertise with laboratory rats, revealed that, after witnessing the inhumane way in which the rats were treated, he no longer wished to cooperate. Apart from traveling conditions that were so poor that the rats, imported from Hungary, had started to eat each other upon arrival in the Netherlands, Herzog insisted the plain white rats be dyed gray. To do so, according to ‘t Hart, the cages containing the rats needed to be submerged in boiling water for several seconds, causing another half of them to die. The surviving rats proceeded to lick themselves clean of the dye immediately, as ‘t Hart had predicted they would. ‘t Hart also implied sheep and horses that appear in the movie were treated very poorly but did not specify this any further.

From the Wikipedia page on Nosferatu the Vampyre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_the_Vampyre

What are we to make of this?

On the one hand, the artist’s task is to unfold as clearly as possible a vague inner vision that is both particular and universal. And maybe gray rats fit that vision better than white rats. But it isn’t OK to treat living creatures like that. On the other hand, if you work in property management in NYC, you know that while you are not even allowed to humanely kill stray cats, you can do any horrible thing to rodents, and besides poisoning them and breaking their backs, maintenance personnel will sometimes smash glass up and mix it into cement, and use that to close rat holes. And, further, we have used rodents to test not just necessary goods like medicine, but also fluff-goods like make-up. So is the quick torture and accidental death of hundreds of animals that we already routinely torture to death too high a price to pay for artistic expression? Keep in mind that this film is considered to be a cinematic triumph.

On the other hand, how can cruelty be a productive part of a meditation upon the whole human moment — whose core radiates Pure Love — or else (if the core of a human moment does not radiate Pure Love) all is lost &mdash ?

Does the movie lose Beauty because the rats were mistreated? If we didn’t know about the mistreatment of the rats, their mistreatment is not likely to change the final product enough for it to aesthetically register with filmgoers. But is their mistreatment still somehow making the film less Beautiful? How? Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?

The fact that it seems possible to serve both art and cruelty demonstrates that art is not a purely spiritual exercise.

Wise feeling/thinking/acting does stop being wise to the degree it participates in cruelty. Even if the cruelty is hidden from observers, it is still coloring the feeling/thinking/acting of the one being cruel.

But are wise observers able to detect the flaw within another’s feeling/thinking/acting? I cannot tell from watching
Nosferatu the Vampyre that rats were mistreated making the film. Could a wise person reliably pick up on that moral flaw just by watching the film? That seems unlikely. But shouldn’t a wise person be able to tell from the behavior of another person that that person was caught up in cruelties, or at least that that person was feeling/thinking/acting with inadequate wisdom? Via empathy and a fine attunement to the inner state that the less wise person’s expression, movements, and gestures are reflecting?

Everything should cede place to the purely spiritual exercise of poetically expressing Pure Love in feelings, thoughts, words and deeds. So you shouldn’t torture rats, even if it will make the picture more beautiful. But it seems to go too far to throw out a beautiful movie because animals were mistreated when it was made (in 1978, so over 40 years ago).