Something Deeperism: Individuals & Groups

Something Deeperism: Individuals & Groups

Something Deeperism for individuals:

Nothing can make sense or matter to humans unless we can know/understand/follow what is actually going on and what actually matters (without adequate insight into Truth, we wander forever about in opinion, conjecture, and arguments with their counterarguments).
And the Truth has to be prior to ideas and feelings about the Truth, but we humans have a tendency to clench ideas and feelings about the Truth so tightly that we focus more on them than on a whole-being organization around the Truth within, which alone could adequately relate what is prior to ideas and feelings to ideas and feelings to ideas and feelings and thus to our specific day-to-day experiences and choices.

For the reasons above we adopt a minimal dogmatism that speaks to both our minds and our hearts, and a refusal to ever abandon that essential starting-point for progress in thought and action: “It matters what I say and do. I should be kind to myself and others. If my ideas and feelings are moving me away from aware, clear, and honest thought and feeling, away from kindness and compassion, away from a growing active insight into the Light within that knows that I matter and others matter and how we should think and act as individuals and in relationship with one another–then my ideas and feelings are undermining my true purpose and real goal; and so I must stop, rethink, find a way towards better ideas and feelings.” Because insofar as we abandon that within that knows how to find out what is going on and what should be done, we contradict all our efforts, undermine ourselves, aren’t even at a starting point.

That isn’t to stay one should stay at the starting point. It isn’t enough just to assume that minimal dogmatism. One must find a way to allow one’s thought-as-a-whole to get better and better at understanding how and in what way that tenet is True. Otherwise, one goes further and further towards ideas-about what really matters, and further and further away from a whole-being-engagement with what really matters (which must, as we’ve noted, be prior to ideas-about what really matters).

Something Deeperism for groups:

Since humans can make no progress without refusing to overstep or abandon something along the lines of the Something Deeperist’s minimal dogmatism, groups should agree to also not overstep or abandon that general direction. That is to say: people should be free to believe as their conscious bids them, but the group should never pretend like truth, clarity, accuracy and honesty, as well as kindness, compassion, win-win, community, joy and other basic inborn and necessary human values are up for doubt, or can ever be set aside for some supposed “higher truth”. It creates chaos (internal meaninglessness and thus the inability to coherently choose one direction over another) in both individuals and groups when doctrines are allowed to doubt or belittle what we humans have to know/believe/care-about in order to make any progress in their thoughts and actions.

So we, speaking poetically so as to avoid unnecessary (though not necessarily inaccurate) metaphysical dogmas, we do hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The point is that whatever philosophy or religion you can imagine, to the degree it asks you to think illogically or dishonestly or confusedly or to be unkind it loses meaning to you and so turns to chaos, to mush, to a dogma that–since illegible to your mind and heart, but claiming absolute authority–can be used to justify anything. So let us agree that the only way forward for an individual is to find a Truth that does not ask one to think sloppily or to be unkind; and that therefore we as a group must also value good, clear thought and real kindness so much that we do not put up with any doctrines or behaviors that undermine these goods. Otherwise, how can we create a place where we can all be our best truest selves and meaningfully relate to one another? How else can we create a space where togetherness and jointly thinking, choosing, and creating is possible? And if this is not the goal of a group of humans, what meaning does that group really have? I mean: give me a break! Throw us a bone, here!

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