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Are You a Something Deeperist?

Are You a Something Deeperist?

Dear Reader,

Are you a Something Deeperist? Do you believe that we human beings can have insight into the Truth (aka: the Light, the Holy, Absolute Reality, etc: we’re pointing–imperfectly, but not therefore necessarily inadequately–with words and ideas towards what is ultimately beyond words and ideas); but an insight more poetic than literal (like how a good poem read well recreates the essentials, though not the exact details, of one human moment within another human moment)?

Do you believe that, for example, the various world religions can help practitioners relate their ideas and feelings adequately to the Truth/Light shining within and all through each moment; and that, further, said practitioners reach this laudable goal to the degree they focuses on that Truth/Light–which knows / is the Meaning of life–more than they focus on ideas and feelings about the Meaning of life?

How could you not?

We all know we need dogmas (assumptions about what’s going on, and how we should think and act) to help us steer through this human world (of which idea-based thinking and acting is a necessary part); and we need those dogmas to connect us to a guide that actually knows what’s what (otherwise we flail helplessly about, caught up in xyz not-understood enthusiasm about the meaning of our life and/or xzy not-understood pout about the meaninglessness of our life). But we all also know that ideas and feelings about meaningful/meaningless are not at all identical with what is really meaningful (we know it, but still we have to work constantly to keep that knowledge front and center: look at the way we allow swells of emotion to convince ourselves that this mate, career path, group identity, religious or philosophical answer, pleasant and/or secure arrangement is THE TRUTH; no, but you take a good long look at that!).

Due to this indelible knowledge both of our need for spiritual values (like “It is actually True that we should treat ourselves and others with kindness and respect”) and the danger of confusing ideas and feelings about the True for the Truth Itself (which is deeper and wider than ideas and feelings), we are all fundamentally Something Deeperists. The only work left is to admit where we find ourselves within our thought (in Something Deeperism). To the degree we admit where we are, we are at a starting-point within our own thinking and acting, and we can make progress. What is sadder than a conscious moment unable to perceive and/or admit where within thought and action it finds itself and thus more lost than it even knows, wandering wide but going nowhere?

And so we all pray as one: “Help us make progress in the only possible progress–the only one human minds/hearts can understand/follow/stand: aware, honest, clear, kind, compassionate, effective, selfless, and joyful thought and action centered around the Light/Truth within that alone understands what’s going on and what should be done, and what properly constitutes aware, honest … and what should be done. Help us grow in the one True Faith: the middle way between faith in ideas and feelings and skepticism towards ideas and feelings. Make our ideas and feelings constantly self-evaluating and -evolving ladders to and from the Light–forever mindful their duty to seek and follow that which alone Knows (ie: What Matters / the inner Light / etc), and ever wary of their weakness for imagining themselves identical with Knowledge.”

[Cataloger’s Notes:
Definition of Something Deeferism /Something Deeperism definition/
All religions point to same Light /fundamental agreement between religions/
Theory of the meaning of life: /meaning of life/
“let the spiritual guide your feelings, ideas, words and deeds” theory of the meaning of life: /spiritual should rule/
“translate the spiritual into life” theory of the meaning of life: /translate spiritual into life/
Necessity of dogmas: /necessity of dogmas/
Error of confusing Reality with ideas and feelings about Reality: /Reality vs ideas and feelings about Reality/
We are all Something Deeperists: /everyone a Something Deeperist/
Inborn Indelible Self-Knowledge makes us all Something Deeperists: /indelible self-knowledge = everyone a Something Deeperist/
Only question is how thorough a Something Deeperist to be: /only decision: how thorough a Something Deeperist/
A Something Deeperism Prayer: /something deeperist prayers/
No progress in thought and action unless our hearts and minds can understand, follow, believe-in, stand our thinking and acting: /must understand own thoughts and actions/
We can only understand thoughts and actions that are aware, honest, clear, kind, compassionate, effective, selfless, and joyful, and that are ultimately grounded in insight into the Truth/Light within: /prerequisites to understand own thoughts/ & /prerequisites to understand own thoughts = aware …/
Ideas and feelings as self-evaluating and -evolving ladders to and from the Truth: /ladder to and from Truth/

/no progress without internal honesty/

[Anthologists Notes:
Pretty readable, short.
Somewhat persuasive example of the standard arguments for a more committed and thorough Something Deeperism.
Why didn’t the author(s) give a more careful explanation for why we need dogmas? The fact that we need ideas to steer this human reality is not enough: to show we need dogmas we must show that we need fixed ideas that we accept as adequately-true. Something Deeperists usually give support for that latter claim by pointing to how our ideas slip and slide unmanageably about if we refuse to accept any premises as “adequately true for belief”. And/or they’ll note that as far as they can tell, we cannot help but put faith in some ideas, and either pretending we can suspend all faith or pretending we believe differently than we believe cause one to lie to oneself about where one is, and thus lose any kind of starting point for coherent thought and action.
This could go in sections like: “we’re all something deeperists”; “introductions to something deeperism”; etc]

All these Something Deeperism essays are BW & AMW collaborations. Occasionally other fictional authors (besides BW) participate. On those occasions, we generally mention them at the essay’s close.

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Here for the umpteenth gazillion time, BW tries to summarize Something Deeperism and its philosophical appeal.

Statement of Faith

Bartleby Willard is a simple man of faith. He is a simple Something Deeperist. He maintains that though the True Good is prior to our ideas and feelings, our ideas and feelings can still interact meaningfully with the True Good.

Something Deeperism attempts to hold the middle ground between radical skepticism and fundamentalist religiosity. Radical skepticism refutes itself because only a fealty to one’s underlying sense toward “truer” and “better” can justify or motivate intellectual rigor. Fundamentalist religion refutes itself when it allows religious sentiments to turn one’s focus away from centering oneself upon the True Good/God/Truth/Dharmakya Buddha/the Way (for a direction towards ideas and feelings, only poetic formulations can be used; so we’ve chosen several common names for the “wheel within the clay”) that justifies and motivates true religion.

Something Deeperism does not claim that either skepticism or religion is an error, but merely points out that the basis of both is deeper than either one: the point of bothering with both skeptical and the religious analyses is to better understand and follow the True Good.

Trying to figure out how to think and act or best follow God’s will only makes sense if it actually matters what you do: if you actually matter: our inner sense that it matters what we do is logically and experientially prior to specific notions about how to do things right (note that an inner sense that I matter is not the same as feeling like I matter or having the idea that I matter: we’re talking about a sense deeper than ideas and feelings here!). The various tools of human thought and human culture should therefore serve this inner sense of We All Matter! For Real!, and not get off into tangents, making gods of themselves and otherwise pushing us away from the very wisdom/joy/decency they should be pushing us towards.

A Something Deeperist can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a secular humanist or etc; all that is barred from Something Deeperists is to deny the sacred Love at the core of reality, or to claim either that one’s intellectual and/or emotional thought perfectly understands that holiness, or that those aspects of one’s thought have no understanding of that holiness, or that one’s intellect cannot better its understanding of that holiness. A Something Deeperist must keep pedaling.

“The logos (account) is only one. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” [Heraclitus]

Or again: “Let’s not sing of Titans and Giants–those fictions of the men of old–nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all; but to give heedful reverence to the gods is ever good.” [Xenophanes]”

The author’s hope for himself and his various groups (be they friend-, family-, practitioner-, nationstate-, worldwide- or ecetera-units) is only this:

Let us all be Something Deeperists at least to the extent that we keep our ideas and feelings about What Matters (including of course so the God help us Amen our ideas and feelings about Something Deeperism) from betraying that ineffable light that they are to some degree imperfectly but still to some degree adequately pointing towards! Help us, Oh inconceivably vastly vast That Which Helps! Please!!!!

“Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.” [Heraclitus]

Bartleby Willard, WAP staff writer; in a resort on the water, vacationing ten days after Independence Day, 2015. Slashed and revised August 1, 2015. Another attempt made August 2, 2015, then again Aug 3, and again November 12.

{Some frenzied, overwashing, desperate, footnotes:

About poetic formulations and irreducibles:
All concepts are prior to the way things really are. A literal formulation (ex: “The capital of Arkansas is Little Rock”) can therefore only label something within a system that is already assumed (like a mathematical or physical set of rules); the metaphysical existence of the foundations of such a system are not provable or even fathomable, and so literal statements can help us to work within working-hypotheses but they cannot speak meaningfully about what is actually the case (or even if such a thing as “actually the case” exists). Poetic formulations (ex: “human life truly matters” or “The capital of Arkansas actually is in Little Rock”), on the other hand, knowingly point with imperfect clarity, precision, and verifiability; they can therefore be employed to discuss irreducibles (senses-of-things that cannot be reduced to any further argumentation: anything having to do with “no, but this is actually the case”, for example “some philosophies are better than others”).

“Imperfect” is not necessarily the same as “inadequate”, so it is conceivable both that an individual could grow in knowledge about the Something Deeper and that humans could meaningfully share their senses of the Something Deeper with one another:
Poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate our inner-senses-of-things to ideas and feelings; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–it was an unfounded philosophical prejudice to suppose that our ideas were somehow hermetically sealed off from our feelings or our deeper-senses-of-things (how to think about the relationship between the Something Deeper and ideas and feelings? A good analogy is our ability to use ideas to talk about feelings, even though feelings are wider/deeper/less-conceptually-solid).
Similarly, poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate one human’s experience to another’s; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–we are all essentially the same and we learn language from other humans: from this we know that our poetries can meaningfully relate to other people’s poetries.}

Author: BW
Copyright: Andy Watson

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About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
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That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)