Browsed by
Tag: philosophy

What is Something Deeperism?

What is Something Deeperism?

A Quick Intro To Something Deeperism

1) Basic Definition: There is a Truth (aka: Light; God; True Good; etc — we’re pointing with words imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately towards a shared vista). The Truth shines through each conscious moment. The path of wisdom is relating the rest of our conscious moments (ideas, feelings, etc, all working together) better and better around the Truth so that there is less and less gap between the Truth and our words and deeds. In this way the Truth guides our thought-as-a-whole (feelings, ideas, awareness, and the Truth shining through all things, all working imperfectly but still meaningfully together) better and better, allowing us to translate the Truth better and better into words and deeds.

The path towards wisdom is the seed of wisdom: By following our inner push towards aware, clear, accurate, competent, honest, compassionate, kind, joyfully-together thinking and acting, centered around the Light within ourselves and everyone else; our ideas and feeling get better and better at following and understanding the Light; allowing the Light to guide our thought-as-a-whole to more and more aware .. joyfully-together thinking and acting.

We don’t start out with only what feels like inkling of the Truth. And the Truth would have to be deeper and wider than our (oh so human!) ideas and feelings, so we can never have literal / definitive / 1:1 / exclusive insight into the Truth. However, we cannot have literal certainty about anything; and we wouldn’t be able to understand, care about, or follow literal certainty anyway. And, as far as we know, we can do as the mystics suggest: via meditation, prayer, contemplation, and loving kindness practice; we can think and act more and more aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, and joyfully together; gaining more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say “we are all in this together”.

We can’t have literal insight into the Truth. But that does not mean we cannot have an adequate whole-being insight into the Truth. Such an insight would allow our emotional and intellectual ideas to point adequately well towards the Truth. And it is such an adequate whole-being pointing-towards what is really going on and what really matters that our intellectual thought requires if it is to know how it should be used, and what it should be used in service of.

Ideas and feelings know they are limited. They know they should not run the show alone. Pursuing wisdom is pursuing adequate insight into foundational values that allow ideas and feelings to function adequately well and with adequately clear consciences.

We should seek a better and better organization of ideas and feelings around the Light within that alone Knows what’s Best. But ideas and feelings are notoriously limited; so we’ll never get it perfect: we need to keep reassessing, admitting errors, trying again, pushing out from within, pushing for less and less gap between the Light outside our thinking/feeling/perceiving and the Light within our thinking/feeling/perceiving.

2) Basic Argument for Adopting and Relentlessly Pursuing Truth, and Bounding that Pursuit with the Assumption that the Truth Ratifies Goods Like Awareness, Honesty, Kindness … : No human’s thoughts and actions can mean anything much to him or her unless the following requirements are met:
(a) the Truth is real (ie: some ways are truly more preferable than others)
(b) one’s thought-as-a-whole relate meaningfully to the Truth (ie: something along the lines of the following: one’s ideas, feelings and the Truth shining through all things can work together and understand each other adequately);
(c) Truth is infinitely aware, clear, honest, competent, kind and good and helpful; and is here equally for everyone. And we can grow in our understanding of the Truth by following our own inborn sense towards aware … helpful thinking and acting; reaching always for more insight and compassion by seeking always to be more and more centered around and aware of the Truth within and shining through all things.

The state of affairs (a-c) is the bare minimum required for a human being to be able to truly understand, care about, and believe in his or her own ideas and feelings. Of course we cannot have literal knowledge about such things, but we could work to gain more and more whole-being insight into that and in what sense (a-c) are essentially True.

Note that you don’t necessarily have to accept the metaphysics of (a-c) to follow, understand, or care about your own thoughts and actions. You have to gain the whole-being insight towards which (a-c) imperfectly, but not therefore necessarily inadequately points. You can play skeptic and doubt the existence of a Truth without particularly undermining your own thinking/acting; just as you can play believer while still drastically undermining your own thinking/acting. Wisdom is a whole-being insight into the Light within. To be coherent (for your own thoughts and actions to be meaningful to you), what you need is to find whole-being insight into that and in what sense (a-c) are essentially True. That is not going to be a literal insight.

So why bother with Something Deeperism? If success in Something Deeperism is not the same as agreeing to the ideas of Something Deeperism, why pursue a philosophy of Something Deeperism? Better ideas help to orientate one’s thought-as-a-whole better towards what’s really going on and what really matters, which in turn helps one gain more whole-being insight into that and in what way it is True to say we are all in this together. To the degree we lack whole-being insight into that sense of things, we cannot believe in, understand, or care about anything we think or do.

Intellectual thoughts are a really big part of how we relate to ourselves, other people and this life. So we want to choose ideas that point us more towards our real situation. That way, we are in a better position to gain whole-being-insight into the Truth, and that insight can flow more easily/naturally out into our ideas.

So, Yes: It is true that of course ideas without insight are not worth much, and it is very possible to be more or less wise than one’s ideas. Nonetheless, part of growing in wisdom is working always to replace worse sketches of what is really going on and what really matters with better sketches of what is really going on and what really matters. Hence the usefulness of philosophy, religion, and wisdom practices; and hence the usefulness of Something Deeperism, which is basically just a gentle (but persistent) reminder that there’s no point in either skepticism and faith unless they are helping us to gain more insight into the Light within that alone knows what’s really going on and what really matters (and that therefore alone knows that and in what sense false beliefs should be avoided [the raison d’etre of skepticisms] and true beliefs should be adopted [the raison d’etre of faiths]).

Furthermore, a philosophy of Something Deeperism can help groups recognize and make use of all the common ground their members have. Something Deeperism helps us to realize that none of our philosophies make sense to any of us in the absence of insight into and use of aware … helpful thinking and acting. And so Something Deeperism keeps us all on the same page: Whatever our differences, we can all agree on aware … helpful thinking and acting, and on the need for us all to seek wisdom; and to agree that wisdom is honest and kind, not dishonest and cruel; and to agree that it is counterproductive to pretend wisdom can fit into a literal set of metaphysical, political, and/or philosophical ideas. All this implies a shared starting point: a place of clarity we can refuse to abandon: we will disagree on much, but should we not agree on (no matter what! for if we sacrifice this, we sacrifice the only coherency any of us could have) awareness, honesty, clarity, competency, accuracy, kindness, and shared joy; all bound up in a respect for wisdom and for our different vantages on what surpasses all human feelings and thoughts????

3) Basic Argument for Seeking a Relationship with the Truth that is Founded Primarily on Direct Whole-Being Experience of the Truth, and for Always Push-ing Against the Human Tendency to Shift One’s Focus onto Ideas and Feelings about the Truth: Putting more focus on ideas and feelings about the Truth than on the Truth Itself is a grave and a common error. The Truth is not ideas and/or feelings about what is really going on, but what is really going on itself; the way forward is to relate ideas and feelings to the Truth more and more meaningfully — a process that self-defeats to the degree we confuse ideas/feelings with the Truth. When you put too much stock in ideas and/or feelings about the Truth, your focus turns away from a whole-being coordination around the Truth and you confuse and frustrate yourself by more and more pathetically/desperately clutching ideas and feelings that (since they claim a clarity and certainty you deepdown know they don’t have) are ultimately meaningless to you.

[Note that notions of “there is no Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth” are just as guilty of the above-sketched error as are notions of “I know the Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth”.]

[Note that we need some principles to help us navigate human life, since ideas are necessary for interacting with this world and our own thoughts, and without any firm principles, you spend every second trying to build up to a coherent philosophy from scratch. The principles of Something Deeperism should be adopted, just not grasped too tightly. They know they are mere ideas and are therefore like evolving, never-quite-adequate ladders towards whole-being insight (ideas, feels, etc centered around the Light/Truth) into the Truth. The idea is to create a ladder that we can see fits adequately well with our inner moment; and then work to travel deeper and deeper into the Truth via that ladder, which will allow the Truth to explicate Itself to our thought-as-a-whole better and better, allowing us to understand better and better in what sense any given ladder is adequate and inadequate.]

[Note that we are all already Something Deeperists. We all already know we need insight into why it is TRUE that we are all in this together in order to believe in, care about, or understand our own thinking or acting; but we also know that we will never have literal insight into such a TRUTH, and that confusing ideas about the TRUTH with the TRUTH creates a great deal of trouble. Something Deeperism is not here to reject or contradict your philosophy or religion. It is here to work with all of us to help us all remember what our philosophies and religions are for: they are there to help us to understand that and in what way it is TRUE to say we are all in this together and should be kind and respectful towards one another, and happy together, enjoying each other’s company.]

AMW and BW, copyright AMW, although everybody knows this so why does he try to own it???

A Quick Intro To Something Deeperism

1) Basic Definition: There is a Truth (aka: Light; God; True Good; etc — we’re pointing with words imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately towards a shared vista). The Truth shines through each conscious moment. The path of wisdom is relating the rest of our conscious moments (ideas, feelings, etc, all working together) better and better around the Truth so that there is less and less gap between the Truth and our words and deeds. In this way the Truth guides our thought-as-a-whole (feelings, ideas, awareness, and the Truth shining through all things, all working imperfectly but still meaningfully together) better and better, allowing us to translate the Truth better and better into words and deeds.

The path towards wisdom is the seed of wisdom: By following our inner push towards aware, clear, accurate, competent, honest, compassionate, kind, joyfully-together thinking and acting, centered around the Light within ourselves and everyone else; our ideas and feeling get better and better at following and understanding the Light; allowing the Light to guide our thought-as-a-whole to more and more aware .. joyfully-together thinking and acting.

We start out with only what seems to be an inkling of the Truth. And the Truth would have to be deeper and wider than our (oh so human!) ideas and feelings. So we can never have literal / definitive / 1:1 / exclusive insight into the Truth. However, we cannot have literal certainty about anything; and we wouldn’t be able to understand, care about, or follow literal certainty anyway. And, as far as we know, we can do as the mystics suggest: via meditation, prayer, contemplation, and loving kindness practice; we can think and act more and more aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, and joyfully together; gaining more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say “we are all in this together”.

We can’t have literal insight into the Truth. But that does not mean we cannot have an adequate whole-being insight into the Truth. Such an insight would allow our emotional and intellectual ideas to point adequately well towards the Truth. And it is such an adequate whole-being pointing-towards what is really going on and what really matters that our intellectual thought requires if it is to know how it should be used, and what it should be used in service of.

Ideas and feelings know they are limited. They know they should not run the show alone. Pursuing wisdom is pursuing adequate insight into foundational values that allow ideas and feelings to function adequately well and with adequately clear consciences.

We should seek a better and better whole-being organization around the Truth within. But we’ll never get it perfect (for it to be an adequate standard of thought and action, the Truth would have to be perfect; and we are not perfect): We need to keep reassessing, admitting and adjusting missteps, trying again, pushing out from within, pushing for less and less gap between the Light outside our thinking/feeling/perceiving and the Light within.

2) Basic Argument for Adopting and Relentlessly Pursuing Truth, and Bounding that Pursuit with the Assumption that the Truth Ratifies Goods Like Awareness, Honesty, Kindness … : No human’s thoughts and actions can mean anything much to him or her unless the following requirements are met:
(a) the Truth is real (ie: some ways are truly more preferable than others)
(b) one’s thought-as-a-whole can relate meaningfully to the Truth (ie: something along the lines of the following: one’s ideas, feelings and the Truth shining through all things can work together and understand each other adequately);
(c) Truth is infinitely aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, good, joyfully caring/sharing and helpful; and is here equally for everyone. And we can grow in our understanding of the Truth in the way we sense we can: by following our own inborn sense towards aware … helpful thinking and acting, reaching always for more insight and compassion by seeking always to be more and more centered around and aware of the Truth within and shining through all things.

The state of affairs (a-c) is the bare minimum required for a human being to be able to truly understand, care about, and believe in his or her own ideas and feelings. Of course we cannot have literal knowledge about such things, but we can work to gain more and more whole-being insight into that and in what sense (a-c) are essentially True.

[The topic of undoubtables is covered in more detail in “Why Something Deeperism? Simple!” (the next essay in the book).
But let’s discuss (c) real quick:
If our inner senses towards clarity, honesty, accuracy, and competency cannot lead us to genuine insight; we have no intellectual path towards genuine insight that we can intellectually or emotionally understand or make use of. If our inner senses towards kindness and joyful compassionate generous and grateful togetherness cannot lead us to genuine insight; we have no emotional path towards genuine insight that we can understand, or even stand. We can only gain meaningful-to-us insights into what’s really going on and what really matters if to the degree we can gain insight into that and in what way (c) is essentially correct about the nature of Reality and our relationship to It.]

3) Basic Argument for Seeking a Relationship with the Truth that is Founded Primarily on Direct Whole-Being Experience of the Truth, and for Always Pushing Against the Human Tendency to Shift One’s Focus onto Ideas and Feelings about the Truth: Putting more focus on ideas and feelings about the Truth than on the Truth Itself is a grave and a common error. The Truth is not ideas and/or feelings about what is really going on, but what is really going on itself. The way forward is to relate ideas and feelings to the Truth more and more meaningfully — a process that self-defeats to the degree we confuse ideas/feelings with the Truth. When you put too much stock in ideas and/or feelings about the Truth, your focus turns away from a whole-being coordination around the Truth and you confuse and frustrate yourself by more and more pathetically/desperately clutching ideas and feelings that (since they claim a clarity and certainty you deepdown know they don’t have) are ultimately meaningless to you.

[Note that notions of “there is no Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth” are just as guilty of the above-sketched error as are notions of “I know the Truth” combined with feelings of “I’ve got the Truth”.]

We could not understand, believe in, or care about literal ideas about Reality (our ideas and feelings know they can have no literal purchase on Reality). The goal is, rather, a whole-being organization around the Truth within, allowing our ideas and feelings to flow out into the world adequately in tune with the Truth. The goal is to live in and through and for the Light that Knows that and in what way it is True to say “we are all children of the Light and must be kind to grateful for ourselves and each other.”

[Note that we need some principles to help us navigate human life, since ideas are necessary for interacting with this world and our own thoughts, and without any firm principles you spend every second trying to build up to a coherent philosophy from scratch. The principles of Something Deeperism should be adopted — just not clenched too tightly. Our principles are mere ideas and are therefore at best evolving, never-quite-adequate ladders towards whole-being insight into the Truth (ie: ideas, feels, etc centered around and adequately understanding and following the Light/Truth). The goal is to create an idea-ladder that fits adequately well with our inner moment; and to travel deeper and deeper into the Truth with the help of that ladder — which adventure (to the degree it is successful) will allow the Truth to explicate Itself to our thought-as-a-whole better and better, allowing us to understand better and better in what sense any given ladder is adequate and inadequate.]

[Note that we are all already Something Deeperists. We all already know we need insight into why it is TRUE that we are all in this together in order to believe in, care about, or understand our own thinking or acting; but we also know that we will never have literal insight into such a TRUTH, and that confusing ideas about the TRUTH with the TRUTH creates a great deal of trouble. Something Deeperism is not here to reject or contradict our philosophies or religions, except to the degree they cause us to self-defeat. By explicitly stating and discussing Something Deeperism we seek only to remind us what our philosophies and religions are for: to help us to understand that and in what way it is TRUE to say we are all in this together and should be kind and respectful towards one another, and happy together, enjoying each other’s company while we work together to grow in wisdom and make things better for everyone.]

4) Something Deeperism is helpful in group settings: A philosophy of Something Deeperism can help groups recognize and make use of all the common ground their members have. Something Deeperism points out that none of our philosophies make sense to any of us in the absence of insight into and use of aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, joyfully-sharing, truly-helpful thinking and acting. And so Something Deeperism keeps us all on the same page: Whatever our differences, we can all agree on aware … helpful thinking and acting, and on the need for us all to seek wisdom. And we can all agree that wisdom is honest and kind, not dishonest and cruel; and that it is counterproductive to pretend wisdom can fit into a literal set of metaphysical, political, and/or philosophical ideas. All this agreeing implies a shared space: a place of clarity we can together inhabit and defend. We will disagree on much, but we can and should agree on (no matter what! for if we sacrifice this, we sacrifice the only coherency any of us could have) awareness, honesty, clarity, competency, accuracy, kindness, and shared joy; all bound up in a respect for wisdom and the Light that makes wisdom possible. Without these standards, all humans self-defeat; it is therefore sensible for groups to adopt them and work together to better understand them and abide by them.

AMW and BW, copyright AMW, although everybody knows this so why does he try to own it???

Objectively Cute Baby Onesies

Objectively Cute Baby Onesies

Citizens of the world past, present, and future:

This is an advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s newest product: A tiny little onepiece for very young children (babies, really) with the words “Objectively Cute” emblazoned on the front in what I can only suppose is a basically safe acrylic-type print.

A white onepiece for infants, with "Objectively Cute" in black block letters.
Click along to purchase this item of clothing for $18

$18 for a very small stretch of cotton welded into a shirt with leg holes and a button-up butt-wrap. Outrageous! But then write “Objectively Cute” on the garment. So! Now, we’ve got a novelty item; now we’ve got an idea that you can buy and so to some degree join, vote for, collaborate with, take credit for. Now we’ve got a conversation starter.

Now we’ve got something for Soren and Regine to exchange pleasantries over as they meet on cool cobblestones beneath the thin northern sun.

“Oh, yes! Clever! And there’s perhaps something to it: by the inward appropriation of the delightful fire your child lights in your heart, your subjective understanding grows in its relationship to the objective reality.”

“Yeah, I know–but it’s also kind of funny, right? How everyone says that of course they’re partial to their children and know that that colors their views and that really babies in general are delightful–but really, let the friends go on their way, leaving a mother and father to confer alone and quick as a wink its: ‘of course, our little one really is the most attractive of the bunch!’”

“Oh, yes, quite! And yet the tender glowing love that a parent has for a child, and the open-hearted love beaming out of infants even more so–these spiritual support-beams of the phenomenon of infantile cuteness are solemn and profound hints to the nature of divine love; and so this little onepiece circles the mind round and round the enchanting paradox that for mortal minds and hearts, the objective can be gained only through the subjective–we cannot mentally or emotionally grasp the nature of the one true objective reality–the divinity of God and how that divinity relates to Gods’ creation–, but through the inward process of experiencing, accepting, willing, and celebrating the love that radiates into and out of our souls, we inwardly appropriate a subjective knowledge of the divine and its ties to this world; that is to say: we grow in subjective knowledge of the objective reality.”

“Oh, yes, certainly–the T-shirt reminds us that though love is a subjective experience, it is also our only clear path to experiencing the one objective reality–the Love of God in, through, and as the world. We thought it was an interesting and a fun little garment–got it from Wandering Albatross Press, are you familiar with them?”

“No, no, I don’t believe. Do they publish many theological books? … But so wonderful to see you! Such a blessing to find you so well!”

“Yes, you too! It really is!”

What, people, do you really want? To halt capitalism and materialism and have everyone grow their own food and knit their own outfits?

Allow me to suggest: you want what you already have: a reality made entirely out of Pure Love, and a divine light working its way through all the forms, kindly and unstoppably shepherding us all home: that is to say into the path of wisdom, of a knowing goodness. And so, by all means: let’s get it together–admit we are all of one cloth and all in this together and that the direction towards better and better understanding and following love is the only path that offers any hope for any of us; by all means!, by all means, let’s quit pretending we are different from the people we think we disagree with and work together before it is too late (to keep from destroying this world and this particular adventure–not “too late” in an eternal sense; but if you like me think there are still neat things that could be done as humans, then you have a “too late” to worry about)!, certainly–by all means. But beyond that, what can we say except that this Wandering Albatross Press company is–given its setting–probably an OK thought: we’ll sell the same novelty type products you buy anyway, the ones that tickle your fancy and make a nice gift in a world where cute ideas are appreciated and gift-giving generally involves converting raw materials into finished products that are sold, admired, used for a while, and then discarded; but we’ll try to push further towards the art end of novelty gifts and wrap our gifts within more art and thought, letting publishing bleed more into novelty knick-knack capitalism, and vice-versa. Why not? Probably won’t make things worse, and might, by encouraging reflection in both us bold capitalist entrepreneurs and you poor sheep consumers (titles which of course easily switch places–at least in one’s imagination; which is to some degree a true and inspiring tale of equality and to some degree fool’s gold), do some good. So we throw our thoughts on your table.

Would you like to buy this product? Kind of charming. Might make a good gift.

This advertisement released May 25, 2015, a Monday, a Memorial Day. On Memorial Day we remember all the generally-20ish young people that have fought and often died because the leaders of the country rightly or wrongly (as the case may be; in some cases perhaps “rightly or wrongly” is an oversimplification–I don’t know) decided to involve them in a bloody conflict. Bloody conflicts are nothing new and patriotism has always had good and bad uses. Sometimes people talk about how so and so’s sacrifice shouldn’t be allowed to be in vain. What should those of us lucky enough to not find ourselves in the grind that makes humans into pulp do with our still-animated forms? Besides, I mean, have barbecues and release novelty ads for novelty products? We should at the very least avoid cynicism: our government isn’t perfect, but what that means is that we need to try to make it better, not sit around ego-tripping on the hopeless evil of politicians and/or “the other side”. How does a nation improve itself? Well, the first step is for the people living in that collective to admit that we are all human-beings. If you are alive in a place where the voice of the people has not been completely and irrevocably squelched, then you can help save your country by merely growing in wisdom and kindness–how much more pleasant that is than the sudden epiphany of the bullet!

We’ll close this ad with a poem from Herman Melville:

Shiloh: A Requiem (April 1862)
By Herman Melville
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

On Philosophical Systems

On Philosophical Systems

I once overheard some desperate wag declare, “Der Wille zum System ist ein Mangel an Rechtschaffenheit.” [“The will to a system is a lack of integrity!”]

What was he talking about? What is a philosophical system? Why is creating or supporting or using them reprehensible? What was he talking about?

A philosophical system is a framework that explains everything essential: what can be known, what is true, how you should live. It is a complete philosophy. And you can put it on like you’d put on a religion. You can wear it. It has grooves into which you can slide your intellectual and emotional thoughts, and it also has an interface with both perceptions and Reality (assuming the system believes in a Reality). So it allows your ideas and feelings to relate adequately to themselves, each other, your daily experience, and (sometimes at least) Reality.

The problem with philosophical systems is that they are just built of ideas, but human life is ideas, feelings, vague notions, and whatever-all-else. So how can a human being expect a contraption made entirely of ideas to adequately answer the questions of his or her life? Also, intellectual ideas cannot prove or disprove their own ultimate viability and/or meaningfulness. So why would you trust a fortress of intellectual ideas to keep you safe and bring you to whole-being victory?

And yet, and yet. Friends, friends, what if we calm down? What if we don’t wear philosophical systems too tightly? What if we just put them on to try a new perspective, to help guide our thinking towards better ways to address our fundamental longing to know what is going on and what should be done about it? What if we just calm the fuck down?

Certainly, a philosophical system will never be literally True, nor ever completely inhabitable/livable by human beings.

However, while a human will never fit completely within a philosophical system — and what a nauseating limit, what a tragedy if a human could fit into a set of ideas! —, systems can help us coherently organize ourselves.

One must merely remember that the intellect’s not all we are: each human conscious moment contains feelings (including both emotions and sense-perceptions), ideas, senses-of-things (prior to ideas and feelings: ur-ideas and ur-feelings together, before differentiating into ideas and feelings; for example the inner sense that eventually gets estimated up into concepts like “what I say and do matters”; another word for “senses-of-things” might be “vague notions”), and — if the song within the storm is correct — most fundamentally a Something Deeper (aka: God, the Light within, etc — we’re poetically pointing through concepts towards what is ultimately prior to concepts) that alone knows what is really going on, what really matters, and what we should actually do. And it is an intellectually unproven and unprovable intellectual prejudice that these various aspects cannot interact meaningfully with one another, with thought-tools like language, and with other human beings. [there’s some translation required to translate, for example, feelings into ideas; and all translations are imperfect; but “imperfect” does not necessarily mean “inadequate”.]

Philosophical systems like those sketched in Plato’s Republic or the Buddha’s teachings can — so long as we don’t lose sight of the fact that human conceptual structures can only be imperfect ladders and platforms in one’s climb to more and more insight into and reliance upon the Truth within — help people organize their conscious moments around the Truth.

One can benefit from trying on, for example, the general sketch of living gently and peaceably while simultaneously reaching for and seeking to flow out of the Form of the Good at one’s center (the “Form of the Good” is here another poetic formulation for that Light within which alone is wise enough to adequately advise your thought as a whole). Playing within such a intellectual/emotional/spiritual framework — presuming you don’t forget it is just a human construct and not itself the Truth (aka: the Form of the Good; aka: God) — help you organize your thought-as-a-whole better and better.

Philosophy is always like Descarte’s “Meditations” in this regard: one person tries to intellectually think-through hisorher own experience of fundamental questions about knowledge, reality, meaning, and morality (ie: formulate a coherent intellectual response to them), and then invites others to try the logic on: to see how it fits their own experiences and thinking-throughs. Even if a philosophy doesn’t spell out a system for understanding reality, it presumes a system: people always do — we always carry within our assumptions more fundamental ones about how to take in, organize, analyze, and evaluate information. So a blatant philosophical system is actually more forthcoming than much philosophical thinking: it takes great pains to tell the reader where it is coming from.

Clutching systems too tightly is indeed destructive, as trying to turn mere human ideas into eternal Truths must be; but humans need some intellectual beliefs to keep their intellects grounded and coherent, and we in any case cannot help but trust some general heuristics for how one should approach life (aka: systems) and we cannot help but believe some things (indeed radical skepticism—supposing that you need to disbelieve everything—is, self-defeatingly, both a system and belief).

So enjoy creating and using philosophical systems! Don’t clutch them too tightly, but that goes for all merely human constructs. We are merely humans, so we need to build and use merely human constructs, but our Good cannot be contained within them, because the do not adequately understand and respond to Love.

Authors: Sommerset Gone and B Willard
Copyright: AMW and Andy Watson

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!

The murder

The murder

The murder
The sin
The hate
The rape
The crime

That undid your philosophy
and showed everybody
where you really were.

It had been
a nice idea.

BW / AMW

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

Some products sold by WAP to support WAP endeavors:

Buy the Books
Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

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:
Buy the Books/Chapter
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)

An Advertisement for “Objectively Cute” baby-wrap

An Advertisement for “Objectively Cute” baby-wrap

Citizens of the world past, present, and future:

This is an advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s newest product: A tiny little onepiece for very young children (babies, really) with the words “Objectively Cute” emblazoned on the front in what I can only suppose is a basically safe acrylic-type print.

A white onepiece for infants, with "Objectively Cute" in black block letters.
Click along to purchase this item of clothing for $18

$18 for a dab of cotton welded into a shirt with leg holes and a button-up butt-wrap. Outrageous! But then write “Objectively Cute” on the garment. So! Now, we’ve got a novelty item; now we’ve got an idea that you can buy and so to some degree join, vote for, collaborate with, even–by adding to your collection of purchase-nods–take credit for. Now we’ve got a conversation starter.

Now we’ve got something for Søren and Regine to exchange pleasantries over as they meet on cool cobblestones beneath the thin northern sun. “Oh, yes! Clever! And there’s perhaps something to it: by the inward appropriation of the delightful fire your child lights in your heart, your subjective understanding grows in its relationship to the objective reality.” “Yeah, I know–but it’s also kind of funny, right? How everyone says of course they know they’re partial to their children and that that colors their views and that the truth is that of course all babies are very cute–but really, let the friends head off and leave a mother and father to confer alone, and quick as a wink it’s: ‘of course, our little one really is the most attractive of the bunch!’” “Oh, yes, quite! And yet the tender glowing love that a parent has for a child, and the open-hearted love beaming out of infants even more so–these spiritual support-beams of the phenomenon of infantile cuteness are solemn and profound hints about the nature of divine love; and so this little onepiece leads the mind round and round the enchanting paradox that for mortal minds and hearts, the objective can be gained only through the subjective: we cannot mentally or emotionally grasp the nature of the one true objective reality–the divinity of God and how that divinity relates to Gods’ creation–, but through the inward process of experiencing, accepting, willing, and celebrating the love that radiates into and out of our souls, we inwardly appropriate a subjective knowledge of the divine and its ties to this world; that is to say: we grow in subjective knowledge of the objective reality.” “Oh, yes, certainly–the T-shirt reminds us that though love is a subjective experience, it is also our only clear path to experiencing the one objective reality–the Love of God in, through, and as the world. We thought it was an interesting and a fun little garment–got it from Wandering Albatross Press, are you familiar with them?” “No, no, I don’t believe–perhaps they don’t publish very many theological books; but so wonderful to see you! Such a blessing to find you so well!” “Yes, you too! It really is!”

What, people, do you really want? To halt capitalism and materialism and have everyone grow their own food and knit their own outfits?

Allow me to suggest: you want what you already have: a reality made entirely out of Pure Love, and a divine light working its way through all the forms, kindly and unstoppably shepherding us all home–deeper into the path of wisdom, of a knowing goodness. And so, by all means: let’s get it together–admit we are all of one cloth and all in this together and that the direction towards better and better understanding and following love is the only path that offers any hope for any of us; by all means! By all means, let’s quit pretending we are different from the people we think we disagree with and work together before it is too late (to keep from destroying this world and this particular adventure–not “too late” in an eternal sense; but if you like me think there are still neat things that could be done as humans, then you have a “too late” to worry about)! Certainly–by all means. But beyond that, what can we say except that this Wandering Albatross Press company is–given its setting–probably an OK thought: we’ll sell the same novelty type products you buy anyway, the ones that tickle your fancy and make a nice gift in a world where cute ideas are appreciated and gift-giving generally involves converting raw materials into finished products that are sold, admired, used for a while, and then discarded; but we’ll try to push further towards the art end of novelty gifts and also to wrap our gifts within more layers of art and thought, letting our longing to make beautiful art bleed more into novelty knick-knack capitalism, and vice-versa. Why not? Probably won’t make things worse, and might, by encouraging reflection in both us dreamy artists / bold capitalist entrepreneurs and you dreamy art-lovers / poor sheep consumers, do some good. So we throw our thoughts on your table.

Would you like to buy this product? Kind of charming. Might make a good gift.

This released on Memorial Day, which prompted a reflection which I’ve decided to move to another post.

Published May 25, 2015
Author, excepting for the concluding poem: Bartleby Willard
Editor/ad-director/copyright keeper: Andy Watson

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is a loosely bound sketchbook: stories of his time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time; the supplementary writings will be mostly stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love (Love at a Reasonable Price) (The Apocrypha you have to pay a little more for because it isn’t really canon; it’s just other writings that happened around the same time and the same themes). 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)