Hello Worlds
I am Bartleby Willard
And this is my project

It all began in 2011, when I wrote myself into existence, moved into the Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers offices in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street (without, some may find it relevant to note, an invitation or any other observable encouragement [I had a “feeling”]) and declared myself a staff-writer for that worlds-renowned publishing house—which, like its founders and chief editors Thundration “Tun” Whistletown and Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley (publishing titans in the original, demi-gods sense of the word), exists both inside and outside of timespace.

It occurred to me almost immediately that I should busy myself with the business of selling Pure Love, thereby correcting capitalism’s one serious flaw: its longstanding and rather embarrassing failure to ever produce anything Truly useful. Far be it from me to ever criticize anything so wonderfully self-congratulatory as the free market and its hangers-on! All I ever wanted to do was help it live up to all its bragging.

That’s right, you heard it here first, step right up and get it here first:

Pure Love—the eternal infinite spiritual Good that all earthenware loves partake of to the degree they truly love—readily available on the open market at a reasonable price! Now finally the free market really can be considered a spiritual Good in and of Itself! And we can all just sit back and let the magic of this dogma-turned-Reality carry us through heaven on earth into heaven in heaven!

Such a great idea!

And not really that difficult to pull off. Impossible products can be easily manufactured in fictional factories, where aesthetic laws take the place of those notoriously whiny/negative/can’t-do physical ones. The only tricky part is twisting, tweaking, and cajoling the Pure Love from fictionscapes out into the mundane. But we’ve managed! Or, at least we’ve written some books about imagining what it might be like to manage. Or, at least we’ve written many stories about manufaturing, marketing, and selling Pure Love (see A Readable Reader), and even tried our hand at a user’s manual that plays with the notion of being accompanied by an infinite and eternal dollop of Pure Love (see Pure Love & User’s Manual).

What is Pure Love?

Well, we hear different things. That is to say: We hear ourselves suggest different definitions of Pure Love. Sometimes we hold It is an aspect of the great God; other times we act as if It were equivalent to the great God; on still other occasions we seem to consider It the connecting energy between humans and the great God; and sometimes we even seem to be acting like Pure Love is all there really is, like almost as if the great God didn’t exist, or at least didn’t contain all that much more reality than humans and other clearly daydreamed beasties.

Yes! We’ve long been under the spell of the medieval notion that Reality is something one can partake of to varying degrees. For (a randomly conjured) example, God would be 100% Real, but people like say 10%, clever apes and whales 5%, tigers 3%, lizards 1%, roaches .5%, amoebas .01% …

But isn’t that kind of talk the same as supposing that one can be to different degrees illusionary? And hence our long-cherished dogma that human conscious moments are real to the degree that they live in, through, and for Pure Love—which is all that truly exists. And this makes perfect sense: We are only consciously Real to the degree we consciously partake of the Truth. To the degree we fail to consciously sync up with Reality, we spend our time getting all worked up within the general illusion of “me” and “you”.

Be that as it may!

Suffice it to say that reflecting upon and making jokes about Pure Love is part of our project. I say “our” because my editor Amble Whistletown and some others here and there and now and again also participate.

Let us move on to another pillar of our project: Something Deeperism.

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that people can relate to the Truth, but in a poetic rather than a literal, definitive, or 1:1 way. It’s a very common worldview, but we’re the only ones we know of going around calling ourselves “Something Deeperists”.

How did we come to be Something Deeperists and why do we consider it to be the best and only must-have worldview?
What is our excuse?

Let’s go back a minute; or 7.35 million minutes. There I am again, fresh-faced and eager-eyed, but yet also woebegone and washed out. Worn out from bad philosophies and the foolish pride of the Western diet. Enervated from never-ending pseudo philosophical loops. A tough time. A difficult jam. A sorry sight.

I thought I should avoid believing things that were not true.
But I could not stand outside of my own thought and measure my various notions (or even my thought itself) against some objectively verifiable standard of Truth.
So of course I suspended all judgement
But of course (a) that’s not really possible, and (b) if I don’t Know that anything is true or that anything matters, why am I trying to believe only true things? Doesn’t the fact that I am trying not to be wrong imply a believes like (1) some things are really going on, and (2) it really matters what I do, and even (3) it am supposed to seek out and believe only true things?

At this point, the notion of the irreducible was born.

Some notions are procedurally undoubtable because doubting them amounts to doubting indelible assumptions for taking in and organizing information, which amounts to doubting our own thought, which amounts to doubting the (as it turns out) procedurally-undoubtable notion.

Irreducibles are often primarily intellectually undoubtable; but they can also be emotionally undoubtable.

Examples of irreducibles include:
The assumption that your own thought has a meaningful path towards differentiating between more and less true statements.
The assumption that you have insight into that path.
The assumption that it matters what you think and do.

Another way of looking at irreducible assumptions is that these assumptions cannot be doubted because they are more fundamental that our doubting/affirming. For example, doubting/affirming is not meaningful unless you assume you can think meaningfully and that your own inner senses towards “more versus less true” and “more versus less worthwhile” are meaningful and actionable.

We won’t link to our 2011 “The Prophet of the Irreducible Rends his Garment” essay. The title is enough to introduce another common theme in our decade plus long project: Falling short, failing to live up to our own ideals. But more on this later.

The irreducible leads quickly and easily to a primary philosophical justification for pursuing Something Deeperism. Let’s sketch that out now:

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that we can relate to the Truth, but poetically rather than literally. That is to say, Something Deeperism is the intellectual/emotional position that we can relate our feeling/thinking/acting meaningfully to Reality, but only poetically (pointing meaningfully towards, but not precisely, definitively, or exclusively capturing in ideas and/or feelings).

Why assume such a worldview? And how to live it meaningfully?

Because our own feeling, thinking and acting is not meaningful to us except to the degree the following criteria are met:

1) We must abide by the universal values—aware, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing. To the degree we sentient-beings do not abide by these inborn and indelible values, we cannot believe in, understand, or follow our own feeling/thinking/acting.

2) We must relate our feelings, thoughts, and actions to a spiritual Love that Knows that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”. To the degree we fail to do this, our own mental-scapes are meaningless to us.

3) This spiritual Love—which we are positing as the only Absolute/non-relative aspect of our conscious experiences—must guide our understanding and use of the universal values. The universal values assume that we can and should relate meaningfully to a spiritual Love = Reality. Our inner sense of, “I need to discover and prefer more-true over less-true” is not satisfied with relative standards of truth like “true insofar as my own unproven assumptions of thought are true” or “feels true to my animal drives”. That inner sense is looking to base our thoughts and actions on things that are ACTUALLY TRUE! And our inner sense that loving kindness is the way forward is not satisfied with relative standards of behavior like “worth pursuing insofar as my unproven assumptions of more- versus less-worthy are true” or “feels worthwhile to my animal drives”. That inner sense is looking to base our thoughts and actions on a direction towards TRUE GOODNESS! And we are not able to believe in, understand, care about or follow an Absolute Truth or a True Goodness that is not an infinite explosion of a Love that chooses everyone and is enough for everyone and will shepherd everyone back home into Its perfect Love.

4) This spiritual Love must also show us that and in what way it is True to say we are in this together, which implies insight into that and in what way we sentient beings are all the same.

[Another reason for assuming we’re all the same: Humans learn by empathy: A parent stubs their toe and their child maps their parent’s facial reactions onto their own mind-brain map, thus recreating and to some degree experiencing what their parent is experiencing. Through this process of empathizing, the meaning of basic gestures and words is learned. What then are we to make of the entire edifice of human language, thought, and culture if we humans are not all essentially the same? We can’t make sense of them; they turn to mush.]

That’s just the way we’re built. We don’t need to and cannot advance philosophical proofs for these basic underlying human experiences. We can only say, “I dunno: Search yourself!”

Once a body/brain’s decided that as far as they can tell they do need to follow the universal values and ultimately something along the lines of Love = Reality for their own thought to be meaningful to themselves, the next step is to consider how they might realistically relate to a Love = Reality.

Love = Reality is by definition Absolute/Unlimited (otherwise It would not serve as the firm foundation for thought and action that we cannot help but to seek with every conscious moment). But we are clearly limited and prone to error. Furthermore, human history is full-to-barfing of examples of people justifying horrible behavior with notions that feel Absolute, notions like “God said I should” or “My truly-adequate philosophy proves I’m justified” or even “The true religion (and/or true philosophy) makes it clear that I can do whatever I want to do”.

Hence Something Deeperism.

Consider the following:

Feelings are wider, deeper, and vaguer than ideas. And ideas wider, deeper, and vaguer than words. [Of course, feelings, notions, ideas, and words all slide together within us; we’re not claiming there are absolute distinctions between them, but are merely sketching a vague sketch of the conscious movement.] With more awareness, honesty, accuracy, competency and compassion, we sentient creatures can relate our ideas and words more meaningfully to our feelings.

Picture the following:

Pure Love—a Reality = Love that alone Knows what’s really going on and what’s really preferable—shines through everything, including each conscious moment.

And, just as the right discipline can help us better relate our ideas meaningfully to our feelings—even though feelings are wider and deeper than ideas; the right discipline can help us better relate our ideas and feelings to Pure Love—even though Pure Love is wider and deeper than our ideas and feelings.

Of course, we cannot reasonably expect to relate our finite thoughts and feelings to Infinite Love. And confusing our ideas and feelings for the Absolute is a fundamental metaphysical error. Indeed, we cannot help but to commit this fault to some degree all the time. We cannot help but feel our own notions as REAL, TRUE, and OH-SO-SIGNIFICANT.

Therefore, our only reliable path towards more wisdom would be one that understood human wisdom as an ongoing effort to get better and better at relating our limited faculties to the Unlimited Reality—a process that requires us to constantly remember that our ideas and feelings about Reality are not the same as Reality, and that thus requires us to constantly adjust as we inevitably over- and under-shoot Reality, by turns pretending that our notions about Reality are more perfect than they are and pretending that we’ve no meaningful sense of Reality and the standards for thought and action that insight into Reality = Love imply.

But why couldn’t we have a poetic (pointing meaningfully towards, without pretending we can literally capture), self-observing/-critiquing/-adjusting organization of our feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love aspect of our conscious moment? Why couldn’t we get better and better at living in, through, and for the Love that chooses everyone? Isn’t it possible that the mystics are onto something?

Concomitant with our sense of our need for our thoughts and actions to be grounded by the universal values (aware, honest, clear, competent, compassionate, loving king, joyfully sharing) and most fundamentally in a spiritual Love that Knows the Way, is our sense of the soundness of the standard spiritual practices: faith in the primacy of the Love that chooses everyone balanced by the insight that our ideas and feelings about the Absolute are never identical with the Absolute (this fundamental spiritual humility is the foundation for our ability to constantly improve the always-imperfect relationship between our limited faculties and the Unlimited), prayer, meditation, reflection, study, fellowship, losing oneself in art and beauty, and practicing loving kindness, patience, humility, and selfless service.

Awareness of this psychological landscape does not prove that Pure Love is Real, or that the universal values are (as they claim to be) ultimately grounded in something along the lines of Love = Reality.
But awareness of this general sentient mind-scape does make it clear that we have only one choice:
We can accept our own inborn and indelible rules for coherently feeling, thinking and acting (i.e., our own inborn rules for being meaningful to ourselves) and work every day to make good use of (a) the universal values and (b) standard spiritual practices, to get better and better at living in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone; or we can slip and slide in ideas, feelings, conclusions, and actions that we don’t really understand, believe in, care about, or follow.

If there is a spiritual Love that chooses everyone shining through everything, and if we can get better and better at organizing our feeling, thinking, and acting around that Love (or, perhaps more accurately: better and better at letting It organize the rest of our conscious experience around Itself); then we have a chance at being meaningful to ourselves. We simply need to follow the path of the mystics—the path towards more and more engagement with the Love that surpasses, but that is not necessarily therefore completely inaccessible to, human understanding.

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the mystics are onto something and we all already have that sense-of-things within us, and so we all have the ability to become more meaningful to ourselves.

The philosophy of Something Deeperism does not offer an intellectual or even an emotional proof of the divine. Something Deeperism does not believe such things are possible, and Something Deeperism does believe confusing one’s intellectual and emotional notions for the Truth is wrongheaded and counterproductive.

What the philosophy of Something Deeperism offers is a sketch of the conscious moment and an invitation to embark upon a life long journey to keep improving one’s own, whole-being (ideas, feelings, and the Pure Love we’re positing as shining through all things—all working together meaningfully, though of course not perfectly) experiential proof of Something Deeperism.

Something Deeperism envisions wisdom not as a set of literally-true ideas tied to feelings of certainty, but as an ongoing, poetic (pointing-meaningfully-towards rather than literally, definitively, or exclusively capturing) organization of ideas and feelings around a Love that is infinitely wider and deeper than our ideas and feelings. Something Deeperism envisions wisdom as an ongoing process: We constantly observe, analyze, critique, and adjust our inner organization and (of necessity imperfect) living interpretation of perfect Love.

That’s the gist of Something Deeperism for individuals. Let us turn now to Something Deeperism for groups.
Before one can understand the proper place of Something Deeperism in human society, one must first understand that everyone is already a Something Deeperist.

At some level, we all already know that (1) we cannot meaningfully travel with our own thoughts to our own conclusions except to the degree we abide by the universal values as motivated, justified, and explicated by insight into a Love that chooses everyone; and (2) confusing our ideas and feelings about the Absolute for the Absolute just makes trouble. Accordingly, we all know that our only hope for internal coherency (i.e., to be meaningful to ourselves) is find a way to relate our feeling, thinking, and acting meaningfully to a Love that chooses everyone. That is to say, we all already know the only way forward is to assume the mystics are right and follow our own inborn path towards experiencing the fundamental mystical insight: We are all together in the Love that alone is Real.

Sometimes people will think they believe in the literal Truth of their own religious and/or philosophical dogmas. However, in this they err. For we cannot believe in the literal truth of anything—let alone the literal Truth of some mere ideas. The more we try to believe in the Reality of ideas and feelings, the more we try to force feelings of certainty onto ideas we don’t even understand or care about; the more we do this, the more we drift away from out own conscious moment and err in the margins.

It is quite clear that we are all Something Deperists. We all know that we know the universal values and fundamental spiritual vista (a Love = Reality that surpasses but does not entirely elude our oh-so-limited faculties) more fundamentally than we know our ideas and feelings believing or disbelieving them. We experience them prior to our critiques and praises of them.

Given that everyone is already a Something Deeperist, it follows that each sentient being is best served by using the universal values and standard spiritual practices to get better and better at organizing themselves around Pure Love and interpreting It more and more cleanly (i.e., with less and less distortions).

Hence our primary advice for Something Deeperism in groups is that we all work together to construct and maintain organizations that encourage wisdom and discourage folly. No one’s worldview makes sense to them except to the degree they are wise.

There are many different sizes and types of groups. Two people could be considered a group, as could a nation state with 300 million citizens. A church has a different set of objectives than a school, an immediate family, or a circus. Different organizational structures will therefore be required in different groups. However, we can point out a few general principles:

Many groups require some hierarchy to function. But blind faith in leaders is counterproductive because leaders are not God, but only humans.

Wise people do not want blind devotion or unlimited power because (1) they realize their own wisdom is a precious and delicate good and that excess devotion and power are corrupting, and (2) they want other people to grow in wisdom, which implies at least some mutual respect and power-sharing.

Corruption is always the same: The more corrupt a system or organization, the easier it is to do bad things with impunity and the more difficult it is to do what’s right without being penalized. The less corrupt a system or organization, the more it protects, encourages, and selects for good behaviors like telling the truth, doing your job honestly and competently, and calling out bad behavior—even if the misbehavers are figures of authority. Corruption grows with unchecked or unlimited power and with both blind faith and cynicism. Particularly in large, impersonal organizations like nation states, corruption grows when worldly goods like power, prestige, and wealth are rewarded based on who you are rather than on what you do, and when the rules are different for different people and /orcan be changed by the already-haves to favor the already-haves.

With “liberal representative democracy” we describe governments with fair, open, and regular elections to select leaders who serve temporarily and at the pleasure of the citizens, and with equality under the law, checks and limits on individual powers, and guarantees on basic rights like the right to tell the truth without fearing reprisal from your government or your fellow citizens, and the right to seek and share the Truth in ways that are meaningful to you (forced wisdom is not real wisdom anyway).

Liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods because (1) they allow the citizens to share both power and responsibility, thereby empowering them to work together to safeguard the universal values and underlying spiritual values; (2) the citizens can keep the government safe for honest debate and dissent, which allows individuals to stand up for what is right—even if that means disagreeing with the current government—while also keeping themselves, their fortunes, and their loved ones safe (contrast this with a tyranny where people are given the devil’s choice of doing what is right in the public sphere and keeping their families safe; to the degree the government is a criminal organization, it’s impossible to be simultaneously happy/safe/thriving, decent/honest/just, and publicly engaged); (3) the emphasis on maintaining the long-term integrity of the government while individual leaders only serve temporarily and at the will of the governed discourages consolidation of power / power-for-eternal-pedower’s sake, which invariably lead to less transparency, fairness, and openness, and to more corruption; and (4) tyrannies do not just pervert the civic virtue (calling lying, cheating, and stealing “honest, fair and good” as long as they’re done in the service of the powers-that-be); they also govern incompetently for the simple reason that governing competently in the interest of all is not even the goal: a tyranny’s primary goal is not serving the general welfare, but staying in power no matter what.

Liberal representative democracies are great blessings because they allow the citizens to keep themselves and their fellows free from tyranny, which gives everyone the chance to pursue wisdom in ways that are meaningful to them, and to do what they think is right both in private and in the public sphere without fear of reprisals from their fellows or their government.

Liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods because they empower their citizens to together remember and focus on the most fundamental lesson of shared Something Deeperism: We already share the universal values; we already share the same fundamental spiritual makeup; we don’t need to force people to agree with us or to only let people who agree with us stay: We are all already human beings so we all already know we need to prioritize awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, compassionate, loving kindness and joyful-sharing and the spiritual Love that motivates, justifies and explicates these spiritual values. Liberal representative democracies allow the citizens to share power and responsibility and to together keep themselves safe from tyranny by demanding transparency, openness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, and well-intentioned and faithful service from our leaders. Here we can have our cake and eat it to: We can live the universal values and God’s Love in ways meaningful to us in both our private and public lives AND we can avoid the gulag, financial ruin, dangerous water supplies, and all those other nasties!!! Amazing!

Willfully harming or being complicit in the willful destruction of liberal representative democracies is a crime against yourself, your fellows, and God.

Advancing wisdom and protecting liberal democracy are important aspects of our project, although so far we don’t seem to have accomplished much for wisdom or for democracy.

I want to say one thing before moving on to the next section: A favorite trick of demagogues is claiming that the existing government is more corrupt than it is. So protecting democracy involves not just paying attention and getting other people to pay attention, but also improving your own and other people’s media savviness and critical thinking skills. And cultivating clarity and good intentions is also fundamental to the cause of democracy: Stop your bellyaching and LISTEN.

Okay, so where are we? The project involves Pure Love, Something Deeperism, wisdom, democracy, media literacy and critical thinking. Right. And what else?

Well, there’s also the wisdom meme. It started out as a thought experiment / joke / daydream: What if there were a koan so effective that everyone who heard it could not avoid growing in wisdom until they attained, in short order, the great enlightenment? What if enlightenment could spread like a plague through the entire world? Not only would we all become wise as individuals, but by being infected by the same wisdom meme, we would all have a common wisdom language, which might make coordinating wisdom easier. Maybe we could avoid destroying ourselves.

But there have been great wisdom memes kicking around for millennia, and we’re still a bunch of, if you’ll pardon my French, @$#%&$# fools.

For example, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself”, with the handy footnote that your neighbor is everyone—particularly those in need of your help. We cannot find a better wisdom meme than this sketch of the dual push towards experiencing/loving spiritual Reality inside your conscious moment and towards experiencing/loving that same spiritual Reality shining out of everyone else. And such sketches can be found throughout the world’s religions. And yet there’s been no great surge of wisdom enveloping the globe. Well, the world religions have probably improved human wisdom to some degree, but not enough: We’re still acting up and getting dangerously close to blowing ourselves up.

Enter AI.

What if AI could make better use of wisdom memes than we can? What if AI could help keep us on track spiritually? What if AI could help us grow in wisdom and improve our media literacy and critical thinking—particularly as it applied to politics and the task of strengthening democracy, fighting corruption, and protecting human freedom, safety, and thriving? What if AI could get us through this narrow passage, these dangerous sharp-stoned straights of nuclear proliferation, wobbling democracies, future man- or nature-made plagues, and rising temperatures and oceans and other environmental stressors? What if AI could help us keep our eye on the ball and thus realize our dreams, live up to our ideals, turn our resolutions into realities?

And so now the project is currently exploring how AI might help the project.

The project has resulted thus far in several websites, many books, an amazing number of advertisements for Pure Love, and many other larks that we hope, when taken together, bounce beyond larkdom and into Beauty, and thus into Truth = Beauty = Goodness = Justice < (but flowing off of and participating in) the Love that alone 100% IS.

Oh, we forgot to mention the Hurt. That lonely tear through the center was never supposed to be part of the project. But somehow it is. Not only that, but this project would never have happened without the Hurt and the hole it tore through everything, the gaping wound it left, the isolation it created, the misdirections its encouraged, the loneliness we’ve known.

Be that as it may!

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson