Enlightenment is when the components of one’s thought-as-a-whole — feelings and perceptions, vague notions, ideas, and the Pure Love that shines through everything (including each conscious moment) — are well-enough organized and relate meaningfully-enough to one another that one perceives what is truly going on and moves in accordance with what is truly going on in a way that allows one to reflect Pure Love in all that one feels, thinks, says and does.

Enlightenment is an accurate poetic interpretation — that is to say adequately Beautiful — of the Love that chooses everyone always forever. Wisdom is an ongoing self-critiquing and -improving back and forth between higher and lower degrees of enlightenment: as you are closer to complete enlightenment, you are perceiving more Reality and less reality and are thus less connected to feeling and thinking. So you have to learn to move up to experience the Truth directly and hag on to some meaningful sense of It as you slide back down to where you can use feelings and ideas to interpret Pure Love in your day-to-day. I don’t know that people ever attain complete enlightenment, but we don’t have to do that; we just have to on the whole get closer and closer to complete enlightenment in our higher levels and keep a better and better sense of the Truth as we slide down into feelings and ideas. In this way we can relate our lives better and better to the Pure Love that alone Knows what’s really what, and thus grow in blessedness.

With a traditional koan, one mulls over it for a long time and/or prepares with meditation and other spiritual practices for a long time prior to hearing it; and then, perhaps in time with enough effort and luck, the koan reveals the Truth and one is enlightened (best case scenario) or has a moment of insight that one can keep coming back to and work with to continue growing towards the great enlightenment (probably a more typical success story).

The wisdom meme is an easy koan: once you are exposed to it, you cannot escape enlightenment. Because the koan is so delicious and yet so wholesome. You cannot shake it and it sinks deeper and deeper into and wider and wider through your conscious space, organizing your feeling and thinking better and better around the aspect of your conscious experience that should rule your conscious experience: The Love that is Reality and Truth and Goodness: An infinite creative compassionate joy in giving.

Yes, Pure Love is the Great God. For what could God be but infinite creative compassionate joyful giving? Is creation itself not an infinite giving and more giving always gushing forth with selfless giving?

Something Deeperismm is the general worldview that there is a Truth, and humans can relate meaningfully to It:
Just not in a literal/definitive/1:1 exclusive kind of way.

After all, the Truth would have to be beyond our self-admittedly fallible feeling/thinking/acting; so the best we could hope for would be to organize ourselves around the Truth well enough that we could — given the continuous gentle effort of calm abiding — poetically interpret the Truth into words and deeds in a way that was essentially true to the Truth.

Indeed, confusing feelings and/or ideas about the Truth for the Truth Itself is a spiritual error, and when indulged in too much (ie: when one is too literal and dogmatic), the upshot is that one grasps feelings and ideas tighter and tighter even as one understands them less and less, and so one drifts further and further from meaningful engagement in the Truth, and more and more into the chaos of ultimately unfounded feelings and ideas. All feelings and ideas that are not rooted in the Truth are ultimately foundationless: They are and deep inside know themselves to be, nothing but the random conjecture of animal hoots and hollers. So to the degree one confuses ideas and/or feelings for the Great God, one inhabits one’s own ideas and feelings less and less even as one tries more and more desperately to be them, and one’s ideas and feelings become less and less meaningful to one.

The only way forward, therefore, is for humans to find a way to relate meaningfully to the Truth (so their own ideas and feelings can be meaningful to them); while keeping in mind that this process must always be an imperfect and ongoing one (because feelings and ideas and words about and actions undertaken for the Truth are not the same as the Truth Itself). We have to keep working with the Truth to relate better and better to the Truth.

Spiritual error is inevitable for humans — since we cannot help but falter into nihilisms (giving up on meaningfulness) and romanticism (imaging we have meaningfulness locked down).

[Please note that it is possible to indulge simultaneously in nihilism and romanticism. Boasting that there is no Truth or that one can know nothing is nihilism because it denies the possibility of meaningfulness; it is also romanticism because it feels like a great Truth to the boaster — at the bar, beer in one hand and cig in the other. Perhaps this is why Epicurus defined radical skepticism as a self-defeating logos. This begs the question why the Academics, being radical skeptics, said they experienced — quite by accident and of course not seeking anything at all — experienced moments of enlightenment while suspending all belief and disbelief. The riddle solves itself when one notes that suspension of all judgement can be a type of meditation. Perhaps with a better surrounding philosophy (one that connected more realistically to the human psyche and human experience), these Academics would’ve been able to grow deeper and wider in wisdom — like cliff dwellers with sturdier and more ergonomic ladders. On the other hand, people can make messes of even the best philosophies. I know a couple obsessive Something Deeperists who often seem to lack even the most basic wisdom.]

The point of Something Deeperism is to try to reduce spiritual error by keeping first things first: We need to seek insight into the Truth; and we need to remember that our insight into the Truth will never be perfect or complete, but must always be an imperfect and ongoing work-in-progress.

Both the impetus and the boundaries of Something Deeperism are spiritual wagers that one must accept and succeed at if one is to be meaningful to oneself.

The spiritual wagers that one must succeed in to be meaningful to oneself can be sketched in different ways. We submit the below as one that we hope is neither onerously complex nor over-simplified:

The Truth must exist. And one must relate meaningfully to the Truth.
[In order to have a firm foundation for knowledge. Because without an absolute standard, one slides meaningfully about in unfounded conjectures that deep inside one cannot even pretend to truly understand, believe in, or care about.]

The Truth must be gentle and kind. It must love and accept and compassionate and love-lift everyone always forever. And one must perceive the Truth as being that way.
[otherwise the Truth is not like what we feel It must be, and we can neither relate meaningfully to It nor stand our lives at all.]

All humans must be essentially the same. And we must perceive that essential sameness.
[Otherwise life is too lonely to bear. Also, if we are not essentially all the same, than all individual and shared human knowledge becomes meaningless mush. How do we learn? Through empathy. My father stubs his toe; he grabs it and yells that it hurts; I map his facial expressions and actions and recreate what he is feeling inside of me and so I learn what “it hurts!” means. If humans are not essentially the same, then what have I just learned? Nothing. All is meaningless noise between humans and thus inside humans as well, since we build our worldviews by interacting with other humans.]

One must feel/think/speak/act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing and giving. And while growing in wisdom, one must gain insight into why these values are preferable and how to better live them.
[The universal values are all either logically and/or emotionally necessary for us to be able to understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting. To the degree we do not follow the universal values, we do not meaningfully inhabit our own thoughts and actions, and we are like a ship whose rudder and sails are being randomly tossed this way and that. We founder and sink. Therefore the universal values must segue meaningfully with the Truth: the Truth must explicate them and help us employ them.]

Something Deeperism does not claim that the above sketch of the Truth is True. It just points out that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we discover that and in what way they are True. Sometimes we’ll try to summarize the general situation with: Our feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree that we discover that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together.”

Something Deeperism argues only that we find ourselves within ourselves in this situation: The Truth must be Real and It must be Kind and we must be able to relate meaningfully to It while following our inborn rules for feeling/thinking/acting; Otherwise, we have no hope for feeling/thinking/acting in ways that are meaningful to us as individuals or as groups of individuals.

For individual conscious spaces, Something Deeperism suggests a non-literal but serious spiritual effort. We try to organize our feeling/thinking/acting around the Light of Pure Love shining through each conscious moment. We try to find and grow our sense of that Love. Through the standard spiritual practices of prayer, meditation, contemplation, study, conversation, practicing gentle loving kindness, humility, and selflessness. Something Deeperism does not tell anyone to give up their religion or philosophy; it just reminds us all that no worldview is meaningful to any of us except to the degree that it helps one better organize one’s feeling/thinking/acting around the Love that loves everyone always and forever; and that for humans that process of growing in internal meaning (meaning to one’s self) requires adherence to and growth within and through the universal values.

For groups of individuals, the situation is a little trickier. Too rigid a shared dogma tempts people to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things. But too loose a shared dogma and we cannot meaningfully relate to one another.

The good news is that we all must and already do share the ethos and values sketched out above. Because, as we’ve said, none of us can be meaningful to ourselves except insofar as we flow meaningfully off of Pure Love into life while remaining within the psychological boundaries created by the universal values.

The bad news is the same old news as always: We humans are full of shit and will say anything to trick ourselves and others into giving us whatever it is that we want.

Still, we should be able to agree to keep first things first: Let us not abandon Love or the universal values for anything ever. Because to the degree we do so, we become less meaningful to ourselves and to each other.

This is why liberal representative democracy is a spiritual good. In a liberal representative democracy, the many can mostly go about their lives pursuing their own paths while still having enough insight into and leverage over their government to serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government. And to effectively do so we the people must create and maintain fair elections, an impartial and universal rule of law, a transparent system with anti-corruption measures built in — including but not limited to separation of powers and limits on individual powers — , free and open debate, freedom from unjust punishment and other protections of basic human rights: all the goods that we should — in trying to follow the universal values — be working to create and strengthen anyway.

What is madness and corruption? They slide into one another. It becomes difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. And they are the same thing both within individual conscious moments and between individuals: The more crazy/corrupt a mind or an organization, the easier it is for bad impulses, ideas, and behaviors to gain and keep power; and the harder it is for good impulses, ideas, and behaviors to gain and keep power.

For an individual example of madness and corruption in action, one has a hurt in their gut that never lets up a deep emotional pain and one tries to get away from it by drinking and/or imagining one’s essaying is somehow going to save the day (just like how one more drink will save the day, one more essay can make the same claim of salvation) and just generally indulging in momentary rushes / empty distractions; then this corruption inside of one is being addressed with further corruption; the wiser would be to accept the hurt screaming inside bleeding out everywhere and to seek for a way to heal, rather than just ways to escape.

For a group example of madness and corruption in action, a leader tries to subvert democracy by convincing election officials to cheat for them and by encouraging physical rebellion, rather than accepting a well-demonstrated fair outcome and being glad to partake in the miracle of the non-violent transfer of power — regardless of whether one is coming or going from power for that moment. These actions if accepted will corrupt democracy. We should together gently but firmly agree that we cannot allow for individuals to subvert our shared resource of a flawed but still workable representative democracy. Yes, our republic is in need of improvements, but real ones — ones that gently and carefully (that is to say: with shared compassion and wisdom / with one accord) improve our shared situation –; not “improvements” that chaotically smash everything to pieces (what happens when the dust clears? Does wisdom reign? Or rather some strongman who is more interested in maintaining power than using it wisely and to the benefit of all?)

For individuals and for groups, corruptions/madnesses can be moments to stop and gently reorganize around the calm abiding of a gentle and loving resolve to seek what is best for all while remembering that none of us are perfect and we should treat ourselves and others with care, while remaining within the limits outlined by the universal values. Or we can let corruptions/madnesses panic and coral us into more corruption and more madness and more waste of focus, of time, of energy, of material and financial and ecological resources, of love.

Something Deeperism centered around the search for greater and greater meaningful organization around the Pure Love that we sense within to be deeper and wider and more fundamental than any explanations of It or arguments for or against Its Reality is a philosophy that people of all different faiths and philosophies can agree on, because it only says what we all already know: My faiths and philosophies are only meaningful to the degree they help me live aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully sharing and giving — better and better translating Pure Love into my feeling/thinking/acting; no it’ll never be perfect and pretending one’s wisdom is perfect is a great way to be less wise; so what we describe here is a process of seeking the gentle kindness that knows and does what is best for all.

But Something Deeperism, for all its merits, is not a wisdom meme. It is a philosophy. The wisdom meme must be a wisdom seed that is so fertile that it blossoms into life-overflowing in all soils — no matter how sandy, rocky, or generally iffy.

The Wisdom Meme

Human conscious space is comprised of feelings and sensations, vague notions, ideas, and the Pure Love that shines through everything — including each human conscious moment.

Is this true?

Well, we can only understand, believe in, or care about our own feelings, thoughts, and actions to the degree we discover that and in what way it is True. [That’s just how we’re wired.] But confusing ideas and feelings about Pure Love for Pure Love Itself is self-defeating (ie: literal dogmatism is self-defeating).

Wisdom is an ongoing self-critiquing/-correcting organization around and poetic interpretation of (not literally defining, rather imperfectly but still meaningfully sketching/pointing-towards) the Love that chooses everyone always; the Love that agrees with and explicates the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing and giving feeling/thinking/acting.

As groups and as individuals, we can and should agree to keep first things first:

Let us not sacrifice the universal values or Pure Love for anything. After all, we can only understand, believe in, or care about our own worldviews to the degree that they help us follow the universal values and interpret Pure Love into human feeling/thinking/saying/doing.

That vow doesn’t imply perfection — just consistently, calmly and gently prioritizing the universal values and the Love that makes life meaningful.

Pretending we can do anything perfectly is a good way to bamboozle us into throwing away what we already have.

The better way is to accept that growing in individual and shared wisdom is an ongoing process and that — the point of life being the gentle Love that lives in and through and between each of us — the only way forward is gentle continuous careful improvement in relentless compassion for ourselves and everyone.*

What?
I’m just here at
this
nice peaceful sunshiny
red and white checker linen spread on green bending grasses
so glad I’m not in a war zone or a political prison
picnic
for the free food.
Where’s the olive oil?

…

So there’s a thought.
Maybe you could help us come up with some more wisdom memes?
Maybe that could be a fun shared project?

*You stand tall and you stand strong
You try ruthless compassion
For yourself and for everyone
Yeah it’s hard but it can be done

is from “Til I Whisper you something” by Sinead O’Connor.
I think maybe these few lines are a better wisdom meme than we came up with.
And maybe we won’t find a better one. Sinead’s wisdom meme makes you want to give the path of wisdom a try, and it explains the essential motion of that path succinctly, and it recognizes both that it is difficult (and thus ongoing and self-critiquing and -adjusting) and yet possible.

We changed “ruthless” to “relentless” not because we think “relentless” is more apt, but because, though Sinead clearly means “ruthless against any lapse in compassion”, we worry people may hear “ruthless” and get the wrong idea (and also because relentless underscores the idea of an ongoing process). Still, that’s part of what makes Sinead’s koan so powerful: The “ruthless” catches in one’s mind as being a little out of place when talking of compassion; so then one has to consider the matter a little more deeply. No, we’re not likely to improve upon Sinead’s wisdom koan very much no matter how we try. In fact the little tweak we made almost certainly did more harm than good.

But then surely wisdom memes are useless, for there has been no enlightenment-surge within the Sinead O’Connor fan community (we know because there has been no surge in enlightenment at all); nor does Sinead herself seem to consistently flow off Pure Love with minimal distortions/confusions of the eternal blessedness of kind delight — I mean, not any more than lots of people who just kind of muddle through as we all do.

Hmmmm.

Can someone please help?
Some great spiritual genius?
Or lucky poet?

Authors/Editors: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown

Still kind of long

Our feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree we gain active insight into the Reality of the Pure Love (an infinitely giving spiritual love that chooses everyone always forever) we sense shining through every conscious moment.

Similarly, our feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree we feel/think/act in accordance with the universal values: aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing and giving.

Wisdom is an ongoing self-critiquing/-correcting organization around and poetic interpretation of (not literally defining, but rather imperfectly but still meaningfully sketching/pointing-towards) the Love that chooses everyone always; the Love that agrees with and explicates the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing and giving feeling/thinking/acting.

As groups and as individuals, we can and should agree to keep first things first:

Let us not sacrifice Pure Love or the universal values for anything.

That doesn’t mean we need to be perfect; just that we need to keep gently pushing to prioritize the universal values and the Love that makes life meaningful — in both our individual and shared systems and endeavors.

Pretending we can do anything perfectly is a good way to bamboozle us into throwing away what we already have.

The better way is to accept that growing in individual and shared wisdom is an ongoing process and that — the point of life being the gentle Love that lives in and through and between each of us — the only way forward is gentle continuous careful improvement in relentless compassion for ourselves and everyone.*

What?
I’m just here at
this
nice peaceful sunshiny
red and white checker linen spread on green bending grasses
so glad I’m not in a war zone or a political prison
picnic
for the free food.
Where’s the olive oil?

Copyright: Andy Watson

Still Too Long

Our feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree we gain active insight into the Reality of the Pure Love (an infinitely giving spiritual love that chooses everyone always forever) we sense shining through every conscious moment. Similarly, our feeling/thinking/acting is only meaningful to us to the degree we follow the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing and giving feeling/thinking/acting. [This is just the way we’re wired. To the degree we lack insight into Pure Love or fail to work within the universal values, we cannot understand, believe-in, or care-about our own feelings, thoughts, and actions.]

Pure Love would have to be prior to our ideas and feelings about It (otherwise It could not serve as the firm foundation for feeling/thinking/acting It has to be if we’re to be able to understand, believe-in, or care-about our own feeling/thinking/acting). And confusing ideas and feelings about Pure Love for Pure Love Itself is counterproductive (ie: literal dogmatism is counterproductive). But we are humans and require feelings and ideas to relate to anything.

So our only hope to be meaningful to ourselves is to cultivate meaningful but non-literal insight into spiritual Love: We have to cultivate poetic insight into It. (Our feeling/thinking/acting must point towards Pure Love. Like how a poem about a walk along the beach points meaningfully towards an experience that is ultimately beyond the words of the poem — and even beyond the ideas and feelings that inspired them).

Wisdom is an ongoing self-critiquing/-correcting organization around and poetic interpretation of (not literally defining, but rather imperfectly but still meaningfully sketching/pointing-towards) the Love that chooses everyone always; the Love that agrees with and explicates the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing and giving feeling/thinking/acting.

As we grow in wisdom we gain more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say we are all in this together.

As groups and as individuals, we can and should agree to keep first things first:

Let us not sacrifice Pure Love or the universal values for anything.

That doesn’t mean we need to be perfect; just that we need to keep gently pushing to safeguard and realize the universal values and the Love that makes life meaningful in our individual and shared systems and endeavors.

Pretending we can do anything perfectly is a good way to bamboozle us into throwing away what we already have.

The better way is to accept that growing in individual and shared wisdom is an ongoing process and that — the point of life being the gentle Love that lives in and through and between each of us — the only way forward is gentle continuous careful improvement in relentless compassion for ourselves and everyone.*

Too Long Version

We are all in this together.
Not because we say so, but because the Love that alone Knows the Way says so.

We experience this Love more fundamentally than our feelings and ideas about It. So we cannot capture It perfectly in feelings, thoughts, and actions. And it doesn’t make sense to use ideas and feelings to try to prove or disprove the Reality of this Love. But we are humans and require feelings and ideas to relate anything meaningfully to our lives.

So wisdom is a path. It is an ongoing self-critiquing/-correcting organization around and poetic interpretation (not literally defining, but rather imperfectly but still meaningfully sketching/pointing-towards) the Love that chooses everyone always; the Love that agrees with and explicates the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing and giving feeling/thinking/acting.

To the degree we fail to meaningfully follow Pure Love and/or feeling/thinking/acting in accordance with the universal values; we are meaningless to ourselves. A human requires active insight into Pure Love and the universal values in order to understand, believe-in or care-about their own feeling/thinking/acting.

As we grow in wisdom we gain more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say we are all in this together.

As groups and as individuals, we can and should agree to keep first things first:

Let us not sacrifice Pure Love or the universal values for anything.

That doesn’t mean we need to be perfect; just that we need to keep gently pushing to safeguard and realize the universal values and the Love that makes life meaningful in our individual and shared systems and endeavors.

Pretending we can do anything perfectly is a good way to bamboozle us into throwing away what we already have.

The better way is to accept that growing in individual and shared wisdom is an ongoing process and that — the point of life being the gentle Love that lives in and through and between each of us — the only way forward is gentle continuous careful improvement in ruthless compassion for ourselves and everyone.*

You stand tall and you stand strong
You try ruthless compassion
For yourself and for everyone
Yeah it’s hard but it can be done

Stand up within yourself (push out from within so that the Light inside explodes out through to the Light outside)
Spiritual growth as an attempt, as an ongoing experiment
Experiment in what?
In the spiritual wager: Love is Real
To win the wager you have to draw the conclusions of the wager while simultaneously seeking for more and more insight into that and in what way the wager is True
Perfect equality within the spirit: placing yourself neither above nor below others
What we all sense about the spiritual wager: it is not an easy way, but it is worth the effort: ongoing, always the chance of error, but always the chance of improvement, and the only way to be yourself is to seek more and more active wisdom / loving kindness

But what about the ruthless compassion?

And above we failed to discuss how knowledge works
We point with ideas and feelings towards experiential senses-of-things.
The only way knowledge can be firm is if there is a knowable/quantifiable and acceptable gap between what we are pointing towards and the ideas and feelings we’re using for the pointing.
But without an Absolute Standard of Truth, we have no idea how close we are getting towards an accurate portrayal of what we think we’re describing (how can ultimately unfounded support beams support anything?).
Hence the need for an Absolute Standard of Truth, and the need to have a meaningful sense of how close our ideas and feelings are getting towards relating to It.
How does that work?
Suppose Reality = Love = Knowledge = Truth. Then there is no gap between Reality and Knowledge and Truth and Love, so Love is an Absolute Standard of Truth; and so we could relate poetically to Reality by better and better organizing ourselves around Love; so we could gain more and more insight into that and in what way it is True to say Love is All.

Ruthless compassion is refusing to compromise about loving yourself and everyone else with spiritual love. It is like Jesus’s answer to what is the most important commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul; and your neighbor as yourself. And active experiential, exploratory, self-correcting dual motion into the Light within and outward into a participation in the reality that this Light shines in everyone else.

But it’s hard to get it right. Too easily what we refuse to compromise on is not loving kindness, but following some other ideas and feelings that have gotten wrapped up with our conception of spiritual growth. Hence violence (physical, emotional, procedural) in the name of Love, and other painful errors.

human ideas and feelings point imperfectly towards experiences — be they conceptual or otherwise

If human thought as a whole includes Love = Truth = Reality = Goodness = the Way, then that Love can guide one’s thought as a whole towards better and better relating ideas and feelings to Itself. Not literal knowledge of Love; but poetic knowledge of Love (poetic knowledge of Knowledge = Love … = the Way). This is our best hope. And it is not an endpoint, but a process, a continuous effort of self-assessment, and -adjusting; a never-ending gentle effort in and for and through the Love that chooses us all always.