Love Case Study

An exercise in applied love

Bartleby Willard has written a great deal about Pure Love. But has this writing ever meaningfully connected anyone to Pure Love? Has the author himself even grown in wisdom after a decade of metaphysical stories, poems, essays, and advertisements?

Enough is enough! Either Pure Love exists or It doesn’t. And either Something Deeperism is a viable path to and from Pure Love, or it isn’t.

So what’s it gonna be, Bartleby?

We’ve brought him a sorry subject. A man destitute of funds, of romance, of vision.

A man who cannot lift a wine glass without draining the bottle and exclaiming at long-jawed barkeeps with redlipstick-lips and cheerfully popping blue eyes and soft-curling mousebrown hair—fretting inanely to these poor souls about get me out of this place, this music is so terrible, how did this happen?, a music empty going nowhere, a culture reduced to mumbling over fake drums and other bits of lifeless tinsel!

A broken man in a nation divided where many cheer for a takeover by a would-be fear-state tyrant. A broken man who’d wanted to help and be fulfilled: to be a part of it in a meaningful way; but who now just wants a hug and nuzzle from a young lady who needs a better bet than he seems to be able to be.

Help him, then, with your high-flying ideas! Bid them land and lay still long enough that he might mount and be lifted up beyond himself, beyond his weaknesses, beyond this cracked shell that he’s come to suppose he must after all amount to.

The project is now two entries long. In the first, we introduce the concept, the doctors and the patient. In the second we give an overview of the medicine. Below we link to and excerpt from both posts.

1. Applied Love

None will deny that Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown are world class experts in Pure Love experts; but their expertise has heretofore been almost entirely theoretical in nature.

And what good is that? What good are ideas that don’t actually help real people?

Let’s be fair. They did create a Loving Relationships section in their Love Book, where they discuss what love is, how romantic love works, what faith is, and so on. And they even tried to expand into the business world — whose leaders are always eager to maximize the Pure Love they produce — with a section on Business Ethics. But let’s be fair: no one has ever read any of these writings, and they are not so much objectively verified insights and proven strategies, as some ideas that Bartleby and Amble came up with while considering the issues. Ditto for their prestigious Something Deeperism Institute. That is to say: even their attempts at practical love have been largely theoretical.

Hence this new project. We have brought our men a man. A regular human man. But one with some issues. One who can’t quite put his life together, and one who — in addition to his personal confusions, give-ups, and fall-aparts — feels his country wobbling around him and, finding neither remedy nor even meaningful response, flails about in useless fretting.

…

Challenge accepted!

But how to proceed?

Come over here, sir. Step up this way. Show the world-renown Pure Love authorities where it hurts!

In your belly? At the pit of your gut? And you’re sure this is a spiritual, not a merely physical complaint? Hmmm. Arms up. Tongue out. Repeat after me: “Lovers love lest love leave lovers lonely.” Now twice as fast. And doubled again. And again. And … stop!

What do you think, Amble?

Nothing a little dogma can’t fix!

…

Now listen to our doctrines: Pure Love and Something Deeperism.

But easy and quick — for laymen and other slouches.

Exactly! It is important that he — or, in you case you –, this poor specimen of broken hopes and derailed dreams — it is important that the patient understand the medicine.

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2. Pure Love & Something Deeperism: Quickstart Guide

Pure Love is love minus all pulls-towards and pushes-away. Pure Love is an infinite explosion of compassionately-embracing, joyfully-uplifting wisdom. Pure Love is the love that completely accepts everyone, that never lets anyone down. … Pure Love is Reality, is Truth, is Goodness, is Knowledge, is Wisdom, is God.

…

Something Deeperism as a general worldview maintains there is an Absolute Truth, and this Truth is Good, and that we sentient beings can relate meaningfully to the Truth, but not in a literal/definitive/1:1 way.

Something Deeperism assumes a fundamental psychological profile shared by all sentient beings. It assumes that we all face the same dilemma and have recourse to the same solution. …

…

What, then, would successful Something Deeperism look like in an individual life? One would every day over and over again stand up straight within one’s own conscious moment and push out from within. There would be something like Pure Love at the center of each conscious moment, and one’s feeling/thinking/acting would relate more and more meaningfully to It, and thus one’s thought-as-a-whole would understand better and better what is going on, what matters, and how to live aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, kind, and joyfully-giving. One would not have a literal idea of the Truth, but one could point to the Truth meaningfully with poetic language — allowing one to adequately communicate insights into the Truth within one’s own conscious moment, and also to others who were feeling/thinking/acting with enough awareness, … joyful-generosity to be receptive to good spiritual poetry.

…

How does Pure Love relate to Something Deeperism?

The term “Pure Love” is one way to point towards our inner sense of Absolute Truth and Goodness, of a divine Light that Knows and Is the Way.

Something Deeperism argues that we all know that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree that we move beyond both the meaningless-to-us notion of living by relative truths, and the meaningless-to-us notion of literal knowledge of Absolute Truth.

And the path that Something Deeperism as we (Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown) know it requires a nonliteral but meaningful whole-being relationship to something like Pure Love. No such relationship, and we slip and slide in speculations, vaunts, panics, give-ups, and other idea/feeling pairs that we don’t really understand, care about, or believe in; but try to make such a relationship fit into literal ideas and/or certain feelings and we again slip and slide around in notions we don’t really understand, care about, or believe in. That’s why Something Deeperism suggests the best course is a nonliteral but consistent and earnest spiritual path.

Something Deeperism can be combined with religions and various other worldviews. All Something Deeperism does is seek to keep us all from abandoning the forest for the trees: At the very least, let’s keep within what is required for any of our worldviews to make sense to any of us: aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, kind, gentle, loving, joyfully-sharing; all sustained and explicated by real insight into Loving Kindness — into what we must have insight into if we are to be meaningful to ourselves.

People know deep inside that people cannot be fully themselves except to the degree that (1) Love is Real and (2) we people can relate meaningfully to Love, to our own selves, and to others. The idea behind Something Deeperism is to accept that fundamental situation and to relate to Love, ourselves, and others in the only way such relationships can be made: not directly and literally; but organizationally and poetically.

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So what’s up next week?

We’re going to have to begin stripping the patient—get in there and start to get a sense for what makes him tick, what makes him such a mess.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson