Deep Thoughts
An Invitation to the Radiant Darkness of Depth
Welcome to The Sovereign Self — I’m John, and I’m grateful you’re here.
In our noisy, hyperactive world, something sacred is often lost: depth. This essay is a descent—not into complexity, but into a different kind of presence. Welcome.
The Calling
Lately, I’ve been drawn to the word deep—not just as a concept, but as a presence. It feels like something is calling me downward, inward, below the surface. I notice how often I skim—my work, my relationships, even my own inner life. I stay in the shallows, even when I long for more. But when I allow my mind to quiet and my soul to settle, a deepening begins. Something shifts. There’s a sense of being pulled toward the underworld of my own being—toward something quieter, older, more whole.
Much of life feels unmoored to me lately—superficial, sped up, insubstantial. The world I encounter often feels unreal, untethered. And somewhere in me, a hunger grows—not for more, not for answers, but for something truer. I feel soul-sick from the thinness of it all. The word deep arrives like medicine. It whispers of stillness, of gravity, of truth. When structures collapse and certainties vanish, I find myself reaching not for solutions, but for roots. Not for progress, but for presence. In this season of unraveling, I’m not climbing any ladders—I’m spiraling inward, seeking the center that can hold.
“I honor the place in you where the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light, and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.” —traditional definition of Sanskrit Namaste
Honoring Deep
When a word calls to me this strongly, I like to begin with its definitions—as an act of re-encountering. The first is literal: extending far down from the top or surface; having great spatial extension downward or inward—like a deep well. I can feel this in my body, a quiet gravitational pull at the lip of my own interiority, folding inward along the curved spacetime of the soul - like following the event horizon of a black hole, where inward and downward become the same motion, drawing me down and in toward the center of being.
Another definition reads: situated far down, in, or back from a surface or usual position—as in deep inside a cave. That resonates. Lately, it feels like I’ve been living too much on the edges of myself, and something in me wants to retreat—wants to rest—in the cave of the inner self.
And then there’s this one: of great intensity; extreme—as in deep sorrow, or deep gratitude. That, too, stirs something. In these last few years, even in pain and loss, I’ve found myself longing not to escape, but to feel more fully. To meet the heart of things with all of mine.
Etymologically, deep comes from the Old English “dēop” (pronounced something like “day-op”). Even then, it carried dual meanings—not just having considerable extension downward, but also profound, awful, mysterious; serious, solemn.
Further back still, it traces to the Proto-Germanic *deupaz, and ultimately the Proto-Indo-European *dheub-, meaning hollow. That root conjures images—of a cave, a chalice, a womb. “Hollow” here isn’t absence—it’s potential. It’s invitation. This kind of depth isn’t merely far down; it’s a form carved by readiness. A receptivity. Negative space as presence.
Think of the silence between notes in music. The pause in a conversation where truth lands. The open vessel that waits to be filled. This kind of depth isn’t about accumulation—it’s about holding. Not expansion, but containment. Not structure, but shape.
So the etymology gives us more than origin—it gives us metaphor. Depth not just as measurement, but as meaning. Not just distance, but dimension. A space made sacred by its capacity to contain.
But a word like deep is also shaped by what it is not. Sometimes, we come to know a thing best by contrast—by tracing its edges.
The most obvious counterpoint is superficial. Deep cuts through the surface; superficial stays on it. Depth requires attention, involvement—whether we’re talking about water, thought, or love. The ocean isn’t deep because it’s big; it’s deep because it disappears beneath us, into mystery.
Then there’s deep versus profound. These two often travel together, but they aren’t twins. Deep can be quiet, subtle, slow. Profound strikes like thunder—life-changing, awe-inducing. Profundity announces itself. Depth waits.
And then deep versus complex. A complex system may have many moving parts, but not necessarily layered meaning. Depth implies an inner logic, a discoverable architecture. A game can be complex and tedious, or simple and endlessly deep. Some conversations are the same.
These distinctions remind me that depth isn’t just a quality—it’s a kind of relationship. Not just a feature of a thing, but a way we meet it.
We also live our lives in directional metaphors. Forward is progress. Upward is growth. Outward is expansion. But deep doesn’t compete on those axes. It moves differently. It draws us down and in. It suggests not extension but intensification. Not expansion but revelation. It asks not for effort, but for surrender.
Up is the direction of enlightenment, aspiration, achievement—climbing the mountain, ascending the ladder, reaching for the divine. But sometimes, we are too tired to climb. Sometimes, we need gravity to hold us rather than altitude to attain. Depth is not height reversed—it is a return. A going under, not to escape, but to re-encounter. Spiritual depth doesn’t elevate us above others; it roots us in what is most human, most universal, most felt.
Forward is the timeline of ambition and accumulation. It’s the chase. The next thing. The breathless lean. But depth asks us to slow. To sink. To stop trying to become and instead, to be. It’s not anti-progress, but it is anti-frenzy. It’s the antidote to the forward-fling of modern life.
And outward is the direction of expansion—more reach, more contact, more visibility. But depth is not about more connection, but truer connection. Not broadcasting, but beholding. Not outreach, but intimacy. Going deep means going quiet. Going inward. Cultivating the soil before we bloom.
We need all directions. But in a world addicted to rising, racing, and reaching out, we risk forgetting the sacred geometry of going deep.
“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Depth in the World
Depth is not only something I’ve been seeking internally—it’s something I’m learning to notice in the world around me. As I move through my days, as I think, feel, relate, and reach, I find myself asking: where does depth live out here?
Let’s begin with thinking. What’s the difference between scattered, surface-level cognition and truly deep thought? (Setting aside flashbacks to Jack Handey’s deadpanned Deep Thoughts or the “Deep Thought” supercomputer from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy...) I notice that I can’t force deep thought. I have to slow down—to stop, to settle, to allow. Mental silence often precedes deeper thinking, a shift from fast-twitch heuristics to something more grounded, more contemplative. It’s not a descent by effort—it’s a softening that reveals what’s already there.
Next, I turn toward my emotional world. What distinguishes deep feeling from mood or sentiment? I notice that the full verticality of depth is always available to me—but I rarely access it. I skim. I bounce. And yet, when I slow and stay, I feel something else arise. Deep emotion requires stillness. It asks me to witness what’s occurring without judgment or reaction. The further I allow myself to go inward into that feeling space, the more my surface identities fall away—and something more essential, more being, takes their place.
With the Bee Gees, we might ask, “How deep is your love?” (“I know your eyes in the morning sun, I feel you touch me in the pouring rain...”). The song is a vulnerable plea for assurance, for reciprocity of feeling. What makes love deep? Time spent? Trust developed? The willingness to truly know and be known? These days, I find that deep love isn’t necessarily loud or dramatic. It’s presence. The capacity to be with another in stillness and silence. That electric, wordless moment when connection drops below the surface—when it enters the territory of union.
I’ve written elsewhere about my Scale of Depth Relating—from talking, to communicating, to connecting, to relating, to beholding, to encountering. All levels are available in any relationship. But how often do we dwell in the deeper ones? When was the last time I beheld someone—not just saw them, but met them in their full aliveness? Martin Buber calls this I–Thou: a moment of reverence, where the other becomes an iridescent being, undiminished by role or utility. David Brooks describes such a moment in How to Know a Person—seeing his wife step into the house, caught in a shaft of light, and for an instant, seeing all of her—across time, across story. That moment unraveled him. Not because she changed, but because he saw.
Depth shows up in time, too. I can feel I’m living on the surface of time when I’m measuring my day in seconds and to-dos. But geologists speak of deep time—epochs, not hours. If Earth’s history were a football field, human civilization would be a sliver thinner than a blade of grass at one end. While my brain struggles to hold billions of years, I can still taste deep time when I broaden my field of view. When urgency softens, and time becomes a wide, breathing presence. A long now.
Deep space feels different to write about—less personal, maybe, but not less intimate. I think of silence. Of vastness. Of the unspeakable awe that arises when I look up at the stars and sense, even for a moment, the scale of what holds us. Carl Sagan called Earth “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” And somehow, that doesn’t make me feel small—it makes me feel precious. Life is rare. Life is luminous.
Deep space isn’t just out there—it’s in here, too. It lives in the quiet between thoughts, the pause between breaths, the inner room that opens when I stop trying to be anything. When I meditate—or simply sit still long enough—something begins to unfold. Not thought. Not emotion. More like orientation. Spaciousness. And that space doesn’t want to be filled. It wants to be met.
Across all these domains—thinking, feeling, loving, relating, time, and space—the same invitation keeps arriving: slow down. Take space. Settle. Let the layers drop. Let the silence speak. Let depth come—not by reaching, but by releasing.
“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.” —Eckhart Tolle
Descent into Self
If the last section was a descent into the world, this is the descent into myself. Into the sacred presence of my own interiority. Where depth is not just something I understand or sense, but something I am.
I notice that this inward calling first arrives as yearning—a kind of soul-sickness from living too long on the edges of my own authenticity. I find myself longing to leave the shallows and inhabit the dark center of the cave of my soul. It's like I've been camping in the front yard of my own being when there's this whole unexplored territory waiting inside. So I emblazon "DEEPER" on the bus of my being (my own inward-bound version of Kesey’s “FURTHUR”) and begin the journey to the center of myself.
But before I can surrender to this calling, I have to learn to be still. Really still. Not just physically, but in that deeper way where my thoughts slow, my heart settles, my breath becomes a prayer rather than a function. There's this question that keeps arising: Do I have the patience to wait until my mud settles and the water is clear? Can I trust stillness enough to let it become the portal to my own depths?
As I settle into this stillness, something shifts in the quality of my attention. The noise around me—both external and internal—begins to fade like sediment sinking to the bottom of a jar. What emerges is not the absence of sound, but a different kind of listening. A silence that isn't empty but full, pregnant with possibility. In this quiet, what seemed so urgent a moment ago reveals itself as surface drama. I can hear what wants to speak from the deeper places. It's like tuning into a radio frequency that was always broadcasting—I just hadn't learned how to receive it.
In this deepening silence, I start to encounter my own vastness. The walls of my imagined boundaries begin to dissolve, and I come into contact with the hollow spaces within me—not hollow like lacking, but hollow like a bell or a chalice. Ready to hold, ready to resonate. Here, nothing is missing and every possibility feels present and alive. Words, thoughts, identities, and attachments all fade away in what I can only call the radiant darkness of emptiness filling my soul. It's the strangest thing—feeling most full when I'm most empty.
From this emptiness, my soul can finally unfurl. I feel my being stretch out and release all those cramped positions and postures I didn't even know I was holding. No longer defined by the artificial boundaries of inner and outer, this spacious depth seems to encircle everything. In this space, I am open and receptive in a way that feels both ancient and utterly new. Life flows through me unconstrained by my usual labels and limits. I can hold contradiction without needing to resolve it. I am vast, containing multitudes, as Whitman said.
From this profound inner spaciousness, the illusion of separation simply evaporates. What I've been calling "me" is no longer distinct from the fabric of existence itself. My breath is the trees' breath, the water in my veins is ancient rain, the light in my eyes is the same fire warming distant galaxies. I'm not merely connected to everything—I am everything. The boundary between individual and universal being doesn't just become porous; it reveals itself to have been a fiction all along.
And from this recognition of interbeing, something even more fundamental emerges. I realize that what I've been seeking—this center, this ground—was never actually lost. The core of my existence isn't a fixed point I need to reach, but a dynamic, ever-present awareness that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It's like discovering that the treasure you've been seeking is the very ground you've been standing on the whole time. This center doesn't need to be found because it's the source and essence of the finding itself. The still point within the turning world that also encompasses the entirety of the turning.
Ultimately, this whole journey reveals what Tillich called the Ground of Being—not as a concept but as lived reality. The fundamental, unconditioned presence that I am, that everything is, underlying all experience, thought, and form. It's the bedrock beneath all the shifting sands of circumstance and identity. Here, all seeking ceases because there's nowhere left to go and nothing left to find.
In this Ground, there is only the profound, silent, and luminous knowing of pure Being itself—boundless, luminous, and finally, finally at peace.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.” —Rumi
The Discovery
Through this exploration, I've discovered that there's another dimension of being available to me—one I'd forgotten in all the climbing and growing and achieving. When I'm worn out from the upward scramble, when the forward momentum feels more like frenzy than progress, the deep can open. It's always been there, waiting. Going deeper, going inward to the depths of my being, requires something different than effort. It asks me to slow down, get still, let go, listen to the silence. And when I do, it opens onto something I wasn't expecting—not more complexity, but more spaciousness. My own emptiness and vastness. The recognition that separation itself might be the illusion. There's an aliveness in this darkness, a restoring energy that doesn't come from doing but from being. It feels good—like taking off a too-tight shoe. Like remembering that I don't have to earn my place in the world. I just have to inhabit it. Deeply.
Thank you for being with me on this descent. If you're also feeling called to go deeper in a world that seems determined to hold you on the surface—if your soul is longing for space, stillness, and silence in the midst of all the noise and speed—I invite you to join me in the depths. What might emerge for you in that radiant darkness? What has been waiting in the cave of your own being, patient as stone, luminous as underground rivers? The deep is not a destination you have to earn or a skill you have to master. It's a dimension that's always available, a homecoming that requires nothing more than the willingness to slow down, let go, and listen. The invitation is simple: Take off your shoes. Let your mud settle. Trust the descent.
Thank you for reading. If this exploration stirred something in you, consider sharing it with someone who might also be ready for the descent. And if you'd like to join me for more wanderings into the depths of being, I'd be honored to have you subscribe.
A hunger for something truer ❤️