Personal

I have been trying to get into philosophy. Why? God only knows. I have gotten to know some philosophers by the highlights posited by those thinkers who are discussing a variety of life issues. Reading beyond the highlights in the thinkers own words, however, expecting to be convinced, is a tough road. Take Aristotle’s “On the Soul”; my brain matter is definitely inferior but I have one criticism. If you can’t just say what you mean and mean what you say, very few of we intellectually challenged persons, will sit through all the arguments.

Philosophy seems to be a game. Who can make the best argument? It is arguing with no answers. Arguing for the sake of arguing. Many books have a conclusion, I try to go there first. Tell me what you believe or all your thinking is for naught. All philosophy books seem to be written to impress the thinking community not those of us who want answers.

Shall I give up? Hell no!

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.    

 

Real

Socrates was a confirmed conversationalist. He could engage in a conversation with almost anyone because Socrates was an expert listener. Listening is more than language and simpler than 2 plus 2. Listening was a rare talent 2400 years ago but is even more so today in our world. Listening is more than sound waves bouncing against the ear drum, listening is focus, awareness and a hunger to know and understand one another. Socrates was a good listener.

Socrates did not go around preaching and advising as if he was an authority person or expert. He asked questions. Socrates listened and then asked questions about what was being said. He challenged the popular accepted understandings that may or may not be correct by asking questions. This method got him into a lot of trouble with the people who became offended. We prize our delusions.

How many of us spend our days just talking? How many of us spend our days reclining behind the walls of our own little world? How many of us spend our days seeking entertainment or the next adventure or the next high? 

Maybe, we should listen to Socrates and become a real person, a good listener and conversationalist.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.   

 

 

Simple

There is an intellect and then there is an intellect. The total human intellect is more than brain function bound to the body. Our companion human spiritual intellect is a message center that will live forever, “he who has ears, let him hear”, as the Bible often says.

Socrates was the real deal, he named his spiritual intellect “daimonion” or inner voice with whom he listened. His students, Plato and Aristotle preferred to listen to the brain function intellect. Likewise, as most philosophers followed their lead, our understanding of who we are got more and more complicated through the centuries.

We can know who we are if we would just listen.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.    

 

Pain

Forty eight hours have passed since “Ma Ma” left us. Barron spent yesterday running around barking at the fence, barking at nothing, barking a different bark. He was crying out for his “Ma Ma“, where are you? The bark was an expression of painful separation. For the last five years, Ma Ma and Barron have been constant companions and playmates in the front yard at 1990 Gibralter.

For now, the fun is gone. Please don’t tell me that dogs don’t have separation woes or depression. Dogs have feelings too. Will he adjust as we humans adjust? Probably, we shall see but death is so final and our post separation world will never be quite the same.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Apologies

The Iranian Ayatollah has been killing Americans for the last 45 years. Suddenly, when they are about to get their come up in’s, they are not our enemy? Just because we have had eight different presidents over these 45 years singing the same song, means that the Ayatollah has not changed his strips. He is who he is, a murderous religious fanatic who needs to go down with his ship.

As for the people of Iran, you got what you asked for and there are no apologies for the end being messy.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Peace?

Give it up! Expecting or hoping that the Iranian Ayatollah is anything other than an irrational religious fanatic hell bend on killing off western civilization is delusional. It is them or us. It is them or Israel to the death. Peace is a pipe dream.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Vision

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics should be mandatory reading at the High School level as their life long decisions are being made. There are no mulligans in life, no do overs. No matter where one starts, the striving for excellence in whatever we do, will bring to us the better way called happiness or fulfilment.

Most books in this book are rather short, easy to read but a bit wordy. Every page has fantastic discussion points. Get the kids talking about real life and the happiness possible with decisions for excellence.  

Where there is no vision, the people perish (authored by another wise man, Proverbs 29: 18).

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.  

  

 

Birthdays

Happy 250^th Birthday of Our United States of America Army Corp!

Our Flag is flying at `1990 Gibralter Rd. Landers, Ca.

(Democracy is messy but freedom is worth the fight.)

Happy Birthday President TRUMP our fighter in chief!

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Broken Dreams

Certain supposedly conservative news outlets defend Obama by pointing out his deportation record. This was never who Obama was or is to this day. As president he had to keep the lid on the radical left because he was much too busy getting rich. The mortgages had to be paid on all those mansions. Oppositional heat would spoil the stew.

When the presidential torch was passed to Biden, the controls were no more because he no longer had to take the heat. Obama could run his socialist, communist ferry land by proxy with his supposed reputation intact.  Biden tried to enrich himself like his boss but he wasn’t as cool about it.

Meanwhile the radical left, Obama’s radical left, was running the country visa the auto pen. The radical left governed with a Marxist game plan which is in short, “burn to the ground what has been in order to build back the socialist ideal”.

The supposed ideal is only government control of everything and everybody, control by the few. Democrat leadership is and has been clamoring to be among the privileged few. The socialist ideal is ignorance resulting in broken dreams for the rest of us. We live to dream.

May Obama’s daddy worship never again work its evil among us? As President Reagan warned, as a country, we are never more than one generation away from socialism. Democrats want the people dumb and unaware.   

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.  

 

Home

Book II, Chapter I, is where Aristotle and this newbie thinker part company. Who are we as humans? What is significant or unique about you and me, as humans? Aristotle is virtue signaling but some of us blew that out of the water a lifetime ago.

“The Virtues then come to be in us neither by nature, nor in spite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them and are perfected in them through custom.” 

Virtues for the few is secondary but Aristotle puts them up on the front pew. No wonder the purveyors of Christian Church tradition and its easy doctrinal believism made the thinking of Aristotle their bread and butter. Spirituality and the pursuit of virtue is about being good little boys and girls, so they say. Aristotle called it “custom”.

O. K., if virtue is secondary, what is primary? Are you not asking that question? Instead of Virtue, what other desire could we plug into the above quote? What other desire is primary and universal among we humans? Maybe, the personal, one by one, search for God reality is primary. Some have called the search, the problem of God. A problem it is because the search desire “is in us neither by nature, nor in spite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with the capacity for receiving” messages from the spirit world.

The best and possibly only way of thinking about this is the natural reality of imprinting. Why does the salmon return to their natural spawning pools?  Does the Salmon have a “homing organ”? What about the homing pigeon? Can anyone, including the A.I. gurus, explain how the homing pigeon navigates? The homing capacity just is. We humans have a home in God land, who knows, wherever that may be. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, ca.  

Welcome Aboard

As individual people, when we choose the good our lives are better, happier, more productive and less complicated. This is a no brainer, we all know it because we are living with the consequences, positive and negative. Forming the habit of choosing the good is called moral character formation. This is an ongoing, life-long, simple lesson we began to learn in childhood but for some strange reason, we too often, young or old, insanely choose to be miserable.

This is my story and probably yours as well. This popular understanding seems to be what Aristotle in saying in the remainder of Book I but he makes it so damned complicated. “Happiness is a kind of working of the soul in a way of perfect Excellence”. Is perfect Excellence a goal or is it supposedly attainable?  We are then taken into a confusing description of the soul, rational and irrational, vegetative, etc. One thing is clear, Aristotle’s understanding of soul is not our 2400 years removed understanding. Before we pat ourselves on the back, 21^th century man is equally confused by soul talk, what it means to me is probably not what soul means to you.

Aristotle finishes well with a short paragraph on what he means by the Excellence of Man. Maybe, somewhere within this Aristotelian definition is an answer to the question, who are we? Some say, as does Aristotle, we are intellectual and moral beings who daily shape our own futures by our choices. Choices we make to think or not to think, choices for the Good or not. Welcome aboard! 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.  

La La Land

Question, if happiness is our Chief Good, our moral center, what then would our world look like?  Let’s call it “La La Land”! In such a world, who in their right mind would storm the beaches of Normandy? All of us would avoid any cause that would threaten our well-being. Aristotle must have a broader definition of happiness in mind or is death happiness?  To this point this happiness thing seems very elitist, for the very few who can avoid the daily vicissitudes of living and dying. We shall read on.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Happiness

Aristotle’s book, “The Nicomachean Ethics”, comes highly recommended. When I finish this project, I shall report back to this blog but at first glance, the book seems to be a how to advice column on how to navigate this world. Happiness is the goal. Valuable indeed. However, a focus on happiness in this world may be a bit short sighted. For now I shall let Aristotle speak.

What is for certain and the starting point to navigate this world is action, we humans are to be men and women of action, doers. Aristotle seems to agree. Question, what are we chasing, a rule book that leads to happiness or are we chasing the Good as in Plato’s world?  Or, are we first chasing after an illusive understanding of God which as we progress, may or may not bring happiness. Who can be happy in bad times?  The only definition of happiness that works for me is a sense of fulfillment and meaning in this world of ours. God is happiness and God is the Good.

This present understanding is open to revision as I dig. Later.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.        

 

 

monster

Does anyone else wonder who is calling the shots for the Democrat opposition to this Trump Republican administration? Could the shot maker be the dude who repeatedly calls every liberal judge to do law fair? Does anyone else wonder who was directing the Biden Democrats from the bleachers? Does anyone else wonder who was calling the shots in opposition to the first Trump presidency?  

What kind of American political leader would advocate giving away our national sovereignty and taking in the world’s trash? Who would use the Marxist playbook of destruction in order to build it back in the way of communism? Who would consent to making America a satellite nation that takes orders from China? Who but one who is angling to be the destroyer of our country. Who but the one who promised us fundamental change.  Now we know what fundamental change was all about.

You got it, the black African monster Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of these United States and destroyer in chief.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.  

 

Embarrassed

Because the third century B. C. Jewish writers of their history mistakenly used the Platonic juvenile bedtime stories about a human beginning amongst the Gods, the Bible thumpers have been embarrassed. Some blindly cling to these beginning tales while others have come to consider all cosmology (our big picture) almost evil or to be avoided.

Neither of these reactions will survive. Neither will give today’s God believer the courage to walk uprightly into eternity. Where are the prophets of a new cosmology?  Where are the prophets with a cosmology that fits our human experience? Somebody out there can talk knowingly about science, psychology, philosophy and God without being embarrassed. Where are you?

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Death

I will never know myself as myself again, however,

myself will merge and submerge into the greater circle of knowing.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.