Day 4

The debate rages constantly in politics and has reached fever pitch.  American exceptionalism verses the world order of big government, where national decisions are made in the dark by unseen forces.  The tyranny of big government is the new American remake that President Obama promised.  According to him and the radical left, if the people yield control of their lives to big government, to the dark forces, our lives will be protected and improved.  Shall we believe him or them??  Is it not Obama who promised you can keep your doctor?

Some politicians preach American exceptionalism but few of them define what makes America great or exceptional.  Money and power to influence the world order are not American exceptional credits, so what is?  What is our national pride, the quality that has rung the bell for 250 years?

We older folk were taught our national greatness from a very early age when school was about school.  President Lincoln prayed on November 19, 1863 at the Gettysburg cemetery honoring the 7,000 dead and 38,000 wounded at this one battle of the Civil War.  How could anyone, any president, justify such carnage?  Lincoln did so by giving the Civil War the same status as that of our American Revolution, 100 years earlier.  The sacrifice on that field and his prayer were necessary to preserve our national greatness, an American “government of the people, for the people and by the people”.   Without their sacrifice, America would no longer be America.

Our country has always been about this one revolutionary idea, true democracy.  The life situation of the black man in America was not the central issue of the Civil War but it was the most visible issue.  The central issue was one of economics or money.  Can a few wealthy people so manipulate American democracy to the point that our government no longer represents all the people?   Is our government to be "of, for and by the rich few"?

When politicians of both parties are owned by the rich interests who dictate policy for the people, the voter no longer have a real choice at the ballot box and America fails to be a democracy.  Money in politics is going to force another phase of the American Revolution for we the people have become impotent to influence our own future.  We can hope that the coming revolution will be violence free but don’t count on it.  Our only hope for that outcome is Donald J. Trump, the 45^th President of the United States.

It is indeed ironic that our only hope to preserve our democracy in the 21^st century, is himself a wealthy man who cannot be bought as are all the rest of the gold diggers.  History will have a good laugh, if we stand up for him!

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA   

Day 3

Life for all we humans has a universal bottom line that explains things. When all the muss and the fuss is scraped away from daily living, we all live to find significance in our existence.  Life is a search for this significance.  All that we do, every decision we make, is in some way influenced by our universal and individual search for some quality that makes us worthy of attention.  Life will end when we lose all hope of finding this “sig factor”.   We may be breathing for a short while but without this hope in our gut, we are already dead.

This may sound like cruel news, dark and foreboding but it is our human condition.  It is true for each of us and every day is an exercise in either searching for the sig factor or settling for some temporary fix to avoid the darkness.  Sure, the fix may be a chemical high but just as damaging to the search is settling for the supposed good life, whether that life is a person, place or thing.  By definition, the good life is only temporary.  The Ray Conniff Singers sang about our human temporary dilemma, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow”.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

Day 2

Hello to the future, whoever or whatever you are.  Greetings from G. Goslaw on January 2, 2019.  This is a new beginning for I have been silent all of 2018, a year that is now over with no regrets.  As this new effort is begun I shall attempt to avoid being the muller modality that I am, one who will consider constantly.  I call it “mulling”.  Most of the time it is a liability, considering to no end, weighing alternatives and waiting for clarity with minimal results.  Wish me luck in 2019 as a more extemporaneous modality may happen.  I shall try.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Day 1

What the hell!  This is New Year’s Day 2019.  For every day such as this a resolution is warranted. For the first time in my life I would like to state for the record a resolution that I fully intend to keep.  Will this resolution go the way of most every other this worldly decision for change into the coming years? 

Probably, but I shall try again.  Simply stated my resolution is to write something every day and put it out there on the web declaring that I was here, at this time and at this hour, whether it matters or not!   Today is January 1, 2019.

G. Goslaw

Lander, CA

Simplification

The free exercise of our innate, individual, human spiritual potential is a reward unto itself, now and forever more.  Any dogma that usurps exclusive control over our innate, individual, human spiritual potential is a fraud and it's advocates are spiritual terrorists.  Jesus said, whomever and wherever you are, exercise.

G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca. 

Thanks be to God

To my delightful surprise, a little piece of Landers, California has been my abode since 2012.  Periodically, I get antsy staying in one place but these times pass and I rightfully remain grateful to all those who made my sandbox happen.  The weather is just a wee bit hot in summer and comfortably chilly in winter, no complaints.  The neighbors are few as my dogs and I hike our sandy roads.  One neighbor, Janet, stops by with her dogs every few days and we share a smoke on the front porch, mixing in a little intelligent conversation about world events, family and politics.  This is adequate socialization for this content senior life observer.

      

This past February I was told an emergency appendectomy was in my immediate future at our hospital on the hill in Joshua Tree.  Five or six hours later the surgeon arrived and I entered the never, never land of anesthesia heaven, trusting in the competency of hospital staff.  Upon awaking from my deep sleep, I slowly became aware of how close eternity had rubbed up against me.  In the recovery room, G. Goslaw began bleeding, an alert nurse recognized the situation and took aggressive action to get me back into surgery to stop the bleeding.  In her words, “I didn’t think you were going to make it”.  I am haunted by the realization that the end could very well have been in 2017, my last days on this earth.

Most of us live very busy lives but in times like these we should ask, when death does arrive, will we humans experience some sort of eternity?  If so, what will eternity look like?  The answer to the first question is a no brainer, there either is or there isn’t.  No eternity means that our lives are reduced to our circumstances and relationships through whom we hope for a future beyond death.  This believing in ourselves may be enough for some but it seems a bit superficial, life becoming all about me and mine.  This is the very definition of Godless secularism, get all you can while you can, every decision is only a pragmatic personal calculation but how that decision may affect others is less important.  Is it any wonder that our country has progressively become mired in selfish expectations and attitudes?  Should there be no eternity, a great many of us will be proved wrong, disappointed and unaware of the loss.

Let us, therefore, quickly dismiss that possibility.  The second question is more fun to consider, what will eternity be like?  What is the destiny of the human spirit?  Every few years someone rises from a near death experience to tell us what eternity is like on the other side, a light at the end of a long tunnel, an overwhelming sense of peace, the great judgement day.  Our religions deposit supposed truth upon the people, whether it be something called nirvana, the fires of hell or 99 blessed virgins.  As for me, eternity without my dogs won’t cut it, which only proves that our expectations have an eerie way of trapping us in earthly drumbeats.  Listen as we must, these opinions are all different and may only be the simple winding down of our computer brains, none of us really knows.

 

In the recovery room, there were no lights, possibly I wasn’t dead enough to bring back any messages or I wasn’t worthy enough to be that messenger.  Others have, Socrates of Greek antiquity and King Solomon of Hebrew history each brought back unusual understanding.  The boy David, the twelfth son of a shepherd family found great courage under the stars of biblical times.  My spiritual background is from an evangelical perspective that has only one picture of eternity, the heaven and hell scenario.  One might wonder if this thinking (dogma) is intended to scare the faithful and sinner into submission to a man-made institution.  Sure, the Spirit of God operates in the church as he does among all of us but is the thinking of God the same as the thinking of the Church?  I trust not.

I can trust Jesus who came out of the desert with a message for the forgotten people, not the religious and proud crowds.  He said, your circumstances have no real power over you because this world belongs to the God of the galaxies and he has your back.  Eternity is here and now as well as beyond death. This was new news to the forgotten people, no one had talked to them before about eternity, as Jesus put it, the kingdom of God.  The forgotten people clamored to listen to this strange talk from Jesus.  Is this kingdom talk a new thing?  Is the kingdom really for me?  Why has no one else spoken of this kingdom?  Does this kingdom have rules?  Will this kingdom improve our daily lives?

Jesus told a little story recorded for us in the gospel of Mathew, this parable or “The story of the wedding banquet”, is a picture of eternity (Mathew 22: 2 through 14).  The story begins, “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son”.  Fourteen little words tell us the size and shape of eternity more profoundly than a multitude of volumes written from human understanding and for a profit.  Eternity has one boss (king), we human beings are family (sons), eternity is a party for the ages (banquet), eternity is about the unification of we humans to God (wedding).  Which one of we humans would want to miss this eternal party?   Not I, nor any other honest person, most of all some of us believe that none of we human beings will miss out!

Surprise, surprise, this is not the small ball touted by the religious crowd but sounds much like universalism, which says that, to God everyone is a son deserving of an eternal party.  The religious crowd will question, don’t our choices in this life determine our eternal future?  If the individual is a part of the wrong religion or worst of all, no religion at all, surely these folks will be excluded post death, will they not?  In response to these seemingly logical questions, one might ask, do those who teach an exclusionary eternity understand the heart of God.  Jesus excluded no one from the love of God, not his enemies or his critics or those who nailed him to the cross, “Father forgive them!”.  Such words sound inclusive not exclusive.  Another instance, the two thieves crucified with Jesus, one repented in this life and he was told that this day the kingdom of God was his to share prior to death but Jesus never condemned the other thief to some other reality.  The love of God never gives up on any of his sons, he just waits, saying, your time will come (the lost parables).

Either God loves the world (John 3:16) or he doesn’t.  Divine love reduced to the religious few is the religion of the Old Testament.  To the extent that the New Testament enforces this understanding of spirituality, the N.T. has missed the revolution that Jesus began.  The hell advocates are certainly missing the revolution, no surprise, you see, most of us miss it most of the time.  The parable of the banquet says that the exact same thing, the Kings invitations to the party is ignored by the people, each preferring to actively pursue other things, “But they paid no attention and went off – one to his field, another to his business.  The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them (v.5).”  Have you ever wondered where violence originates, violence that always makes no sense and is self-destructive, could it be that to us, anything is better than accepting an invitation to spiritual accountability?

In response to our avoidance techniques, God (the king) directs his servants out into the streets to invite anyone and everyone they meet to the party.  “So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests (v. 10).” May I be blunt?  Does this story uttered by Jesus not teach that a heavenly destination is in the cards for all of us?  Moral standing may not be the primary qualification for eternity.  The shared human destiny is an eternity with God, who does not discriminate, by race, religion, wealth, sex, skinny or fat, ugly or buff or relative goodness.  And that there, in eternity, we all will discover what spiritual reality is truly all about, at the party.

About this time, I hope you are questioning my universalistic assumption about this passage.  When the invitations of the king are rejected by the people who kill his servants, the king takes revenge by sending his troops to murder and burn out those selfish subjects (v. 5)?  Is this divine intervention or a John Wick movie about revenge?  Can’t you hear that line, “they killed my dog”?  As if that injustice was to justify all the killing to follow in the movie.  Worse yet, this so-called God, who acts out with the sword, must be related to that other ancient religion that persists to this day.  Anyway, the biblical parable of the wedding banquet describes a very human deity who responds to injustice just as we do, with violence from a vengeful heart.  This venom can’t be the God of the galaxies, but the Bible, in this parable, claims this earthly behavior is a divine right, violence is a part of the character of God.  A simple question, how does this violent depiction of God square with the message of Jesus who said, love even your enemies? Jesus goes on to say, love your enemies so that “you may be the children of your Father in heaven (Matt. 5:45)”.  This is not the picture of a violent vengeful God.

The conclusion I have reached is that the red-letter edition of the Bible, the words purported to be from the lips of Jesus, are a mixture of his words and the succeeding generations of religion defenders and handwriting duplicators, who were not fans of the Jesus spiritual revolution.  The violent elements to the parable were added to water down the wide open message of Jesus.  In verses 13 and 14, the king, God, has an encounter with a man at the party without wedding clothes, the king feels insulted and passes judgement upon the man.  “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  For many are invited but few are chosen.”  The religious few relate to these words but really, the ultimate reality, God, is he so easily insulted and apt to take revenge?  Is this parable Greek mythology or spiritual truth?  Sadly, the answer is that it has become both.

Heaven is a place for spiritual growth freed from the burdens and distractions of this earth.  Let’s play God a moment, how would you design such a reality?  The parable of the wedding party may be helpful to reduce the fog of some of our misunderstandings about eternity.  While all our spirits may have the same final destination, the seating arrangement at the eternal party may or will be different.  Some of us will be up close to the action around God, while others of us will be seated in the darker places.  Just possibly, as we get it together in the hereafter, those closest to the light will pass on into another reality.

Should this be the future for the human spirit and justice combined with love is the character of God, how will God determine the pecking order in heaven?  Who gets to proceed first to the light?  My own opinion is that those of us who had no chance at finding God’s Love in this earthly life, will go to the head of the line.  They will experience the blessed light and the next reality sooner than we darker souls.  The worthiest of all contenders for this priority are the millions of we humans that were aborted in the womb, their bodies torn apart before they had a chance at the life we take for granted.  This would-be justice!  Enough with the suppositions, the Ultimate Reality is the boss.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA.  

Inner Space

The starry, starry nights are spectacular in Landers.  It is impossible to stare at these stars for any length of time without becoming an amateur philosopher.  What does all that spectacle up there mean to me?  With a sense of wonder, we humans have been staring at the stars for 200 million years but it was only 600 years ago that we began to understand the workings of the stars when Nicholas Copernicus and Issac Newton ushered us into what has been called the scientific revolution.  The sun centered universe made the changing heavens predictable but the new culture resulting from this revolution wrongly assumes that science and the philosophers have all the answers.  These thinkers, at least most of them, would not make such an arrogant claim but they have inadvertently exerted undue influence upon us, influence that has driven us further from valuing our spiritual center.

    

As we look heavenward, outer space just keeps getting bigger and bigger while we feel smaller and more insignificant.  Outer space is composed mostly of nothingness but with an untold number of evolving rock systems sprinkled throughout the immeasurable blackness.  A frontier for man to explore, maybe, but despite our growing knowledge of the heavens our meaning among the stars has failed to be illuminated.  In fact, our looking up into the stars has made our place among the galaxies seem more and more tenuous with each new discovery.  Our ever-expanding insignificance has filtered down to our individual lives where we struggle with the enormity of our situation beneath the stars.  Could it be that inner space, the inner space of each individual human being, is the frontier that we most need to explore?  Could it be that staring into the stars is but one of those many earthly distractions we use to avoid exploring our inner space?

2500 years ago, Socrates was a stone mason and a courageous warrior for Greece who dared to enter inner space at around fifty years of age.  This experience propelled him to give the remainder of his years telling about inner space by questioning the accepted wisdom of outer space.  The Greek community of his birth was his mission field and daily he entered the markets and town square to engage the people in the wisdom of the ages, all the while denying that he was any smarter than anyone else.  He wrote no books, intellectual papers and sought no credentials or personal authority.  Avoiding the distractions of power, position and to a degree family, Socrates became a messenger for the wisdom of inner space.

At first the people flocked to his message and conversational methods but well into his eighties, the people turned on him.  What we hear most about Socrates today is that he committed suicide by drinking hemlock and therefore he died a failure. The truth be told, he was put on trial for upsetting the outer space status quo and given a death sentence by his own community.  Rather than run, which he could have done, Socrates drank the poison because that was the decision of his people.  Plato, the best student of Socrates, shared the wisdom of Socrates in his writings but scholarship is divided on how much of his book, the “Republic”, was his own.  In any event, together these two thinkers are credited with founding western philosophy.  Plato, however, cared little for the Socratic mission of communicating the inner space trek.  He did succeed, inadvertently, in burying the memory of Socrates in an ocean of philosophical group think. The inner space mission of the man, Socrates, was no more.

As did Socrates, just a few of us in every era have been roaming the deserts and crawling into caves to block out the distractions of our daily lives in order to find the wisdom of inner space.  They have been called hermits, prophets, monks, recluses and the like, their craziness was and is an attempt to get a glimpse at the inner stars.  These folks have emerged time and again to communicate to us the reality of inner space with marginal success for we, you and I, are prone to disrespect the inner space trek because it can only be entered with great personal discomfort.  Sadly, those courageous voices telling of inner space have been quickly drowned out and replaced by a group think that dilutes their message.  Modern philosophy, science and our many religions are the predominate group thinks that have spoiled the adventure of the few who advocate for the inner trek.  We, the people, have tried our best to bury the truth of inner space by burying the few.

 

Two thousand years ago Jesus, a mongrel human being like the rest of us, walked out of the desert and told the people about the kingdom of God.  The Jesus message was not for the religious folk who prized power and position above the wisdom of inner space.  The message was and is for those desperate human beings like you and I who seek spiritual survival amid conflict, failure, social disorder and daily drama.  After all, are not all these things our life realities, what else is there?  Jesus communicated to the people the “else” of life, the inner stars of life that can be had in the kingdom of God.  The people flocked to hear about the kingdom and the invitation to enter extended to all we interested unlovely human beings.  But as the people became aware that the kingdom message was not intended by God to relieve their immediate suffering and circumstance, they turned on Jesus just as they did with Socrates.

Jesus said our immediate circumstances are intended to drive us toward the inner stars and there, in inner space, we will find relief, reward, safety, nourishment and eternal peace.  Nowhere does Jesus promise everything we want in this world, he promises only that the inner trek will bring the reality we were born to experience and most need.  Plato gives us an illustration or parable of the meaning of reality, an illustration he probably got from Socrates.  In the parable of the cave, we humans are chained to the floor of the cave with our backs to the only light source, from our immobile position facing a blank cave wall, all that we can understand of the light is our own shadows against the cave wall.  The shadows are real but are they less than full reality?  Could this world be duping us into believing that we are only shadows?  Could this world be duping us into believing we are to be satisfied with the shadows of life, the survival priorities, friends, entertainment, family, race, religion, science or philosophy?  The few would say no way.

Jesus said, “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mathew 6: 31-33, TNIV).  Some of us prefer translating the Greek word for righteousness in this context "God centered reality".

Jesus was not talking about a religious rightness dictated by top down dogma but the God centered reality of inner space, admittedly more difficult to define clearly.  The reality of inner space is the place we are all called to travel as humans but the place we avoid at all costs.  And then, upon entering inner space, you and I will be increasingly less bound by the shadows of life and find for ourselves what it means to be wholly human.

    

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.