A Beautiful, Distorted World

Greetings readers!

The date today is Monday, March 28, 2011. Currently, the sun is gracing us with it's warm, bright presence. The temperature is a chilly 35 degrees fahrenheit, but the overall brightness seemingly dwarfs the presence of the cold in my mind. On a day such as this, it becomes increasingly difficult to view occurrences as daily routine or patterns. I go through the same routines (driving to school, coming home, reading, writing, thinking) but it is all in a different light today. I cannot help but notice the beauty of this world. From the air being forced into my lungs through respiration to the keys I press on in order to convey the thoughts of my mind - none of it will be taken for granted! I would like to take this time to thank God for every accommodation He has placed in my life to ensure that I could make today - this moment a reality.

For those reading, I would like to encourage you to take the time to look around and think about the beauty in all things nature has given us. Of course the man-made possessions we may cling to may have physical beauty, but far too long have we been glued to our technological advancements. I find it very interesting - yet not surprising - that a man by the name of Blaise Pascal, scientist, mathematician, and French philosopher predicted back in the early to mid 1600's that with the advancement of technology, with all of it's marvelous uses, we would only become bored with life and the blessings we are so very lucky to have been given.  Here is a quote that has peaked my interest from Dr. Wolf's lecture: "Man's boredom with himself and his universe leads him to two realities: Indifference, and Diversion." It is clear to me - as clear as the cloudless sky, in fact - that our boredom (caused probably primarily by technology) has caused us (from what I have observed in Americans I come into contact with) to become indifferent to what is really going on in the world and most of all it has made us indifferent to our souls. We are indifferent to anything that is not placed right in front of our eyes so that we can physically see and experience its usefulness. Now this is tragic because remember what was said by Aristotle that if a thing is separated from its purpose, only misuse, disorder, or destruction can follow. We are very clearly separated from our purpose at this point it would seem. Technology - being an invention of man - cannot possibly be the purpose of man. Technology was created due to the genius of many people. Now that we have so much technology to make our lives "easier", what use do we have to think for ourselves? I would like to argue that technology in itself is a very wonderful thing. In fact - I am now using technology in order to attempt to reach many people without ever having to leave my house. Technology is a wonderful, marvelous invention that is indeed a tribute to the genius thoughts behind its existence. However, anything taken out of moderation can distort its beauty and usefulness. Since we are so BORED with life and the newest technologies, we no longer recognize it as a great tool, we see it as a "diversion".

Many people are so very focused on their cell phones and the latest tech out there, they almost live for it. How many hours a day do you spend simply looking at your cell phone or computer? With the invention of smart phones, people can go outside into beautiful nature and see only what is in their email inbox. Is it any wonder we are so bored and is it any wonder the suicide rate/depression rate is so high? What meaning has life if we stand outside the window and never look in? We, as a society - or dare I say world - are for the most part standing outside the door of a party but relying on text messages to tell us what is going on at the party! Instead of putting down our technology and walking in and experiencing life for ourselves, we look at our phones to do it for us because it is easier. 

All it really takes to have a more thorough appreciation for your life and what has been given to you (and can just as easily be taken away), is to just take the time to focus on the meaning of life. What other purpose should we strive for? What could possibly make this life more enjoyable than to know what the meaning of this life is? Just as a bottle filled with water is meant to quench your physical thirst, your life - every life - has a purpose. Find that purpose and you will never again look at things the same. Neglecting your soul is the same as not knowing the purpose of the water in the water bottle - it cannot serve or help you in the most meaningful way unless you find what its true purpose is - to be consumed.

Thank you all for reading everyone. I'm out to enjoy nature now! Thank you, God for the beauty you have placed in front of me to observe, for it is all a testament to your beauty!

True Love

Tonight I'm going to focus on a topic that everybody should hopefully be familiar with: love. There are many different views on this, so maybe I can get some feedback or discussion about the topic. Love - true love - is a rare gem in our culture here in America. As I am no expert on other cultures around the world, I can only base my observations on that which I have been able to observe - American culture. Love  is such a powerful force, I would argue that it may be the ONLY thing that can absolutely shake your soul. It could build it up or tear it down. To begin to understand love, lets start with its origin.
Love is arguably the very force that started everything. There is a Latin phrase called "Ex Nihilo", which means "out of nothing" when translated. This phrase means that nothing can come from nothing. If there is something, then it has come from something before it. So if nothing can come from nothing and everything has to have come from something, there MUST be a force that put it in motion. Either that or everything that we see, everywhere mankind has been, has come into existence by RANDOMNESS - sheer luck. With the complexity of just ONE cell in the human body, how likely would you say it is that we are what we are due to complete randomness? In other words, God, or another force is behind our existence. If God truly is behind our existence, He could have created us in any way He wished. He could have either created us as robots to follow His bidding and to please Him, but instead He has given us the idea of "free will". I know that if I were God, I may not have made the same choice. People today try in every possible way to convince us of God's nonexistence. How great is God's love for us that He not only gives us the choice to love Him back or to completely shun Him? Understanding the origin of love is key in understanding love in our day and age.
Love has mostly been reduced to the physical or the mental. Love in our day and age is determined upon the frequency of physical benefits or to keep us mentally sane. Our relativistic society has distorted our views on love and they feed on it. In our society, love has been turned into a made up holiday in the middle of February or October. Doesn't it sound nice? Sweetest day or Valentine's day: a day where you focus everything on your significant other - a day for the two of you to show each other how you feel through gifts or cards. Really?! Its no wonder the divorce rate is so disturbingly high: we think 2 days is enough to show our "love". The ironic part about this is: I personally do not see how anyone who has adopted a relativistic style of thought could experience true love. The media feeds us so much relativism, but if we do not believe in absolute truth, and we believe that truth is subjective to each person, how can two souls ever fully connect? It is obvious that trust is needed in a relationship. How can there be trust if everyone makes up their own beliefs of right vs. wrong? If there is no absolute truth, trust will suffer to a degree. Now lets get to what TRUE love is!
In the medieval times, there was an idea called "courtship". This idea was a way of life for knights during this era. Courtship is much more than just holding the door for a woman; it is completely giving yourself to her! According to courtship, a man had to be worthy of a woman's love. How amazing would it be if men still thought this way in our day! If this idea was still existent in our time, just imagine the divorce rate. Imagine how many people are in abusive relationships. I think it is very strange that with the progression of women's rights, the idea of courtship has just simply gone down the tube. Is it that men are afraid of women? Perhaps. Even if we go back 50-60 years, we see a dramatic difference between how women were treated. I believe we need to adopt this concept back into our society!
True love is giving EVERYTHING you have to another. When you give everything, you have nothing - NOTHING else to give. I find it absolutely absurd with how many people cheat on someone they are supposed to love. If you even begin to THINK about saying those three words to your significant other, just remember that if you truly love that person, you are bonded to them for the rest of your life. Everything that is yours becomes theirs as well. 100% of you goes to them which means you cannot even give 1% of yourself to another. How is it, then, that people cheat on the ones they claim to love? Astounding...
So if you believe you truly love someone, search your soul, pray, meditate. Be ready to commit 100%.
Love...it is a very powerful thing. Once you have it, never EVER give it up. If you give 100% to someone, how could you possibly fall in love again? If, then, you truly only have one shot, make it count!

Never...EVER...give up love. Once you have it - realize it, and cherish it with all that you have and all that you are. It is indeed, the one force that started all of existence. What a powerful force...


True Love: The bonding together of two souls to become one - striving for excellence for both individuals.

Today

Greetings readers!

Today is the day, don't let it get away from you.

Today is a very important philosophical matter! If we are without today, then what do we truly have? Todays create our yesterdays and they shape our tomorrows. What is stopping us from living this moment to the fullest extent? Why do people persist on being average? The world's love-affair with average and the relativistic are destroying what beauty we have. What kind of a world do we live in where nobody aspires to strive for excellence simply because everyone is so average that no one needs to be any more than that? We buy into all of the relativistic thinkings of our modern day and age. "The only absolute is that there are no absolutes." We need to step away from this type of thinking! What is it that is holding you back from excellence? We all have excellence in us, because we all have a purpose we are meant to fulfill. Find what is holding you back - that is key in understanding yourself and your life.

Today, we have expanded our technological spectrums to such an extent that we no longer see fit to think about the infinite. I mentioned previously the importance of the soul to our well being. Being one of the most influential, brilliant people I have gotten the honor of studying under, Dr. Wolf, Philosophy professor, speaks every day about the importance of the soul. Our soul can be in harmony with nature and natural laws, or it could be in turmoil. Many of today's people do not take the time to work on the soul and therefore, are more likely to succumb to "bad" things. Working on the soul takes practice, but with more and more time spent on the soul, the more inner peace you can feel. When we don't work on the soul, we have no defense against what situations we have no control over.

To quote from Sharon Lebell's interpretation of Epictetus' work: "When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it; you can either accept it or resent it. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not the things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance." This quote is absolutely life-changing. In order to be more peaceful and content, we must worry ourselves only with that which is in our control. When worrying ourselves with matters that are completely and entirely out of our control, we let the situation control our lives. How long is this life? It varies! It can be the next ten minutes or the next sixty years. Knowing that life can end at any second, how can we be content with letting a situation control our lives? Take control of your lives and turn your hatred towards a situation into an understanding of it, learn from it, carry out the knowledge you just learned into action. Wisdom - necessary if we plan on living a full life. There is a difference between those who are knowledgable and those who are wise. The knowledgable train their minds and expand their mental capacities. The wise, however, expand their mental capabilities and they convert the knowledge they just learned into action. A knowledgable man can state "striving for excellence is the only way to reach one's full potential." A wise man says nothing but DOES!

As William Hazlitt has stated "contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created." Today Dr. Wolf imparted such a wisdom onto me: "Life is too short to not seek the truth." We should all seek the truth as if it was the last precious drop of water in the desert. Love the truth, for it will be your liberation from the average and will place you amongst the extraordinary! A quote that goes so well with this is spoken by Elie Wiesel, "The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference." Indifference can only cause an imbalance in your soul and you can never be in harmony with what is natural. Seek after truth with all that you are, with all that you have.

"There is a profound difference between having to and wanting to." - Dr. Richard Wolf. We need to want to seek truth and be excellent. We do not have to train our minds, but the desire to want to will absolutely change your life.
Work on your soul today. Start striving for excellence today.

Life's Meaning(less?)

 I'm going to start off by quoting a philosophy professor named Dr. Gerard Reed.

"Deafened by our own sounds, we easily imagine we're the source of all that is."

What Dr. Reed stated here is very relevant to our world today. This quote pretty much sums up all of our world and society today. With the advancement of technology and modern science, human beings are typically blind to the infinite. We like to believe only in what can be seen and tested in a laboratory setting, or in every day life. Where has our belief in the infinite gone? We are all surely "deafened by our own sounds". With all the technology we have today, we eat, sleep, breathe, and dream technology. We spend hours watching TV or looking at our smart phones or computers, but how many of us take time out of the day to focus on the soul? The soul is all that we are. It is everything we are that is not our flesh and blood. Many of us cannot even "hear" our own souls due to the deafening noise that is our world today. Most of us probably forget the soul even exists. So, for those of us still deafened by our own sounds (myself included), it is easy to fall into the illusion that we are all that there is. We don't think about the infinite, a God, a higher power. We don't think about our purpose or the purpose of things around us. We, in our society think "If it feels good, do it."

Most people are relativists in our day and age. A relativist believes there is no such thing as an absolute truth. As my Philosophy professor Dr. Wolf has said, "A relativist believes there is only one absolute truth: there are no absolute truths." In other words, "Do what YOU think is right" or "Do what YOU want to do, and if its right for you, its right." Without a scale to determine what is ultimately right or ultimately wrong, we look to ourselves or others to make the distinction. Many of us act the way we do because of laws or its way we were brought up. When we put it upon ourselves, our peers and family, or government to determine what is ultimately right or wrong, it is very easy to imagine that we are all that there is in this universe. We have gotten ethically and morally lazy and that is why we are deaf.

We seem to have gotten lost in the maze we humans created. Without a map out - absolute truth - we can only continue to become more lost in our own creations. Here is a quote from my Philosophy professor Dr. Richard Wolf's book: "Aristotle warned that when a 'thing' is separated from its function or purpose, surely misuse, disorder and destruction would follow. Post-modern man has indeed become estranged from Truth and is ethically, morally, politically and philosophically sinking in his self-created quicksand." What he and Aristotle are saying here is that we all have a purpose. The absence of morals, ethics and most of all, truth, only serves to separate us from that purpose. Another quote from Dr. Wolf's book: "Today, since we no longer believe in anything, we no longer have anything for which to live - no cause to live or die for other than ourselves. ...Relativism has literally sucked the life out of living and left its followers wandering the streets of life desperately looking for meaning - any meaning at all. ...you will never find a young person leaving behind a suicide note that explains he or she did the fatal act because they believed their life had too much meaning."

Life has become meaningless. The things we see on TV and in movies and even the news are all feeding on our weaknesses and constantly feeding us with relativistic thoughts and ideas. Our purpose has become to be like a certain celebrity, or to make a lot of money. When we live our lives to be like someone else or to attain riches, we are not living a life of meaning. When we live this kind of a life, we are separated from our actual purpose, and as Aristotle warned, this can only bring misuse, disorder and destruction.

I had much more to say, but I will leave my thoughts for "Philosophical 2". Thanks for reading! Work on your soul!

Welcome

Hello all,

Welcome to my blog! My only dreams and aspirations for this project in which I am currently about to dive head first into, are that people - thinkers - from anywhere in the world can come here and maybe find a new truth to that ever so pressing question: "What is the big picture?" If there is a meaning behind this life, I hope that some of my reflections on some philosophical matters can help you find truths or ideas on the big question that we all ever so desperately wish to know the answer to.

Before I begin, I believe I must introduce myself before discussing the things that truly matter. My name is Douglas McLaughlin. I define myself as a thinker, a lover of truth and of wisdom. I am a student in some ways, but in others a teacher. I am an absolutist who is tired of the relativistic ways of our current world. I have fully devoted everything I have to progressing my mind and studying philosophical thought so that maybe I can express my thoughts as well as hear some thoughts from other thinkers.

As philosophical writer Sharon Lebell interprets from Epictetus' Manual of living: "His [Epictetus'] prescription for the good life centered on three main themes: mastering your desires, performing your duties, and learning to think clearly about yourself and your relations within the larger community of humanity." If we make it a habit to strive for excellence in all that we do, we can easily achieve the good life according to Epictetus.

Once again, welcome! Lets work on our souls!