The Gift of Freedom

 I have often read through and pondered the following, written by Thomas Merton, in his book "New Seeds of Contemplation":-

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free. An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil: only as an apparent good. But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice. When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief. Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free. God, in whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free. In fact, he is Freedom.

I don't tend to agree or disagree with whatever I read. More simply absorb, leave the words to bear fruit - or not - in the way of no-calculation (hakarai)

Maybe what I have absorbed is that true freedom only comes with the surrender of the self and its "will". I think that this is in effect the way of the Dharma (Buddhism), the flowering of not-self (anatta) But in theistic language, here is Meister Eckhart from his "Talks of Instruction" on "True Obedience":-

When we go out of ourselves through obedience and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself.

So as I see it, true radical freedom can only be a reality for us in union with the Source, Reality-as-is, the Tao - call it what you will.

A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less that everything

T.S.Eliot

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

(St John's Gospel)

From the "east", zen master Caoshan:-

When studying in this way, evils are manifest as a continuum of being ever not done. Inspired by this manifestation, seeing through to the fact that evils are not done, one settles it finally. At precisely such a time, as the beginning, middle, and end manifest as evils not done, evils are not born from conditions, they are only not done; evils do not perish through conditions, they are only not done.

Well, that's it, I have waffled enough, perhaps clarifying my own mind if nobody elses.