What Do You Live For?

"What if what we long hoped for does not come? The willingness to live for a better day."

What am I living for? Living for the joy of acquisition and power is self serving; living for the good of others is perhaps more in the Way. Yet we can seem to think ourselves to be living in the Way and yet we are not. There are those who convince themselves they are right; their ego has the answer, it is good--for me.
Do you live for freedom? In one sense freedom is the absence of restraint. There is nothing to hinder me to act as I choose. Suppose, however, that you live in a universe that for every choice I might make, the world has already determined the response, responses for which I have no control. I may remain physically free, no one has tied me down or locked me up, but I seem to lack freedom in a more durable and possible sense. While I am free to act as I choose, my choices are not free.

There is another type of freedom says the Christian philosopher and theologian, Augustine of Hippo. In the book, On Free Choice of the Will, translated by Thomas Williams, Augustine writes, "I have freedom to choose in a way that is not determined by any thing outside my control, what Augustine called metaphysical freedom. The view that human beings have metaphysical freedom is also known as Libertarianism."
Augustine is one of the great defenders of Libertarianism. He says that human beings are endowed with a power called the will. A person can direct his will to go in seemingly limitless directions. His own freedom of direction, then, can be thought of as free choice.

A person may choose for himself money, power, influence, sex, excesses of all types; these choices so mentioned have all been external choices, made by factors outside the person. If so, then a person could not be entirely responsible for them.
But it is not external factors that determine our choices. Rather it is internal states: beliefs, desires, hopes and fears. Since it is the desire, the will of a person and the character which determines one's choices, freedom therefore is not threatened.

Yet a Libertarian like Augustine would not be swayed by this. He says that in fact, human beings are rational thinking, and free choice makes them therefore responsible. Because persons have metaphysical freedom in this view, they are capable of making a real difference in the world. We may write our own "scripts." We may be truly in the image of God, the Creator, bringing something into the world that previously did not exist before us.

Forgiveness, Sorting Through Your Secrets

"Some harm that people do to themselves or others may appear to 
outsiders to be less grave..." -- Forgiving Yourself by Beverly Flannigan

Many people find it difficult to forgive themselves for the simple, secret reason that they felt some benefit or pleasure from the now regretted experience. It may have been a sense of power, control, emotion, energy or mastery. It may have been a degree of delight in depriving another of a benefit such as needed material items, or the plain truth.

Keeping secrets for these reasons may make a later impulse to self-forgiveness more difficult; self forgiveness is self-confrontation and requires for many, a measure of courage. We don't like what we see in the mirror, yet we live with it day after day. Forgiving Yourself by Beverly Flannigan, discusses forgiveness and includes the issue of secrets.
 "Some harm that people do to themselves or others may appear to outsiders to be less grave than it is to the person unable to forgive himself. You may have been told that you 'did the best you could' or 'didn't know.' You may not have been able to listen to other peoples' condolences because you knew something no one else knew about the situation. For example, you may have felt momentarily good about hurting someone or physically aroused, assaulted, or angry at a person."

If what you know about your situation, you keep 'secret,' it likely is at the center of your inability to forgive yourself. Flannigan recommends to such transgressors that they write down as much as they can remember about the situation, include all the details without fearing the memory; express those parts of yourself in writing that you think or thought then, were unacceptable.
She advises the writing be kept in a safe place; refer to it as often as needed, adding details or feelings which you may have not recalled at first writing. This may take weeks as things surface in your mind.

Concluding this discussion Flannigan notes that, "With each phase of forgiving yourself, you come closer and closer to truth. Eventually you will expose more of your truth to another person."
  For now, the hard work of confronting what you most dislike in yourself takes you closer to the time you feel genuine relief and can say to yourself, "I feel whole, I forgive myself."

Spiritual Energy

Love is the great union of the universe."  Theilhard de Chardin

There is no subject in the world which arouses greater curiosity than spiritual, or psychic energy. The energy that animates a body, that enlivens the soul; it lights the eyes and attracts life to itself. Spiritual energy is that which is absent in the corpse. Yet there is scant, scientific evidence that it even exists. Most have an awareness of this energy by their own, daily experience. It is often encountered in the simple, everydayness of life, and as well in the profound.

While science is largely unaware of its presence in the world, its realness, none more opaque scientifically, spawns the whole of Ethics which rests upon it. "The nature of this inner power is so intangible that the whole description of the universe in mechanical terms has had no need to take account... but has deliberate disregard of its reality," wrote Pierre Theilhard de Chardin in his work, The Phenomenon
of Man.
"The difficulties we still encounter in trying to hold together spirit and matter in a reasonable perspective are nowhere more harshly revealed... the building of a bridge between the two banks of our existence-- the physical and the moral-- if we wish the material and spiritual of our activities to be mutually enlivened. To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul in a coherent manner: science has ignored the question... [yet]we must advance."

"The inner face of the world is manifest deep within" and we are most aware of through our concrete behaviors that the two energies do combine, but we cannot easily, or not at all, make out the method. It seems, according to de Chardin, that the method is made of both a dependence and an independence, thus a mutual inter-dependence arises as it occurs to us that the "soul" must be "a focal point of transformation" at which point all energy converges. However attractive it may be to suppose that there is a direct transformation, it becomes clear that in practice, in love, it is their mutual inter-dependence, as clear as their inter-relation arising, says de Chardin writing about the nature of spiritual energy and love.

His book, The Phenomenon of Man, deemed radical when it first appeared in 1940, was blacklisted by many contemporary theologians upon its arrival; today de Chardin now occupies an esteemed place in the world of theology. His ideas give rise to the idea of humanity as a unifying factor of the universe, and man its bearer.

Moral Return and the Problem of Good and Evil

"On the mixed egoism of human nature there can be no safe or positive reliance... " --Sri Aurobindo writing about good and evil

The problems of human life are myriad, but the of the most persistent and perplexing of difficulties lies with the perception and response to the nature of good and evil. It is to oversimplify the issue by dividing the world into two camps, the good and the evil. In maturity we see that bad things do happen to "good" people. But how, and why? What type of response may we mount in the face such a situation?

The idea of moral returns supposes that like begets like; that by positive intention, or positive self talk, one may garner positive rewards. This is thought by others to be an egocentric philosophy, not borne out by everyday experiences. And while there exists in the intellectual marketplace many such advocates of these types of ideas, there are the others such as Sri Aurobindo who examines the issue more closely, writing a part in the book, Lights on Life's Problems by Kishner Ghandi.

The rule of moral returns, or more commonly called the 'golden rule' is pervasive in human philosophical systems, especially those dealing with ethical systems, and ideas of faith and belief.

Aurobindo writes, "The rule is true to a certain  extent... but it is not true all the way and all the time. It is evident enough that hatred, violence, injustice are likely to create an answering hatred, violence and injustice... and I can only indulge those propensities with impunity if I am sufficiently powerful enough and prudent enough to provide against their natural reactions. It is true also that by doing good and kindness I create a certain good will in others... but this good and evil are both of them movements of the ego, and on the mixed egoism of human nature there can be no safe or positive reliance. An egoistic, selfish strength, if it knows what to do and where to stop... if it is strong and skillful, cunning, fraud, many kinds of evil, do actually pay in man's dealing with man hardly less than in the animal's with the animal, and on the other hand the doer of good... finds himself as often as not disappointed." paraphrased

Why? asks Aurobindo: "It is because the weakness of human nature worships the power that tramples on it...return[s] to every kind of strong imposition, belief" crouching and fawning admiration, flattery of self and others, even in moments of hatred and terror, possesses a singular and unreasoning loyalty to me, myself and I. "And its disloyalties too are as unreasoning, or light and fickle; it takes just reasoning and beneficence as its right, and forgets or cares not to pay." paraphrased

"Even', says Aurobindo, 'Christ on the cross or Socrates drinking his potion of hemlock are not very clear evidence for any optimistic notion of a law of moral return in the world of human nature. Actually in the cosmic dispensation [Aurobindo thinks] "evil comes out of good and good comes out of evil; there seems to be no correspondence between the moral and the vital measures." In summary Aurobindo concludes that good does tend to beget good, "the total power of good in the world and the greater this grows, the greater is likely the sum of human happiness" and that evil tends towards its inverse. Eventually surmises Aurobindo,  man or nations doing evil will have to pay in a theory of a harmonious cosmos, equal and balanced by its opposite. Though he notes, "it is not often in any intelligibly graded or apportioned measure, and not always clear in translating terms of vital good fortune and ill fortune."