Knowledge, Commitment and Freedom

"Only true knowledge of a person makes it possible to commit one's freedom to the other."
--Karol Wojtyla

"Love," says Christian theologian, Wojtyla, 'consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom-- it is a "giving" of the self... to limit one's freedom on behalf of another. Limitation might seem to be something negative or unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing."

If this freedom is not engaged by the will, it becomes negative, and gives to human feeling, a sense of emptiness and unfulfilment. Yet love commits to freedom and " imbues it with that to which the will is naturally attracted-- the element of goodness. Thus the will then aspires to the good; freedom is the providence of the will, existing for and because of love; it is the way of love in which human beings share most fully in the good. "Human freedom then is one of the highest in the moral order of things," says Wojtyla. This order encompasses the spectrum of man's longings and desires; his growing pathways of awareness of the life in the spirit. But man longs for love more than he longs for freedom. In choosing, there is an affirmation of value in response to natural, sense perceptions, to sentiment. "Sexual values [as an expression of the appetite] tend to impose themselves," regardless of the choosing of the possible values of a whole person.

For this reason, a man, especially, one who has not succumbed to mere passion, but preserves his interior innocence, usually finds himself in the arena of struggle between the sexual instinct and a need for freedom, or liberty to do as he otherwise wishes. This natural instinct, this drive of Eros cannot be underestimated; it is a powerful, yet limited drive. Eros can, and often lays siege to the will itself, clouding the other values with sensual intensity. Through a perception of sentiment, however, the will may be freed of the vice-like hold of a conscious, lusting desire, of a consumer view; rather it is transformed by sentiment, and the action of the will to a longing for a person of the other sex, for a possibility of wholeness.

It is love, finally, when the will enters into the equation, providing a conscious commitment of one's freedom in respect to another person, in recognition and affirmation, providing a creative contribution of the love that develops between the persons. Thus love is between persons, existing in a space that is neither one or the other, is created, and not possessed. So then in love, in freedom, there is a conscious will for another person's good, an unqualified good, a good unlimited, that is a person's happiness.

"Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction. " -Antoine de St. Exupery

We desire moreover to make the beloved happy, to please them and see to their good. It is this precisely that makes possible for a person to be re-born in love, to become alive, aware of the riches within himself, of his creativity, his spirituality, of his fertility. The person, in love, compels belief in his own spiritual powers; it awakens the creativity and the sense of worth within the individual. And yet for all its lofty abundance, human lovers must learn to translate their highest impulses into the everyday world.

Ethics and the Universe Lights on Life

"The roots of heaven are of great emptiness, for in emptiness there is energy, incalculable, vast and profound." --Krishnamurti to Himself, by J. Krishnamurti

Writing in his book, Lights on Life Problems, Sri Aurobindo and Kisher Gandhi say,"the universe is not solely an ethical proposition, a problem of the antinomy [a contradiction or opposition] of the good and the evil; the Spirit of the universe can in no way be imagined as a rigid moralist concerned with only making all things obey the law of moral good, or a stream of tendency towards righteousness attempting hitherto with only a very poor success, to prevail and rule, or a sterner Justicer[sic] rewarding and punishing creatures in a world he has made, or has suffered to be full of suffering, wickedness and evil. 
The Universal Will evidently has many other and more supple modes than that, an infinity of interests, many other elements of its being to manifest, many lines to follow and many laws and purposes to pursue."
 
The law of the world is not this alone: that good brings good and evil brings evil; nor is its key, the ethical-hedonistic rule that our moral good brings us happiness and success, and that our moral evil brings to us sorrow and misfortune. 
There is a rule of right in the world, but it is the right of the truth of Nature and of the truth of the Spirit, and that is a vast and various rule which takes many forms that have to be understood and accepted before we can reach either its highest or its integral principle."

Many of us have these experiences in our lifetime. We, by chance encounter, perhaps with the police, are arrested unjustly, called out by others unfairly, lied to or about; while we maintain a stance in justice and truth, we are not rewarded. 
Rather, we suffer as did Mahatma Gandhi in calling attention to injustice in India, as do truth minded individuals protesting against any form of violence or destruction which can be imagined. Against the status quo, the faithful are castigated, humiliated, reviled, objects of malicious gossip.

Clearly as Aurobindo and Gandhi write, good doesn't always beget good. Just as often, at least initially, good begets evil--it stirs it up and it may be a long standing evil such as racism, slavery, war or any other thing against matters of human and social justice. 
And yet what is the response? In the end, as M. Gandhi demonstrated in India, where there is peace there is justice; where there is justice, there is faith; where there is faith, there is love. In the end then, finally, if we do love one another, we must find the way to love through faith, through peace and justice. Trust now becomes the issue.