Religious Freedom

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, Huang Gongwang, 1350

"Love God and do as you will." - Augustine

Freedom, as we usually understand it, is a state wherein there are multiple possibilities and one has some ability to affect the outcome.  To choose.  One of the commonly stated goals and described outcomes of the spiritual path is a sense of freedom, that having sense shed impediments by becoming in greater alignment with the deepest principle of Reality we are free.

It has struck me of late that this is a strange loan of a word from the mundane sphere.  How is the word "free" appropriate when the ultimate goal is not to do mine own will but thine?  Even outside the Christian framework it is the same: that having become enlightened one perceives what is and what must be done and does it.  In a way it is actually a diminishing of choice, because if the goal is to perceive what is correct as well as to always act in accordance with this perception then there is, in some sense, no real choice there. 

To be clear, I am not questioning either the aspiration or the experience.  I am simply asking myself: what is it about the word "free" that approximates this state?  On reflecting on it this morning I realized that perhaps although we nominally describe freedom in positive terms as above, it is practically experienced in negative terms.  That is, we know when something outside of us prevents us acting in the way that we would wish, as we cannot truly experience the hypotheticals.

This wraps around to the thought I often have, and that is that we have far less freedom in the first sense than we presume.  It's just a reality that we are shaped by our biological composition, our personal history, and so forth in a way that not only dictates what we can do, but even what we can want.  We can ask for freedom to choose among options but we can't choose the criteria by which we make that choice.  Or if we do aspire to that it becomes an infinite regress, since now we wish to choose among the criteria with which we make choices, which itself can be hypothetically chosen, so on and so forth.  Whenever I see a rabbit hole like this, it hints to me that something has gone crucially wrong with the thought process in the first place, and that rather than uncovering some mystery of the universe it is merely my operational definitions that are at fault.

Returning to the main point, then, I wonder if the spiritual experience of freedom isn't a better guide to what freedom perhaps means: freedom is doing what you will unopposed, no matter whether you chose to or not.  And since the world is most commonly set up to oppose what we want from an egocentric view the only way to experience unmitigated freedom is to be in alignment with Reality.  This is, of course, the Augustine quote up top.  It is not that we can do anything, just that we no longer wish to do anything other than we can, and no longer wish to be anything other than what we are.  

Bah, I'm falling into a trap.  I can tell that I'm not writing well enough this morning to get the point across.  The last few sentences just add the same confusion they always did before, since like "freedom" they appropriate words that mean something different in this new context.  There is some idea in here I am trying to get to but have not yet figured out how to express in a more lucid way.  This all ended up being banal.