TRUE FREEDOM

BY MIKE CATES

Man was created to act in freedom according to reason.

The paradisal garden described in Genesis chapters one and two, of which the Lord had developed in the crown of His creation, had provided the man immediate influx, face to face communion with the Lord.  It was the Lord s life in the man!  He could freely eat of every tree of that garden the goods of charity its fruit, and faith its leaves.  He could do it as of himself because he could act in freedom according to reason.

If that church, the Most Ancient, had remained in its integrity living from God, or God living in man the Lord would have had no need to bow the heavens and come down and been born a man.  (AC 2661)  For that genius of people lived, while on earth in their bodies, as in heaven (see Deuteronomy 11:10-21).  Though heavenly life terminated in their sensual, corporeal, earthy objects, their affections were not in those; their affections were in the heavenly life.

Love and wisdom co-exist in use.  The one must produce into the other that they may exist.  Love and wisdom without use are not anything: they are only ideal entities; nor do they become real before they are in use: for love, wisdom, and use, are three things which cannot be separated.  (AR 875)

Man is not life in himself, but is an organ receiving life.  The good of love and the truth of wisdom flow in from God, and are received by man and are felt in the man, as in him; and because they are felt by him, as in him, they also proceeded, as from him;  It is given by the Lord, that the good of love and the truth of wisdom should be thus felt by the man, in order that what flows in may affect him, and so be received and remain.  Because of the delightful ness of this, the feeling began to drag on the sensual plane and man began to believe that he lived from himself and not from God; thus that love and wisdom, charity and faith, or good and truth, were his own and not God's.  He believed this because he could think and will, and speak and act, in all likeness and appearance as if from himself.  From this belief, he persuaded himself that God had implanted in him, that is, had infused into him, His own Divine, therefore the serpent said:  God doth know that in the day that ye eat of the fruit of that tree your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.  (Gen. 3:5)  Hence, the beginning of the decline of the Most Ancient Church.

The reception and appropriation of damnation ensued once man willingly acted on the fallacy.  Keep in mind, the Lord s mercy is a living and mighty attraction and is of such a nature that He wills to draw all men into eternal happiness, thus unto Himself.  (SE 1104)  Man willingly had to act against it for this to change, and once he did, the equilibrium became out of balance.  (Romans 1)  What once had been immediate influx from the Lord of what was good and true, and from that perception knowing whether a thing was so or not, a communication of yea, yea; nay, nay, the choosing between a greater good and a lesser good, the waters above and the waters beneath had now become evil.  (Matthew 5:37)  Man fell from the state of integrity, in which he had been by virtue of believing that he was wise and did good from God and not at all from himself, to a persuasion and belief that life in himself is not God but his own.  The sensual, corporeal the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had overlaid the tree of life; hence hell and eternal death or damnation.  Only the Lord, when He was in the world, was wise of Himself and did good from Himself, because the Divine itself was in Him and was His from birth.  (John 5:26; CL 135)

What once was beauty was now venomous.  Man had made his bed in hell.  (Psalms 139:8)  Influx from the Divine now flowed into disorder.  (Influx is received according to the form of the receiving vessel.  See AC 657)  Man s trust was no longer in the Lord, but in his own abilities.  He had sunk down from the celestial into solely what was sensual and corporeal.  (AC 202)  He had taken providence away from the Divine and claimed it for himself, and when he did this, he became anxious about things to come, and desired to possess all things and to dominate over all, which kindled and grew according to the conditions he had made, and finally it grew beyond all measure.  (AC 8478-8480)

If there is any one word which expresses the true idea of freedom, it is equilibrium.  The common notion is that a man is free when he has the power and liberty to do what he likes.  This, indeed, as our lesson has taught us, is natural freedom.  For action is free when it is according to the ruling love.  What a man loves to do, that he does with delight; and when one is allowed to do what is delightful to him without any let or hindrance, his life seems to him unconstrained, and therefore free.  Hence all freedom must have a quality according to the character of the love from which it springs.  And thus natural freedom, being the unrestrained activity of natural love, takes its quality, its form and its hue from natural love.  But natural love is the love of self, or the love of dominion over others; with the love of wealth as the means of obtaining it.  And the unrestrained activity of self-love among men would be the liberty to bring all men into subjection to one man, and the power and right to appropriate and possess all their property.  And this, it is easy to see, would be universal slavery. For, when one man had subjected all other men to him, they would be all his slaves; and he would be the greatest slave of them all, because he would be a slave to himself: for no man is so much a slave as he who cannot act contrary to his own natural passions.

To love oneself above all things, and to act invariably with a view to one's own gratification, is essential sin.  For sin is contrariety to divine order; and the order in which God creates man is to love others as well as or better than himself, and to find his happiness in all those acts of good use to other men by which he makes them happy.  Hence the essence of sin is to act against the love of others and the love of promoting the common good.  Thus self-love, which is active in the love of dominion and seeks its own gratification in subjecting all other men to itself, is essential sin.  And the servant of this sin is the essential slave.  We have thus arrived at a point from which we see the nature of slavery and discern its essence and its source.

Hence comes the disposition to have and to exercise all arbitrary power.  This, in the individual man, makes him self-willed or determined to have his own way, dictatorial and overbearing in his conduct to others, and most cruel in his treatment of them, if they in any way thwart him in the attainment of his ends, or do not prove subsequent and subservient to him in the gratification of his desires.  It leads the politician to fawn and flatter the people until, wafted by the breath of popular favor to the pinnacles of chief power, he can exercise dominion over them and enact the tyrant.  It leads the people themselves to the worst of all tyrannies, when they substitute their blind will for the law which is divine justice.  "He," says the doctrine of our church, "who regards himself as above the law, places royalty in himself, and either believes himself to be the law, or the law, which is justice, to be derived from himself.  Hence he arrogates to himself that which is divine to which, nevertheless, he ought to be in subjection."  And "the king who lives according to the law, and therein sets an example to his subjects, is truly a king."  But "a king who has absolute power, and believes that his subjects are such slaves that he has a right to their possessions and lives, and exercises such a right, is not a king but a tyrant."  (NJHD 322; see also, DP 73)

(Excerpt from A Discourse on Freedom and Slavery by Richard De Charms)

Again, from the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church, we read:  To do evil from freedom, appears as freedom, but it is slavery, because that freedom is from the love of self and from the love of the world, and these loves are from hell. Such freedom is actually turned into slavery after death, for the man who has been in such freedom then becomes a vile servant in hell.  But to do good from freedom is freedom itself, because it is from love to the Lord and from love towards the neighbor, and these loves are from heaven.  This freedom also remains after death, and then becomes freedom indeed, for the man who has been in such freedom, becomes in heaven like a son of the house.  This the Lord thus teaches: Everyone that doeth sin is the servant of sin; the servant abideth not in the house forever: the son abideth forever; if the Son shall have made you free, you shall be truly free (John 8:34-36).  Now, because all good is from the Lord, and all evil from hell, it follows that freedom consists in being led by the Lord, and slavery is being led by hell.  (NJHD 142)

When the Lord foresaw that the Celestial Church would wholly perish from the world, the first prophecy concerning the His descending into the sensual, corporeal plane and subjugating the hells was made:  And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.  (Genesis 3:14-15).  The ascendancy of the sensual principle in the human nature would be destroyed, and man s freedom would be restored.  From the Lord s Divine Human there would come forth a divine means the immutable Word to keep the sensual, corporeal, earthly life in subjection forever in all who would faithfully follow the Lord in regeneration.  As Moses had lifted up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, the Lord by redemption and the glorification of His human, most mercifully accommodated His divine and saving influences to every state of degradation into which man had fallen, to the lowest sensual evil.  Man now from his externals can progress towards internals.  (AC 1083)

We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts.  (2 Peter 1:19-20)
 

If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.  They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?  Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.  And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever.  If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.  (John 8:31-36)