To live is to be awake. But to distinguish between the apparent real and the real real, the apparent good and the real good, is the challenge. How do we know the difference? "Human beings are at grips with a contrariety between their desires and their reason, between their perception of the immediate, the product of their sense knowledge, and their apprehension of the future, which their intellect enables them to foresee." Thomas De Koninck, "Metaphysics and Ultimate Questions," in Logos, Spring 2012, at 48."Only insofar as we can overcome the yoke of contrariety can we direct ourselves toward goodness. Freedom means liberation from contrariety; the words point the way: luo (to loose or release), eleutheroo (to make free), liberare (to liberate). . . . If the human mind were not itself above contrariety, we should never be able to determine ourselves to one or the other opposite, to choose knowingly and freely. Hence Dante could write: 'The greatest gift which God in His bounty bestowed in creating, and the most conformed to His own goodness and that which He most prizes, was the freedom of the will, with which the creatures that have intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed. The Divine Comedy, Paradiso V 19:23. "
And so I can choose the good, and be free, if my intellect, my conscience -- above contrariety -- is given reign in my life, over my actions, my impulses. Then I am free . . . free to choose and live the good! It is in discipline, self-mastery that I master the melody of life. Practice makes perfect!
Listen to Mozart, Piano concerto No. 21 in C major.
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