Conscience

     Conscience is our emotional knowledge of how we should be. We know emotionally, but with our minds we don't know.

     I think that if we could really live in unity with our conscience it would be like the artistic sense of a really great artist at work, an intuition or simply a preference, an impulse that determines what we do from moment to moment with no need to wait for thinking, simultaneous direction in action and even in thought. That would be life in true consciousness, a condition in which our conscience could actually be our guide, and in which, as the "I Ching" puts it, remorse could disappear.

     At the present time for us, life with a conscience is life with remorse. Living in waking sleep, we are not remotely sensitive enough to be guided by our conscience. We are far too partial for that. The scales of our judgment are weighted by our thoughts. Our thoughts are heavier than our conscience. Conscience is fine, not gross, it is the touch of spirit, light as a butterfly's wing or an angel's hand on your shoulder. We are too slow and too insensitive to actually be guided by our conscience, and so we have to live with remorse.

     I think that one does learn lessons from remorse. They are hard lessons, but I think that the ability to learn in this way is crucial for a person. One has to be able to submit to one's conscience. We are so insensitive that we require a beating before our conscience gets our attention. But when we receive the beating of genuine, severe remorse and respond, adjust our behavior and our thinking in accordance with the inner punishment that we have received and are receiving, it is a proof that we are willing and of a mind to submit to higher authority, that is, to what we actually should do and should be. It is a good mark for us, it shows that we still have potential.

     Conscience is, as it were, the judgment of God, the way God feels when He regards us-and God regards us continuously, that is omnipresence. I think that it is as if God experiences a degree of indigestion in regarding us, usually not outright nausea. After all, God keeps it all in perspective, by definition, but regarding us must be somewhat disturbing to God. On the other hand, sometimes we have our golden moments, as if God says, "not bad." I hope that you have experienced both severe remorse and such golden moments. One such moment can warm your heart for a lifetime, at moments when you are in desperate need of a little warmth in your "cold, cold heart."

     I think that we live with a constant background of remorse. We tune it out. We really have to tune it out, because we can't do anything about it, until we actually learn how to become aware of reality. It is even mentally healthy to tune it out, so that we can experience our requisite minimum daily requirement of joy. If we don't have enough joy in our lives, we suffer from emotional malnutrition. There is no use in that, it doesn't benefit us personally or anyone else. In our present condition, it may be desirable to be able to tune out this baseline remorse which is unavoidable in waking sleep, while still being able to respond to extraordinary remorse. That is a "well-adjusted" person, adjusted to life in waking sleep. But we should not have to adjust to waking sleep. That is not how we should be.

     As awakening becomes a little more real for me, the possibility of actually living with my conscience, and not tuning it out, also becomes a little more real. There is an immense backlog of remorse that I have tuned out in my life, like water held back by Grand Coulee Dam. I don't see any benefit in subjecting myself to that flood. Of course, my sins are crushing.

     The remedy is to let the river of life flow. This is the practice of awareness of reality. "Remorse disappears." I have experienced such moments. "The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off."

     If you will pardon some frankly metaphorical thinking: God, of course, is very forgiving, exactly because He is just. God is just right, because God is reality. We are not as we should be, and we sin moment by moment. It isn't right, but we can be forgiven, because we did not know what we were doing. The past really isn't our fault. We were badly brought up by our culture. A good child of the universe wishes to be as one should be, to direct my attention and energy rightly and to do rightly, to decide rightly in all things where I have the power and responsibility of decision.

     The issue really is not my sins. The issue is that I wish with all my heart not to sin. In responding to genuine and sincere remorse, I prove that. Sometimes I do something right that wasn't easy, something that demanded my intelligence, my strength and energy, my intuition, spirit and goodwill. Those are the golden moments, when I recognize that. The point is not to experience remorse, but rather to live as we should live. God isn't into recriminations. "Go and sin no more," says the priest after confession and communion. But of course we are sinning before he can even get the words out of his mouth, long before we depart the church. Maybe we stopped for a moment, if the communion was actually real, and the spirit of Jesus Christ actually was present to us for a moment.

     We are troubled by anxiety because we know that we are ignoring essentials. Of course we are troubled by an uneasy conscience. We fear punishment because we feel that we probably deserve it. But God is just.

     I want to avoid confusion on this point. When I say that God is just, I am not, for example, endorsing the Holocaust. It is evident that a great deal can, and will go wrong for any individual on Earth, and some seem to get far more than their fair share of wrongness. Life on Earth is subject to many accidental happenings, often the result of stupidity and evildoing by our fellows. And we are also subject to ill health, aging and death, which sometimes seems all too cruel to us. These are the conditions of life here. From a partial viewpoint, we might think that these things represent horrible injustice, or on the other hand, we might at least try to find justice in it. It is much more than merely justice. We are gifted with life. Life is always found in conditions, which always are, whatever they are. But life is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. In impartiality and simultaneity, we know what it means, that we are created in God's image.

     We need to accept our gift of life, however it happens to be wrapped. In one sense, we have no choice about that. Acceptance is really the only way. For example, the apparent option of committing suicide is really an illusion. We will all die, when God reclaims His talent. In the meantime, we have our choices to make. I can choose to hasten my death, do something that I believe will cause me to die. But I am still alive for the moment, as we all are. We must accept that we are alive until we die.

     But "aye, there's the rub." In the present condition of our consciousness, we are not able to accept reality. We are stuck with a partial and usually vague viewpoint. This condition is our bondage, our prison, our "mission, should you choose to accept it." Our inability is not inherent. It is a consequence of lifelong bad habits, unworthy of our consciousness and conscience, even of our beautiful bodies.

     Conscience is part of our experience. Working on our consciousness is the only way that we will ever  really be able to live in accordance with our conscience. In the meantime, do the best you can. Don't try too hard to deny your remorse, and when you can change your ways as indicated by your conscience, by all means do so. But you must realize that, as yet, you are too unconscious to really be conscientious. Don't drive yourself crazy. Jesus advised us to "be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect." He did not mean that we should do the impossible.

     Perfection is a journey, the "golden road," made up of golden moments strung together. Jesus gave some advice that seems impossible, but none more so than this. I am supposed to be perfect like God? The practice of awareness of reality shows us the way. I cannot go to perfection, not only is it too far, infinitely far, but also I really don't know which way to go, because my thought is partial and perfection would be impartial. But I can take one step in the right direction. Impartiality is the right direction. This practice shows us how to take that step, and in watching it, made correctly, God says, "not bad, my child. Maybe you will learn to walk after all." Walking is taking one step after another, continuously.

     Some people happen to be born with a disability, so that they cannot learn to walk. That's a condition of Earth. Walking is good as a metaphor because commonly, we walk. We all had to learn and we do learn, barring extraordinary circumstances. But walking is not the criterion of a human being. Consciousness is the criterion. That is "the talent that is death to hide." That is the talent that we must put to use, but we neglect it. Of course, we have a guilty conscience. We see a person walking, and say to ourselves, oh, there goes a man or a woman. But we do not see the behavior of really conscious people because they are "rare as hens' teeth." We look like real people, but the sordid, stunted condition of our consciousness is invisible, except to ourselves and to God. Of course we experience shame and anxiety. Our conscience is like a noble woman, the "Eternal Feminine," regarding us with clear eyes, always with hope and often with despair, sometimes screaming, sometimes sobbing. She knows what we are, what we could be, she knows what a poor excuse for a consciousness we are. She cannot be the man herself. It is up to us.