The Light of Conscience
Conscience is like a lamp, lighting up the way. When we ignore it and forget to attend to it, its light begins to dim. When we do this for a long period of time, it may become so faint that we may barely be able to find it anymore.
However, when we follow it, it is thereby also enlivened, growing ever brighter. When we attend to it, slowly, we begin to see the shape of our life more clearly. We begin to see everything in our lives in and through it. This light begins to impel us to change the way that we act, the way that we speak, the way that we relate to ourselves and everyone around us.
There’s a quality of the genuinely revelatory in a properly functioning conscience. It can reveal reality to us, in a less and less clouded manner. This is because conscience isn’t bound by momentary feelings, sensations, impulses and reactions. Rather, it is something like a profound moral intuition, a feeling for the “rightness” of things. It does not function according to a moral “code”, a legalistic framework, although it can be informed and educated by them. Conscience is also not purely something which inhibits and restricts “wrong” actions. It is perhaps even more importantly that which calls us out of our indifference towards action. Conscience is therefore profoundly aspirational. The more profound our aspirations, the more profound our conscience. But what we aspire towards matters profoundly.
Conscience is the compass which reveals the direction toward which we must grow in order to mature as human beings. It shows the path to voluntary suffering and the joy of being fully alive. It guides us towards self-transcendence, towards being something more than what we currently are. It stretches the confines of current mode of being. Following it will inevitably lead to growing pains. However, the feeling of growing into something more than we were before is truly the greatest joy that can be felt. It is a joy that transcends mere pleasure or comfort.
To follow it requires great courage and commitment, for it will inevitably lead one to hitherto unknown paths. The ways of one’s conscience cannot be predicted, made into an algorithm. This is why following it is so difficult. As a faculty, it is always sensitive to the unique reality of each moment and of each individual context. In order to hear it, we must be able to slow down, to listen deeply to our own depths and the depths of meaning present in each situation we encounter. The voice of conscience is not a reactive, dramatic voice. In order to become accustomed to hearing its delicate whisperings, we must become accustomed to silence. To the attitude of waiting, being ready to receive. Of not imposing our own conclusions on a situation too hastily. By quieting down the reactive voices within us, which would throw us around into a myriad of directions at once, quite literally splitting ourselves apart.
To follow one’s conscience, is to step with ever greater attentiveness to the unique reality of one’s own life, to the meaningfulness of its every detail. It is to step into the knowledge of the fact that everything we do, and the manner in which we do it, matters to the utmost degree.
Conscience is that faculty which seeks to integrate the fragmentary nature of the human being. By following it, the human being is gradually made simple, less and less divided against himself. A human being with a clear conscience thinks clearly, acts decisively and feels fully. By being honest with himself, he is made transparent to himself. Being transparent to himself, he allows himself to be transparent to others. He allows himself to be seen by others without pretending to be something else, or acting on the impulse to hide from them, or from himself.
With a clear conscience, we are able to encounter other people without shame, with courage, with love and with patience. By seeing ourselves with honesty and clarity, we are able to withdraw our unfair projections, judgments and expectations from other people, which really have their roots in the judgments and expectations that we have for ourselves.
Clarity of conscience bridges the distance between self and other. The very light that shines in the lamp of the clarified conscience, is the same light that we begin to see in everyone and everything around us. With a pure heart, the world around us is transfigured and made as if transparent. Through this transparency, an ineffable light seems to flow in and through all things, uniting us with itself and through itself, with everyone and everything.