Meetings With Remarkable Men
Bogachevsky had very original views on morality. He …said …
‘Conscience is everywhere the same. As it is here, so it is in St. Petersburg, America, Kamchatka, and in the Solomon Islands. (I)f you have a real conscience and live according to it, it will always be well with you wherever you may be. ‘Subjective morality is a relative conception, and if you are filled with relative conceptions, then when you are grown up you will always and everywhere act and judge other people according to the conventional views and notions you have acquired. You must learn not what people round you consider good or bad, but to act in life as your conscience bids you. An untrammelled conscience will always know more than all the books and teachers put together. But for the present, until your own conscience is formed, live according to the commandment of our Teacher Jesus Christ: “Do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you.”
Yelov…said:
‘It is not a question of to whom a man prays, but a question of his faith. Faith is conscience, the foundation of which is laid in childhood. If a man changes his religion, he loses his conscience, and conscience is the most valuable thing in a man. I respect his conscience, and since his conscience is sustained by his faith and his faith by his religion, therefore I respect his religion; and for me it would be a great sin if I should begin to judge his religion or to disillusion him about it, and thus destroy his conscience which can only be acquired in childhood.’
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
Chapter 19 – Beelzebub’s tale about his second descent to the planet Earth
…”From our earliest meetings, the sensitivity and concern with which (Abdil) spoke about beings like himself always touched me deeply. And when my Reason had clearly recognized that the function of ‘conscience,’ transmitted to him by heredity and fundamental for all three-centered beings, had not yet quite atrophied in him, there arose, and eventually became crystallized in my presence, a ‘really functioning needful striving’ toward him, as though he were a kinsman of my own nature.
From that moment, according to the cosmic law that ‘every cause gives birth to a corresponding result,’ the priest Abdil began to experience ‘silnegordpana’ toward me, or as your favorites would say, a feeling of ‘trusting another as oneself.’
Chapter 27 The order of existence created for men by the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemas
… Ashiata Shiemash … explained in detail, among other things, what this being-impulse of Objective Conscience is, and how factors for its manifestation arise in the presence of three-brained beings.
…’The factors for the being-impulse of Objective Conscience arise in three-brained beings from the localization in their presence of particles of the “emanations of the sorrow” of our All-Loving and Long-Suffering, Endless Creator, that is why the source of manifestation of genuine Conscience in three-centered beings is sometimes called the “Representative of the Creator. ”
” ‘And this sorrow is formed in our All-Maintaining Common Father from the struggle constantly proceeding in the Universe between joy and sorrow.’
“And he said further…
‘In all … three-centered beings of our entire Universe … including us men, owing to the data … engendering in us the divine impulse of Conscience, “all of us” and the whole of our essence, in its very foundation, are, and must be, only suffering. …
” ‘Consequently, … we men existing on the Earth, … must always inevitably struggle with the two quite opposite functionings arising and proceeding in our common presence, the results of which are always sensed by us either as “desires” or as “nondesires.”
” ‘And so, only he who consciously assists the process of this inner struggle, and consciously assists the “nondesires” to prevail over the “desires,” behaves in accordance with the Being of our Common Father Creator Himself, whereas he who consciously assists the contrary only increases His sorrow.
(Beelzebub speaking…) “ ‘…from time to time …these favorites of yours .. are moved by the particular inner impulse which they call ‘remorse of conscience. ‘
“And this is because, when they happen to receive and experience some kind of moral shock, …there automatically takes place in …these three-brained beings there a combination of functioning that frees the data present in their ‘subconscious’ for the manifestation of the divine impulse of Objective Conscience, and temporarily allows it to participate in the functioning of their ordinary consciousness, with the result that this ‘remorse of conscience’ begins to proceed in them. …
…”Here it is necessary to say that these favorites of yours, particularly the contemporary ones, have become experts in preventing this inner impulse of theirs called ‘remorse of conscience’ from lingering long in their common presence.
“No sooner do they begin to sense a twinge or even the slightest ‘prick’ of the arising of the functioning in them of this being-impulse than they immediately ‘squash’ it, whereupon this impulse, not yet quite formed in them, promptly subsides.
“For ‘squashing’ the first stirring of any remorse of conscience in themselves, they have even invented some very effective special means which now exist there under the names of ‘alcoholism,’ ‘cocainism,’ ‘morphinism,’ ‘nicotinism,’ ‘onanism,’ ‘monkism,’ ‘Athenianism,’ and others with names also ending in ‘ism. ‘
In Search of the Miraculous
… “Conscience is a general and a permanent phenomenon. … (W)e may say that there exists the conscience of a man in whom there are no contradictions. This conscience is not suffering; on the contrary it is joy of a totally new character which we are unable to understand. But even a momentary awakening of conscience in a man who has thousands of different I’s is bound to involve suffering. And if these moments of conscience become longer and if a man does not fear them but on the contrary cooperates with them and tries to keep and prolong them, an element of very subtle joy, a foretaste of the future ‘clear consciousness’ will gradually enter into these moments.
Openings, William Segal
There are times when conscience alone, supplementing reason, can bring equilibrium and openness. The realization that one’s life is a waste for oneself and for others, that one lives here on earth without fulfilling one’s purpose, brings the experience of conscience. Thus touched, one may be moved to another understanding. Change, movement, liberation are possible, but until conscience, deeply buried in the subconscious, is aroused, one may never unveil the feeling needed to create and sustain the human link to another order of energy.
Parabola Magazine
Conscience, January 29, 2015, Material from talks with John Bennett at his International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House, Gloucester, England.
Conscience is like a guest, a noble guest who comes to your house and you don’t recognize him. You make him very uncomfortable, because he is a very sensitive guest, and because you don’t recognize him you behave in front of him in a way that’s very painful to him. Then a moment comes when you begin to see that this guest is yourself, and you begin to feel this discomfort, and you feel ashamed because you’ve not treated this guest properly.
…closely connected with Conscience is also Compassion, because we mustn’t think that Conscience is critical of us. This is simply how it feels to us.
… when we see clearly, and we look at people and see through the mask of their personality—what they want to present to us—and we see them without their mask as we see ourselves without our mask, then we come to realize one most necessary thing, and that is that we are all in the same boat. As long as we feel that we’re different from other people, whether we think we’re better than they are or worse, it is blindness. We’re not better or worse than other people, we are one. This is what Conscience can do to us.
It can bring us towards realizing that we’re not separate from other people, by showing us what is behind the mask; that it is the mask that separates.
…The power of Conscience is in its seeing. It is not given authority to do, because as I described it, it is a visitor to the house. The visitor is not entitled to give orders in the house; it is his presence that changes things. But if we don’t know that he’s present, or if we don’t recognize him for what he is, then even his presence changes nothing. That is how it ordinarily is. But we turn things upside down and instead of living by this inner seeing, we live by outer seeing.
Exchanges Within
Conscience is not a relative idea . . .
Question: What did Gurdjieff mean in what he said about “coming to conscience?”
Lord Pentalnd: Of course I think you’ll really agree with me that his words on that are a help, but all other words get in the way. …(I)t’s one of the words, perhaps the only one, that is not a relative idea. Perhaps that’s why it’s so difficult to speak about. “Understanding,” “being,” “knowledge,” all these we speak about on different levels. But conscience—and perhaps this is why it interests you—is there or it isn’t. We can’t speak of it relatively….
We could …say that if we only have flashes of it, it would be because our feelings aren’t properly prepared. I think the first step towards conscience would be the study of the degrees of feeling… The truer feeling is very quiet, isn’t it? It is very often forgotten by us because it speaks so quietly. We can hardly bear to live without a certain contact with the less valuable, more colorful feelings. So the way towards conscience would be through the different levels of feeling.
…In any case, it is necessary for you to understand that one can’t understand about feeling until one has understood feelings, and that’s only possible when we have a certain command over our attention. That depends on a certain ability to relax, to maintain an inner activity.
So we must return and say that really all our work is for coming towards conscience. … Gurdjieff says that in a sense our work begins from conscience….