Maurice Nicoll discusses Real Conscience vs Consciousness.
Maurice Nicoll addresses Conscience early in his Psychological Commentaries: “Consciousness and Conscience are similar in their respective spheres, one being in the Intellectual Centre, the other in the Emotional Centre. Consciousness is Knowing all together; Conscience is Feeling all together.” p40
“Each person sets up his own dogma as absolute truth, and so people persecute, despise, and kill each other in the name of God. They may do so very earnestly and say they act from Conscience. But this is False or Mechanical Conscience and is formed in Personality. This False or Acquired Conscience is not based on inner understanding. It is related to False Personality and so to feeling merit and therefore feeling that one is right. The difference between Real Conscience and Mechanical or False Conscience is that Real Conscience is the same in all men and speaks, as it were, the same language. Mechanical or False Conscience is different in different people.” p40
“Real Conscience exists in everyone but is buried and so out of reach. Personality has grown over it and as a result our feelings, our sense of ourselves, has shifted to Personality. Therefore to ‘feel all together’ is impossible and indeed would be unendurable as we are. To ‘feel all together’ would mean that we were one. But Personality is divided into little bits.” p40
“Conscience does not teach us what to do, but how to be. Doing comes out of Being.” Annie Lou Staveley, The Plan Is Good, p150
“Being lies in the direction of summoning Will and Aim to gather a structure that I can call ‘I’”. Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 03 7:50
The presence of Conscience is the one remaining thing that distinguishes human intelligence from artificial intelligence. Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 04 11:40
Maurice says, “You can never make aim unless we see what the Work is about—namely, about yourself and your relationship to Higher Centers or Real Conscience.” p627
“If you are guided by your acquired ideas and opinions you are following the wrong mentor. You must start from what the Work teaches because the Work replaces Real Conscience for us as we are. It teaches what Real Conscience would teach us if it were awakened in us.” p627
“It is within a man that the struggle of Yes and No must begin, in regard to esoteric ideas. We have ‘I’s in us that, if we follow them, drag us down in regard to esoteric ideas, that, indeed, fight against all new understanding and wish to kill us in this respect. Yet we take ourselves quite calmly as if there were nothing wrong with us. This means illusion. This means we have not begun to observe ourselves in the light of esoteric teaching—whether of the Work or the Gospels or of any other source more ancient. And this means that everyone has ‘I’s which will resist the Work, resist every form of esoteric ideas.” p303
M says the Work teaches that we should struggle against self-justifying—always putting ourselves in the right. Otherwise, we will never know what real suffering means, and we will spend much energy in justifying all that we do. “Such a person has no Real Conscience. When Real Conscience awakens in a person, they know what real suffering is. The Work teaches that Real Conscience exists in everyone but is deeply buried. So we have to find it outside in the form of Esoteric Teaching which, when accepted by understanding and lived by the Will, will begin to connect us to this Inner and Real Conscience so we can know and see what everything is and its quality and use.” p449
“Real Will—that is, Master—comes from above, not from life and its level of interests. If you have no above in you, in your thought and outlook, there is no chance of touching Real Conscience or Real ‘I.’ p486
Maurice: “Buried Conscience is the herald of Higher Centers, as John the Baptist is of Christ.” p1039
“Sincere work begins to bring Buried Conscience into your consciousness, little by little, as you can bear it. Insincere work buries it more than ever.” p1630
Annie Lou Stavely talks of the role of Conscience in a group:
“Beelzebub says that an untrammeled conscience is the best guide and also that all men who have uncovered true conscience see things alike. There cannot be disagreement between one man and another’s conscience if it is genuine. So it follows that if a group of people need to work together, make decisions together, their only hope is to uncover conscience as best they may and strive to come to the point of agreement on this basis—inner first, outer second.” Annie Lou Staveley, The Plan Is Good, p221
Logion 58
Yeshua says…
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
All quotations from Cynthia Bourgeault are from The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
Page numbers for Annie Lou Staveley refer to The Plan is Good, (Two Rivers Press: 2023)
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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