What is the Conscience?
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Answers from the books of Samael Aun Weor
People confuse Conscience with intelligence or with intellect, and the very intelligent or intellectual person is called a conscious person.
We affirm that Conscience in man, beyond any doubt and without any fear of fooling ourselves, is a very particular type of "Understanding of Internal Knowledge", totally independent of all mental activity.
The faculty of Conscience permits us the Knowledge of Ourselves.
Conscience gives us integral knowledge of what is, where it is, what is really known, what is certainly ignored.
Revolutionary Psychology teaches that only man himself can know his own Conscience, and whether it exists or not at a given moment.
Man himself and nobody else but himself can become aware for an instant that before that instant, before that moment, he was not really conscious, that he had his Conscience asleep. He will then forget that experience or keep it as a memory, as the memory of a strong experience.
It is urgent to know that the Conscience in the rational animal is not something continuous or permanent.
Normally, the Conscience in the intellectual animal called man sleeps profoundly.
Rare, very rare are the moments in which the Conscience is awake. The intelectual animal works, drives cars, marries, dies, etc., with his Conscience totally asleep and only in very exceptional moments does it awaken.
human being's life is a life of dreams. However he believes he is awake and will never admit that he is dreaming, and that his Conscience is asleep.
If someone was to awaken, he would feel terribly ashamed of himself; he would immediately understand his tomfoolery, his own ridicule. This life is frightfully ridiculous, horribly tragic, and rarely sublime.
If a boxer in the middle of a fight was to awaken all of a sudden, he would feel ashamed before the honorable public and would flee from the horrible spectacle before the astonishment of the asleep and unconscious multitudes.
When a human being admits he has his Conscience asleep, you can be sure he has already begun to awaken.
The reactionary schools of old-fashioned Psychology that deny the existence of the Conscience, and even declare the term useless, reveal a most profound state of Fundamental sleep. The henchmen of such schools sleep very profoundly in a practically infra and unconscious state.
Those who confuse the Conscience with psychological functions, thoughts, feelings, motor impulses and sensations, are in fact very unconscious and they sleep profoundly.
Those who admit the existence of the Conscience but flatly deny the different degrees of Consciousness, revel lack of conscious experience and sleep of the Conscience.
Every person who has, at least once, momentarily awakened, knows very well by personal experience that different degrees of observable consciousness exist in oneself.
First: Time; how long did we remain conscious?
Second: Frequency; how many times have we awakened consciousness?
Third: Amplitude and Penetration; what was one conscious of?
