Pure action does not mean blind action. The rule is to care nothing for the consequences to the shifting, individualistic feelings, but not in ignorance of the objective conditions that action must take into account in order to be as perfect as possible, and so as not to be doomed to failure from the start. One may not succeed: that is secondary, but it should not be owing to defective knowledge of everything concerning the conditions of efficacy, which generally comprise causality, the relations of cause to effect, and the law of concordant actions and reactions. \nOne can extend these ideas to help define the attitude that the integrated man should adopt on every plane, once he has done away with the current notions of good and evil. He sets himself above the moral plane not with pathos and polemics but with objectivity, hence through knowledge — the knowledge of causes and effects — and through conduct that has this knowledge as its only basis. Thus for the moral concept of 'sin' he substitutes the objective one of 'fault,' or more precisely 'error.' For him who has centered himself in transcendence, the idea of 'sin' has no more sense than the current and vacillating notions of good and evil, licit and illicit. All these notions are burnt out of him and cannot spiritually germinate again. One might say that they have been divested of their absolute value, and are tested objectively on the basis of the consequences that in fact follow from an action inwardly free from them. \nThere is an exact correspondence with traditional teachings here, just as there was in the other behavioral elements suggested for an epoch of dissolution. To name a well-known formula that is nearly always misunderstood, thanks to overblown moralizing, there is the so-called law of karma. It concerns the effects that happen on all planes as the result of given actions, because these actions already contain their causes in potentiality: effects that are natural and neutral, devoid of moral sanction either positive or negative. It is an extension of the laws that are nowadays considered appropriate for physical phenomena, laws that contain no innate obligation concerning the conduct that should follow once one knows about them. As far as 'evil' is concerned, there is an old Spanish proverb that expresses this idea: 'God said: take what you want and pay the price'; also the Koranic saying: 'He who does evil, does it only to himself.' It is a matter of keeping in mind the possibility of certain objective reactions, and so long as one accepts them even when they are negative, one's action remains free. The determinism of what the traditional world called 'fate,' and made the basis of various forms of divination and oracles, was conceived in the same way: it was a matter of certain objective directions of events, which one might or might not take into account in view of the advantage or risk inherent in choosing a certain course. By analogy, if someone is intending to make a risky alpine climb or a flight, once he has heard a forecast of bad weather he may either abandon or pursue it. In the latter case, he accepts the risk from the start. But the freedom remains; no 'moral' factor comes into play. In some cases the 'natural sanction,' the karma, can be partially neutralized. Again by analogy: one may know in advance that a certain conduct of life will probably cause harm to the organism. But one may give it no thought and eventually resort to medicine to neutralize its effects. Then everything is reduced to an interplay of various reactions, and the ultimate effect will depend on the strongest one. The same perspective and behavior are also valid on the non-material plane. \nIf we assume that the being has reached a high grade of unification, everything resembling an 'inner sanction' can be interpreted in the same terms — positive feelings will arise in the case of one line of action, negative in the case of an opposite line, thus conforming to 'good' or 'evil' according to their meanings in a certain society, a certain social stratum, a certain civilization, and a certain epoch. Apart from purely external and social reactions, a man may suffer, feel remorse, guilt, or shame when he acts contrary to the tendency that still prevails in his depths (for the ordinary man, nearly always through hereditary and social conditioning active in his subconscious), and which has only apparently been silenced by other tendencies and by the dictate of the 'physical I.' On the other hand, he feels a sense of satisfaction and comfort when he obeys that tend ency. In the end, the negative 'inner sanction' may intervene to cause a breakdown in the case mentioned, where he starts from what he knows to be his deepest and most authentic vocation and chooses a given ideal and line of conduct, but then gives way to other pressures and passively recognizes his own weakness and failure, suffering the internal dissociation due to the uncoordinated plurality of tendencies. \nThese emotional reactions are purely psychological in character and origin. They may be indifferent to the intrinsic quality of the actions, and they have no transcendent significance, no character of 'moral sanctions.' They are facts that are 'natural' in their own way, on which one should not superimpose a mythology of moral interpretations if one has arrived at true inner freedom. These are the objective terms in which Guyau, Nietzsche, and others have treated in realistic terms such phenomena of the 'moral conscience,' on which various authors have tried to build a kind of experimental basis — moving illegitimately from the plane of psychological facts to that of pure values — for an ethics that is not overtly founded on religious commandments. This aspect disappears automatically when the being has become one and his actions spring from that unity. In order to eliminate anything implying limitation or support I would rephrase that: when the being has become one through willing it, having chosen unity; because a choice is implied even here, whose direction is not obligatory. One might even accept and will non-unity, and in the same class of superior types that we are concerned with here, there may be those who permit themselves to do so. In such a case their basal unity does not cease to exist, but rather dematerializes and remains invisibly on a deeper plane.

• good and evil
• moral relativism
• consequences
• transcendence
• care
• knowledge
• attitude
• causality
• freedom
• behavior
• fate
• tradition
• perspective
• karma
• obligation
• unity
• conscience
• the fourth way
• centers
• conditioning

Another complexity of the dynamics of depression that we overlooked was the one that Rank taught us: the urge to immortalization and self-perpetuation by pleasing the other, by conforming to the code of behavior that he represents. People hunger for immortality and get it where they can: in the small family circle or in the single love object. The transference object is the locus of our conscience, of our whole cosmology of good and evil. It is not something we can simply break away from, as it embodies our whole hero-system.

• depression
• psychology
• rank
• assimilation
• conformity
• transference
• immortality ideology
• religion
• the fourth way
• aim
• love
• good and evil
• self
• family
• conscience
• evil
• behavior
• immortality
• other

Q. Is conscience what would help most to know oneself? A. Yes, it is a necessary element; one has to pass through it. It is the most unpleasant thing in the world, because in the ordinary state we can hide things from ourselves. If we do not want to see something, we just shut our eyes and do not see it. But in the state of conscience our eyes will not shut

• will
• conscience

But first of all, as I said before, it is necessary to understand what self-remembering is, why it is better to self-remember, what effect it will produce, and so on. It needs thinking about. Besides, in trying to selfremember it is necessary to keep the connection with all the other ideas of the system. If one takes one thing and omits another thing—for instance, if one seriously works on self-remembering without knowing about the idea of the division of 'I's, so that one takes oneself as one (as a unity) from the beginning—then self-remembering will give wrong results and may even make development impossible. There are schools, for instance, or systems which, although they do not formulate it in this way, are actually based on false personality and on struggle against conscience. Such work must certainly produce wrong results. At first it will create a certain kind of strength, but it will make the development of higher consciousness an impossibility. False personality either destroys or distorts memory. Self-remembering is a thing that must be based on right function. At the same time as working on it you must work on the weakening of false personality. Several lines of work are suggested and explained from the beginning, and all must go together. You cannot just do one thing and not another. All are necessary for creating this right combination, but first must come the understanding of the struggle with false personality. Suppose one tries to remember oneself and does not wish to make efforts against false personality. Then all its features will come into play, saying, 'I dislike these people', 'I do not want this', 'I do not want that', and so on. Then it will not be work but quite the opposite. As I said, if one tries to work in this wrong way it may make one stronger than one was before, but in such a case the stronger one becomes, the less is the possibility of development. Fixing before development—that is the danger

• the fourth way
• self-remembering
• false personality
• consciousness
• conscious development
• memory
• unity
• time
• work
• will
• self
• conscience
• danger
• strength
• personality
• understanding
• ideas
• struggle
• schools
• other

All our life, all our habitual ways of thinking, have only one aim—to avoid shocks, unpleasant feelings, unpleasant realizations about ourselves. And this is the chief thing that keeps us asleep, because in order to awake we must not be afraid; we must be brave enough to see the contradictions. Even quite apart from the question of conscience, it is important to find in yourself that, when you have strong emotions (it does not refer to small emotions), when you feel strongly about some particular thing, you may be practically certain that at another moment you will have a different emotion about the same thing. If you cannot see it in yourself, see it in other people. When you realize the existence of these contradictory emotions, it will help you to understand your mechanicalness and your lack of understanding of yourself—lack of self-knowledge. So long as we feel different emotions at different times, what are we like? One moment we trust, another moment we are suspicious; one moment we like, another moment we dislike. So the aim is to bring those different emotions together, otherwise we will never know ourselves. If we always feel only one emotion at a time and do not remember other emotions, we are identified with it. When we have another emotion we forget the first; when we have a third, we forget the first and the second. Very early in life, by imitation and in different other ways, we learn to live in a kind of imaginary state to save ourselves from unpleasantness, so people develop in themselves this capacity to see only one emotion at a time. Remember to work. Remember yourself in one mood, then remember yourself in another mood. Try to connect them together and you will see

• the fourth way
• buffers
• aim
• thought
• habit
• sleep
• awakening
• fear
• contradictions
• conscience
• emotion
• mechanicalness
• self-awareness
• self-observation
• identification
• imagination
• life
• time
• work
• will
• self
• knowledge
• existence
• understanding
• trust
• emotions
• shocks
• other

Conscience is a state in which one cannot hide anything from oneself, and it must be developed in man. This development is parallel and simultaneous with the development of consciousness. We cannot say that we do not have it, so it does not mean a special development of something that does not exist in us, only in our life it is behind the scenes, buried very deep down in us and asleep. It may awake for a moment in ordinary life, and when it does, particularly at first, it always brings suffering, for it is very unpleasant to face the truth about oneself

• suffering
• truth
• life
• conscience
• consciousness

Conscience is a state in which one cannot hide anything from oneself, and it must be developed in man

• conscience

Whereas the collective intellect developed explosively, the collective conscience (emotional equivalent of the collective intellect) remained on a rudimentary level. This explains why man of the twentieth century, despite technological achievements of considerable magnitude, has been guilty of collective atrocities which might have brought a blush to the hairy features of Australopithecus. It explains the extraordinary casualness with which contemporary man discusses, among the cocktails and canapes of this afternoon jabberfests, the prospect of total thermonuclear war and its attendant horrors. They will roast us, we will roast them. Abombs, Hbomb, Nbombs,..all discussed without a blush, without a grimace, without shame or any impulse to resign from the human race as if roasting the entire population of a large city were the most natural thing in the world. A curious phenomenon, demonstrating once again that the expansion of man's cerebral cortex took place without any corresponding development in the mid-brain, a primordial hell's kitchen in which are brewed the crude patterns of emotional behavior that, though they may once have aided man's survival, now merely serve to imperil his very existence.

• humanity
• evolution
• consciousness
• war
• death
• society
• will
• survival
• existence
• conscience
• behavior
• collective
• hell
• shame
• patterns

All human beings consider themselves sinners. It's just about the deepest, oldest, and most universal human hangup there is. In fact, it's almost impossible to speak of it in terms that don't confirm it. To say that human beings have a universal hangup, as I just did, is to restate the belief that all men are sinners in different languages. In that sense, the Book of Genesis— which was written by early Semitic opponents of the Illuminati— is quite right. To arrive at a cultural turning point where you decide that all human conduct can be classified in one of two categories, good and evil, is what creates all sin— plus anxiety, hatred, guilt, depression, all the peculiarly human emotions. And, of course, such a classification is the very antithesis of creativity. To the creative mind there is no right or wrong. Every action is an experiment, and every experiment yields its fruit in knowledge. To the moralist, every action can be judged as right or wrong— and, mind you, in advance— without knowing what its consequences are going to be— depending upon the mental disposition of the actor. Thus the men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake knew they were doing good, even though the consequence of their actions was to deprive the world of a great scientist.

'If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad,' said George, 'aren't you liable to be pretty Hamlet-like?'

'What's so bad about being Hamlet-like?' said Hagbard. 'Anyway, the answer is no, because you only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action may be one or the other, and you're not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you remember the play. It was his conscience that made him indecisive.'

'So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?'

Hagbard laughed. 'Not necessarily. He might have decisively killed his uncle at the earliest opportunity, thus saving the lives of everyone else. Or he might have said, 'Hey, am I really obligated to avenge my father's death?' and done nothing. He was due to succeed to the throne anyway. If he had just bided his time everyone would have been a lot better off, there would have been no deaths, and the Norwegians would not have conquered the Danes, as they did in the last scene of the last act.

• good and evil
• hamlet
• humanity
• knowledge
• morality
• obligation
• sin
• death
• time
• conscience
• evil
• anxiety
• guilt
• creativity
• emotions
• consequences
• depression
• classification
• belief
• other
• transactional analysis
• scripts

It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?'\n\n 'When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

• dogma
• god
• religion
• spirituality
• understanding
• unity
• time
• will
• language
• light
• conscience
• pride
• rules

The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or  those deemed desirable by the collective.  Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality.  The 'inner voice' is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values.  The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience.  When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.\n\n 'Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious.  As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind.  Thus 'feminine' or 'soulful' characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one's specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship.  This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex.  This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.

• adaptation
• children
• collective
• conscience
• contrasexuality
• god
• individuation
• personality
• sacrifice
• sexuality
• unconscious
• morality
• experience
• culture
• relationship
• law
• paradise
• feminine
• sex
• repression
• differentiation

Conscience: that ambivalent faculty which is sometimes the voice of sanity but mostly the echo of parental qualms and social conditioning.

• conditioning
• conscience
• society

At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature which is peculiarly foreign to those brought up with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures.  Yet it was always obvious to the Chinese that a man who mistrusts himself cannot even trust his mistrust, and must therefore be hopelessly confused.

• christianity
• good and evil
• trust
• life
• nature
• conscience
• evil

The human problem of modern capitalism can be formulated in this way:  Modern capitalism needs men who cooperated smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated.  It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim - except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

• capitalism
• post-modern
• society
• authority
• force
• conscience
• aim
• numbers

Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father.  He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience.  Motherly conscience says: 'There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.'  Fatherly conscience says: 'You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all your must change your ways if I am to like you.'  The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside.'  

• conscience
• maturity
• love
• life
• change
• crime
• consequences
• happiness

You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be the fugitive. First question of conscience.\r\n \r\nAre you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience.\r\n \r\nAre you one who looks on? Or one who lends a hand? Or one who looks away and walks off? Third question of conscience.\r\n \r\nDo you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question of conscience.

• conscience
• will
• aim
• self-observation

Gentlemen of the jury, lo, we shall condemn him, and he will say to himself: 'These men did nothing for my fortunes, for my upbringing, my education, in order make me better, to make me a man.  These men did not feed me and did not give me a drink, nor did they visit me as I lay naked in prison, and now they have sent me into penal servitude.  I am quits with them, I owe them nothing now and shall owe no one anything until the end of the ages.  They are wicked, and I shall be wicked.  They are cruel, and I shall be cruel.'  That is what he will say, gentlemen of the jury!  And I swear: with your accusation you will only relieve him, relieve his conscience, he will continue to curse the blood he has spilt, and will have no remorse for it.  At the same time, you will bring to ruin the man still possible within him, for he will remain wicked and blind all the rest of his days.  But do you wish to punish him terribly, ferociously, with the most dreadful punishment that one may imagine, but with the purpose of saving and regenerating his soul forever?  If so, then crush him with your mercy!  You will see, you will hear his soul shudder, show horror.  'Am I to endure this mercy, am I to receive all this love, am I worthy of it?' - that is what he will exclaim!  There are souls that in their limitation accuse the entire world, but crush this soul with mercy, show it love, and it will curse its handiwork, for within it there are so many good beginnings.  And then what he will say is not: 'I am quits with them,' but 'I am guilty before all men and am the most unworthy of all men.  Men are better than I, for they wished not to destroy me but to save me!

• justice
• mercy
• soul
• love
• education
• time
• will
• conscience
• prison
• limitation