The Peculiar Idea of Conscience

The Peculiar Idea of Conscience

[00:45] Right vs Wrong

This is the Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. Today we’re going to talk about the peculiar idea of conscience. Conscience. Do you have a conscience? Is something unconscionable to you? Meaning, can you, with good conscience, engage in certain activities? Or are you going to be plagued by feelings of guilt?

And so whenever we look at the word conscience, we have to look at another fundamental concept in Vedic psychology. So in Vedic psychology, we’re going to use some of the same terms that are used in Western psychology, but with slight twists in them, and a little bit of a difference.

In Vedic psychology you’re born and in the first four or five years after your birth, you have impressions from the outside world about, that are character forming. What is it that, from what you’ve seen from birth until you’re about four or five years of age, that gives you a fundamental sense of what is right?

And if you have a fundamental sense of what is right, then you also have a fundamental sense of what is wrong. And this has to do with, to what extent is it conscionable to bring benefit to yourself? To what extent is it unconscionable to eliminate or not regard the interests of others while you’re in the process of bringing benefit to yourself?

[02:28] Selflessness vs Selfishness

And so, is it possible to be someone who never intends to bring benefit to themself? It is philosophically impossible. I can remember once a philosophy professor of mine said, “Alright, there is a combat soldier. He sees a hand grenade roll into a group of children. He scatters the children, throws his body on the hand grenade and it blows up and kills him. Was it a completely selfless act?” And then we had to all sit and talk about that.

And people were saying, “It was a completely selfless act. He gave up his life so that those children wouldn’t be harmed.” Of course, by the way, this is a hypothesis. This thing may have happened sometime in combat, but this was really just a hypothesis being brought to us.

But then people like me who were perhaps a little bit deeper thinkers, came up with, “Well, in the remaining one second of his life, he didn’t think he could live with himself if he allowed the hand grenade to kill all the children and didn’t take the blow into his own body, and so he would rather die than live with the conscience of having watched children all blow up when he could have stopped it from happening. And in that one second, he made a value judgment and leaped onto the hand grenade.”

Mine was the least popular point of view, but I think it was the most accurate, to tell you the truth. The basic question here is not about hand grenades and combat soldiers, it’s about is it possible to do anything without some kind of motivation towards a sense of self, a greater sense of self, a greater sense of being?

And fundamentally, most philosophers would agree that the answer’s no. Even if you seem to be doing something completely selfless, you’re doing it because selflessness is a better status to have, a better idea of yourself than selfishness.

[04:30] Personality – The Delivery Mechanism for Character

So when we are little children, we learn these elements of character that have to do with the okayness of bringing benefit to yourself, provided that you balance it with taking regard of the interests of others, and these are the fundamental building blocks that give us this thing called character.

What is your character? To what extent do you regard the interests of others to be valuable, not just your own interests? And then after about the age of five, this is in Vedic psychology, you use another device of the human psyche to begin the process of delivering your inner character in interaction with the world around you. And that device is known in Vedic psychology as personality.

So personality is that which you develop, which is the delivery mechanism for your character. Now as you progress in Vedic psychology, at some point, if you’re, you have the great good fortune of being introduced to Vedic Meditation, a new character building phenomenon gets added to the mix. Without the intervention of Vedic Meditation, it’s considered that someone’s character by about the age of five is pretty much set.

Personality can go through changes, but character remains character. And what is character? We’ll go back and just touch on that point again. The extent to which you consider it reasonable to bring benefit to yourself, along with bringing, allowing benefit to accrue to the many: to the interests of the one with reference to the interests of the many.

And the balance between that is basically telling of the qualities of your character: that that’s pretty much set, and even most Western psychologists would agree with this, by about the age of five, that’s what you have, and the rest of the time is your personality, which is delivering this thing. Delivering this inner character to the world, in interaction with the world.

[06:56] Changing Character and Conscience Through Vedic Meditation

So in Vedic psychology, we have the advent of turiya. Turiya, T-U-R-I-Y-A, turiya, which means the fourth. The fourth consciousness state, the non-waking, non-dreaming, non-sleeping state. 

Most people experience only three states of consciousness. Meditators add a fourth state, and that fourth state is the internal impression. It doesn’t come from the outside. It doesn’t come from anything you can see, taste, touch, hear, or smell. It comes from a particular fundamental experience of your individual consciousness internally without the aid of senses. Without the aid of circumstances.

Internally, when you go beyond thought, the Unified Field imprints itself into the ego structure and is added to your inner quality of character. And so someone’s character begins to change when Turiya, the fourth consciousness state is added into the mix. And of course, even well after the age of five. It could happen at the age of 50. And it is fundamentally altering of your character.

Conscience is based around character. What is it that I… what is my fundamental sense of what is right? My fundamental sense of what is right. And so when character is limited to whatever we’ve created up to and before the age of five, then we’re kind of stuck with a conscience that can, you know, maybe in somebody who the majority population might consider someone to have “flawed character.”

Flawed character meaning they can stand by and watch while heinous acts are committed and feel completely unmoved by that. That’s flawed character. And so then, if someone has flawed character and they’re after the age of five, what do you do with that person?

Well, sociologists will say there has to either be rehabilitation or containment or incarceration or whatever is going to keep that person from being a sociopath. Someone who only is interested in gain for themselves and has no concern about the impact that gaining for themselves might have on anybody else. That’s a sociopath.

So Vedic Meditation being added into the mix causes a fundamental change in character because it imprints very deeply into the ego structure a new experience of unboundedness, unbounded awareness. Awareness that has self-sufficient bliss in it.

[10:08] Developing Baseline Happiness

One is no longer solely motivated to get little waves of happiness by licking the dewdrops of happiness from the circumstantial environment. One is beginning to get baseline happiness.

Baseline happiness means, “I’m already happy and I want to take my happiness on an excursion now. I don’t need to have a thing, a body sensation, or self-aggrandizement, or to have possession of an object, or control over other humans or control over objects, in order to get happiness. I am the happiness field. I am the bliss field.”

This gradually dawning on a meditator is character changing, and as the character changes, the personality that delivers that character also goes through change.

And so we can see fundamental character change even in somebody who would’ve been relegated without Vedic Meditation to becoming a sociopath, as someone whose existence and behavior is just fundamentally damaging to the rest of society.

And so then, when we look at conscience, what is it that’s within your conscience? Well, when I worked in the prison system, I met… I’ve met in my lifetime, probably 35 to 40 sociopaths, people who considered it to be perfectly okay to either as a serial killer or as a mass murderer, to mass murder or serial kill, dozens or, in some cases, scores of other people and felt perfectly okay with it. It was within their conscience to do so. 

They didn’t feel guilty at all about it. It was one of the reasons why they were incarcerated. And a very interesting thing to see what happens when someone like that learns the practice of Vedic Meditation. The spontaneous rehabilitation doesn’t come from outside from, “Don’t do it” lectures, or “Can’t you see?” kind of lectures.

What happens is they begin to rehabilitate from inside because there is a fundamental sense of what is right being added into their ego structure, into their character in a transcendental way. They close their eyes, they go beyond thought, and that unbounded field of pure Beingness, that bliss field imprints itself in their consciousness, and baseline happiness grows.

[13:05] Happiness Through Hedonism

Baseline happiness and the lack of it is in fact what’s fundamentally wrong in a social structure. It’s the thing that’s missing. What is it that causes people to be greedy, to hoard for themselves more than what they actually need? What is it that causes people to be uncaring about the welfare of others?

Well, it has to do with no baseline happiness. When there’s a conviction that, “I have to be happy and I have to be happy at all costs, including the costs of others. That my happiness is my number one priority, even if it’s at the cost of others, and even if the gaining of my happiness cuts across the cost of others.

“Why? Because all I am is a body. I’m a body. And when this body dies, the opportunities for me to experience joy are also gone. So all I am is a body, and the body is aging, and it’s aging second by second, minute by minute, and I’m kind of in a panic to deliver to myself the satisfaction of being totally in control of circumstances, totally in control of others who might, through their behavior or their needs or their wants cut across my program of just basically getting happy.

“And getting happy has to do with hedonism. I have to accrue to myself the largest number of physiological, tactile sensations I can get.” There’s some arguments that you might think somebody wants, to possess a car like a Ferrari with a, that they can drive around with the top down. It’s not actually the car they want.

A psychologist, like me, would say they want to have the sensation of riding in the car. Just knowing the car is there is no good. They want to actually have sensations. There are some psychologists, and I rather agree with them, who would argue that all anybody’s really looking for is a bunch of tactile sensations.

[15:18] The Repercussions of an Identity Crisis

What is the sensation of hearing people say yes to you all the time when actually they want to say no, but they’re afraid to? But they say yes to you because you have a kind of commanding presence that maybe you even exert fear-based administration on them, and consequently, they only ever say yes. So somebody who has within their conscience structure, the capacity to do a thing like that, to administer fear-based administration in order to get what they want, is doing so because of an identity crisis.

What is their identity crisis? Their fundamental existential crisis is, “I’m only a body and I can see all these bodies die.” 

And we can also see people who put a lot of attention on, “I’m not going to die.” In this modern age there are technologies that are being experimented with, it is supposed, to make your body live forever, or live for a long, long, long time. Physiological extension so that, “Maybe I’ll have 130 years, maybe I’ll have 150, maybe I’ll have 300 years. Maybe I can dispense with this body altogether, keep my consciousness alive in a computer-driven nervous system.”

But if you still have this idea that happiness is through the acquisition of sensations, happiness is through the acquisition of… what is control? Control is, “I get to have all the sensations I want and I don’t have to listen to you.” That’s why people control. They don’t want to have to listen to anybody else or their interests or their needs. They want to get those sensations for themselves anytime they want, whenever they want them.

And so this kind of addiction to body sensations is the baseline unhappiness that gives people a sense of all they can do to get all the sensations they need to get by controlling.

[17:22] Vedic Meditation as a Solution to an Addict Mentality

So let’s hypothetically think about it. You could have your consciousness survive for 300 years, or 400 years, or 500 years, and then you’re going to die. At what point are you going to reach satiety? Fancy word for satisfaction. 

At what point will you reach satiety? At what point will you experience the supreme inner contentedness, the beatific state? Is it going to be only after accumulating 500,000 physiological sensations that you have total control over and that you can administer any time?

This is a very addictive mentality if that’s the case, and there’s no end to it. What’s the basic idea that typifies an addict? “I want an infinite amount of everything right now.” That’s the addict mentality. “I want an infinite amount of everything right now.” And there are limits because of the relativities of the world to our ability to have an infinite amount of everything right now, if the only mechanism by which we’re going to do that is a body and a physiology.

[18:40] Bliss Plus

You can in fact experience infinite bliss, but it’s not going to come through your senses and their contact with the outside world. The desire to experience infinity can be satisfied through the practice of Vedic Meditation in which you transcend sensory experience and experience oneness with the supreme inner contentedness of the Unified Field itself.

And when you do that and you awaken and stabilize baseline happiness, you don’t have to be a control freak anymore. You don’t have to attempt to govern the experiences of others anymore. You don’t just have access to the happiness, you have become the happiness. You’ve become it. You are the supremely content Unified Field of consciousness.

And anything that’s added to that is a plus. “I am the absolute supreme, inner contentness bliss field, plus I get to chew on a nice piece of sourdough toast with butter and tahini on it. So I have bliss plus tahini. I have bliss plus being able to go to a movie. I have bliss plus hanging out with my friends. But my bottom line is I have bliss.

“If for some reason the friends aren’t here, I’ve still got the bliss. If for some reason the sourdough toast and the tahini and butter aren’t here, I still have the bliss. If for some reason the movies get canceled, I still have the bliss. My minimum position is absolute bliss.”

Anything else is an add-on, and because of that, one doesn’t need to turn into an egregious control freak who, within their conscience will permit the suffering of others caused by their presence, or the suffering of others caused by their grasping for gaining the sensation basis they feel they need before their body dies.

[21:05] Ayurveda – Relevant Longevity

Ayurveda is the science of self healthcare that is promulgated by the Vedic worldview. Ayurveda is a branch of vedic Science which teaches us how to have a quality of life, which provides us with, and here’s the adjective, relevant longevity. Relevant longevity. How long is it relevant for an individual status and structure to be the processor of Cosmic Intelligence? For how long is it relevant?

And the Vedic worldview is, it’s not relevant in almost all cases for a human body to go on being the repository of resources for beyond a certain number of years. It’s just not relevant.

Why is that? There’s no succession. When you have people who are hoarding longevity because they’re convinced that they want to continue on being big influencers and being controllers of others and being controllers of resources, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the entire mentality of that, because it cuts across the interests of those who cannot succeed into, there’s no succession into the status of being someone who is a leader of community.

And so in order for succession to occur, there has to be limits on longevity, and without limits on longevity, there’s no succession. There’s no transference of property titles or intellectual property titles or land titles. There’s no succession. No succession means no evolution.

[23:02] A Great Conscience is a Reflection of Great Character

Evolution is death dependent. It’s absolutely dependent on cells dying in your body and being replaced by new fresh cells, and then the entire cell mass dying and giving rise to a vacancy for succession for the next generation. And so evolution in one regard is body-death dependent.

And so then, those who have it within their conscience, the idea that they’re going to use modern technology to keep their crusty old consciousness alive forever and ever and ever, so they can continue hogging down and hoarding resources and bossing people around, this is not the Vedic worldview.

Vedic worldview is, become one with the Totality Consciousness. When you become one with the Totality Consciousness, you have it all, baby. You have it all. You are everything. And when you are everything, when, “Aham Brahmasmi,” when, “I am Totality,” the Sanskrit phrase for that is Aham Brahmasmi, then I’m not a controller or a hoarder anymore and I have a great conscience.

So conscience is a reflection of character, and character is limited without the practice of Vedic Meditation. So conscience is also usually a little shabby, and with the practice of Vedic Meditation, conscience improves because one’s neediness is not so egregious.

Jai Guru Deva.