Birdlip, February 17, 1945
COMMENTARY ON ACQUIRED CONSCIENCE
Maurice Nicholl
..........
If we had Real Conscience the whole world could unite and all
police, law, war, military control, and so on, would cease, because Real
Conscience, which is buried in all of us, is one and the same, and if all
people had Real Conscience they would understand one another and
speak one common tongue, one common language. In this Work we
try to study a language that will bring us together, that we can all
understand, and its object is to awaken Real Conscience. But as long
as we have artificial, acquired conscience, which is different in practic-
ally every case according to the upbringing, the nation, the country,
and so on, there is no possibility of any common understanding, and so
everything must always go on just as it has always done and, I fancy
you will all see, as it will go on, even worse than ever, in the future.
Here are people getting into their traditional 'I's and fighting with each
other on every side, and no one is trying to understand anything, and no
one can understand anything, and so the whole chaotic plot of life, which
is due to Man's being asleep, will continue as before and even worse than
before. But amongst ourselves we must try to form a nucleus of people
who wish to work on themselves, on acquired conscience, on False
Personality, and to separate from this terrible factory and meet each
other on a deeper level, where it is possible to meet one another without
all the insults and confusion and misunderstandings of ordinary life
led by sleeping people who take themselves for granted and in every
department of life behave purely mechanically. Is it not extraordinary
to feel that every person has in him, as the Work teaches, the common
basis of a mutual understanding which has been overlaid layer by layer
by the acquired conscience and the powerful outer layer of False
Personality with which everyone identifies most of all? Remember that
the object of this Work is to break through this false pseudo layer that
causes so much damage to ourselves and to everyone else. We know
that it is difficult to respect a person with no mind of his or her own, a
person who is simply composed of acquired opinions, buffers, traditional
attitudes and prejudices. With such a person there is nothing but
acquired conscience which may be better or worse, useful for life or
otherwise, but there is nothing really individual. If we converse with
such a person there is no thought, no ideas, nothing alive, no power of
anything new. In fact, we know exactly beforehand what gramophone
rolls will turn to the particular stimulus applied, and how the same
opinions will be expressed over and over again without change.
Acquired or false conscience is in this way a rigid fixed thing, a mech-
anical thing, whereas Real Conscience is quite different. It sees every-
thing in its true light and so judges it differently in each case. It is
relative, not absolute.
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