Most people do not live according to their conscience, and so the conscience has been repressed. Since the conscience is repressed in most humans, humanity had to create laws, moral codes, and etcetera to tell people how to behave. In order to enforce these laws, humanity also created consequences for breaking its laws. Of course, these consequences have often been extreme and just as out of harmony with conscience as the crime itself.
Ego is responsible for the repression of conscience. When we believe our egotistical self-centered thoughts, we ignore conscience. Since conscience is not self-centered, we believe it is against our will, which is self-centeredness. In other words, we literally choose self-centeredness over unity.
Practicing kindness in our relationships with others reverses this process.
Today’s reading provides guidance about how to practice kindness, which it calls love. It also addresses some common confusion about this practice. I encourage you to read slowly and digest this guidance.
Many spiritual people ignore the guidance for kindness. Sometimes they use excuses to justify unkindness like, “the world is not real,” “the script is written,” “I am not the doer,” “there are no others,” or “I’m just a mirror of your state of mind.” Two traveling spiritual friends of mine used to steal from people who invited them into their homes. They claimed that by stealing, they gave their hosts the opportunity to forgive. They even coined a term for it: stealing for forgiveness.
Self-centeredness is what repressed conscience in the first place, and self-centeredness will confuse spiritual teachings in order to keep it repressed, if you let it. However, that’s not necessary, because you do have conscience.
Conscience comes from the latin verb, conscire. “Con” means “with,” and “scire” means “know.” Therefore, conscience literally means ‘with knowing.’ Since this knowing is built into you, you can know when confusion is trying to confuse you; you can know when you are trying to ignore conscience; you can know when you are attempting to justify being out-of-harmony with conscience; and you can know how to be in harmony with conscience. It’s all a matter of wanting to choose unity consciousness over separation (self-centered) consciousness.
This is a song that a friend wrote based on NTI Matthew, Chapter 5. It might be fun to listen to it as you contemplate your choice regarding kindness.
