Chapter 20
CONSCIENCE
Charles Fillmore
Dynamics For Living
THERE is a divine goodness at the root of all existence. It is not necessary
to give in detail the place of abode of each sentient part of this central
goodness, for it is there, wherever you look, and whenever you look. No man is
so lowly but that at the touch of its secret this divine goodness may be brought
to light in him. Even the animals exhibit its regulating and directive power.
This goodness sleeps in the recesses of every mind and comes forth when least
expected.
Many stifle it for years, maybe for ages, but eventually its day comes, and
there is a day of reckoning. This is the law of universal balance--the
equilibrium of Being. It cannot be put aside with transcendental philosophies or
metaphysical denials any more than it can be smothered in the forces of the
blind passions.
Monitor
Men and women are loath to admit that there is within them a monitor with
which they have sooner or later to cope. They put off the day of reckoning as
long as possible. They do not like to deal with this leveler of Spirit. It is
too exact. It wants justice to the very limit.
Whoever has felt the prick of conscience has been spoken to by the Holy
Spirit. Whoever has sat at the feet of his own inner conviction has been aware
of God's presence.
Guidance
Man is never without a guide, no matter how loudly he may be crying out for
leading. There is always at hand a sure torchbearer if he will but follow the
light. It is too simple, too easy! Man has formed in his mind a far-off God who
talks to him from some high mountain in invisible space. By thus looking afar
for his God he ignores the spark of divinity shining in his own being.
Herein is man fooled into believing that he can do the things that are not in
harmony with his ideas of goodness and yet escape the consequences. He presumes
that God is too far away to behold his shortcomings. He loses sight of the fact
that God is right with him every moment.
This is the meaning of the old saying that a man and his conscience are good
friends as long as the way is smooth. When it grows rugged, they fall out. They
fall out because man has reached a point where he begins to consider his ways
and he looks carefully over the life he is leading. This brings him to a
beholding state of mind. He sees that what he considered right in the clear
light of divine good is not up to standard. Here the divergence takes place
between man and his conscience. They were friends in appearance only before or
during the period of license. The conscience may seem to assent to the
derelictions of man, but it is ever the inner protestant that keeps knocking at
the consciousness until the steps are arrested.
Questionable Methods
Worldly fortune is not always a blessing to man. In fact, under present
customs it is apt to be just the reverse. As long as questionable methods are
successful in bringing results, conscience has but a small chance for a hearing.
It is only when failure follows the efforts of the misguided that conscience
gets his ear. Then the field is surveyed with the eye of a general defeated in
an unjust cause. The heat of battle blinded him, and he gave no thought to the
lives he was uselessly sacrificing.
Here remorse gnaws the vitals of the unwise. Here the true wisdom is
revealed. It is said that experience is a dear school, and only the wise learn
therein. This carries with it its own nullification, like many of the
intellect's wise observations. Experience is the school of fools. The truly wise
do not take lessons within her doors.
Understanding
There are two ways to get understanding. One is to follow the guidance of the
Spirit that dwells within, and the other is to go blindly ahead and learn by
hard experience. These two ways are open to everyone. It is recognized by the
man who has had experience that he can advise the one who has not and thus save
him the laborious steps of that rocky road. In the light of omnipresent
intelligence, is there not One who knows all things, all roads, all
combinations, and what will be the outcome of every one?
Prophecy
Do not men and women by their constant efforts to peer into the future
prophesy a wisdom that knows all future? They certainly do. When man looks in
the right direction he finds such an oracle.
It is the prerogative of Spirit to know the future. When man consults Spirit
with pure heart and unselfish motives he has pointed out to him the very lines
his life shall be cast in if he is obedient to his most high God.
It is no great achievement for one who follows the leading of Spirit within
to forecast the future. To Spirit the future is a succession of events based on
the ideas revolving in the mind at present. Whoever rides into his own ideal
realm can read his future for himself. He finds there a chain of causes at work
that he can easily see will produce certain results. It is not necessary for him
to read the definite line along which each separate idea will travel to its
ultimate. This is the method of reasoning from cause to effect. In Spirit, cause
and effect are one. They appear as one and the ultimate is just as clear as the
inception.
In mind, all things reach fruition the very instant they are conceived. Time
not being a factor, how can there be a beginning and an ending? The architect
plans a house and sees it finished in his mind before a single stone is laid or
a pound of earth excavated. He can change his plan many times before the
construction commences. He can destroy it entirely if he so desires. So man
builds the house of his own conscience. If he has been planning to build a home
for himself alone, in which there is but one room, he created in mind just such
a plan, and it is complete and awaits its coming into visibility. If he has made
a plan of a larger structure, in which are many rooms, this plan will also come
into visibility.
Wasteful Speech
Some persons build their houses far ahead in mind and say nothing to anyone.
Such persons make very substantial plans, which are infused with the most
enduring substance of the invisible.
Talking is a waste of energy--a dissipater of power. If you wane the greatest
success, do not talk too much about your plans. Keep a reserve force of new
ideas always on hand as a generative center. Let your work speak for itself.
Dynamics
The electrician recognizes a certain universal law of action in the
revolutions he builds into his dynamo. The energy produced is based on the size
and texture of the dynamo and the rapidity of its motion. Mind has a law of
dynamics equally as scientific. The character of an idea is the estimate of its
size. One's active faith in it determines the rapidity of its motion. Ideas
generate energy with a swiftness unparalleled in physical dynamics. Rather than
moving inanimate things, they move men and women. Rather than temporarily
lighting our streets for a few hours, they light the lamps of intelligence that
burn eternally.
The secret of doing this successfully lies in knowing how to handle our
ideas. The electrician constantly improves the efficiency of electricity by
studying the machinery that generates the power. The same rule holds good in
mental dynamics. We must study ideas if we want to improve the service of our
body, of our intelligence, and of our surroundings. From ideas flow forth the
currents that move the machinery of all of them. If our beliefs are based on
Truth and we are satisfied that they will stand the test of the most rigid
justice, we do not want to let the currents they produce in our mind leak away
on some grounded wire.
The world is full of people who are filled with high and mighty resolves to
do good. They are sincere, but they are connected with grounded wires. We must
keep our wires properly insulated, or our plant will not prove successful.
For instance, we are holding an idea of health, which is generating currents
in our mind that might flow out on the wires of faith and heal the world. But we
have broken the current by believing that it should pass through a pill, a
magnetic hand, or the mind of someone who we think is stronger than we are. We
must stop all this and send our idea of health straight to the mark on the wires
of our own true word. We have an intuitively correct idea of the truth on every
question that comes to our mind, but we do not trust the idea. We impede its
free currents by believing that some book, some person, or some church
organization has sifted the truth and somehow established it before we came into
existence. This fallacy makes a menial of the genius and puts out the light of
the world in the minds of generation after generation of the sons of God.
Spiritual ideas must have spiritual wires, or their power dissipates. So we
need to watch both the beliefs we hold and the words with which we set them
free. If we have an ideal world in which we see things as we want them, yet
think it an impossibility that that world may be realized here and now, we are
dissipating the power that our ideas are generating. So throughout the category
of thought generation, every idea must have a wire that corresponds to its
circuit or current. Our words, our acts, and our whole life must be in accord
with our ideas.
Available Ideas
The realm of ideas is at the call of each of us. It is, in fact, the source
from which we draw our real sustenance. It exists in Being as universal
intelligence. Since it is the cause and source of all intelligence, sooner or
later it must assert its unobstructed sway in the life of all mankind. When this
realm of ideas becomes so active in the consciousness that it attracts our
special attention, we call it a quickening conscience. It is the universal
intelligence of Being asserting its inherent moral equilibriums. Man cannot
always distort the fair face of the God-Image, whose likeness he is. He may for
a season wear the grotesque mask of the mountebank or the fool, but in God's own
good time he will be unmasked by the silent inner self that must be heard when
its hour has come. God is not mocked, nor is the secret place of the Most High
in every heart forever made a cave for thieves.
Listening
When conscience cries out in your heart, "Make straight the way of the Lord,"
you will save time by heeding it. Let its cleansing waters of denial flow over
you. Change your beliefs. Be meek and lowly. Let your thoughts go up to the
Christ Spirit. Acknowledge Him as One whom you, in your human consciousness, are
not able to comprehend in the majesty of His spiritual understanding.
If you are of a haughty, domineering, self-sufficient will, you stand as
Herod, the ruler of Judea. You are married to the passions of the human soul.
These passions lead you into sense gratifications so deep, so degrading that you
cut off the head of conscience that would have turned you into the highway of
good. But the reign of the sense man is shortlived. Your kingdom is taken from
you, and you are banished from your native land. This was the fate of Herod
after he beheaded John the Baptist. This is the fate of everyone who refuses to
listen to the voice of his higher self.
Meekness
The key to the development of Jesus' great powers was in His meek and lowly
submission to the Father. Whoever makes himself nothing in the presence of God
may be possessor of all things below God.
Man is open to God when he wills to be open. This opening is made by our
attitude of absolute mental humility in the contemplation of spiritual
realities. Thus, the likeness takes on the express image of the Father, and in
no other way can it be done.
"I am gentle and lowly in heart," said the mighty Nazarene. "Not as I will,
but as thou wilt," was the mental attitude He always took when communing with
the Father. It was always in the same spirit of love and willing obedience to
the guidance of a wisdom that He knew transcended His own.
Jesus did not take the universe on His shoulders by affirming His
self-sufficiency. He unloaded every burden and rested in the all-sufficiency of
the Father. "I can do nothing on my own authority"; "the Father abiding in me
doeth his works." This is the total denial of self--the giving up of all
personal desires, claims, and aims. Before man can do this successfully he must
change his beliefs--there must be a mental house cleaning.
Denial
The command, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself . . . and
follow me," is not broadly interpreted by the world. Some men think that self is
denied sufficiently when they acknowledge God as mind, life, love, substance,
and all else as error; others think that they have only to give up the
recognized sins of the world and believe in a personal Savior, Jesus. But the
denial of self goes deeper than all this. To be effective, it must reach the
very depths of the consciousness and dissolve all the organic forms that the
beliefs held by the personal self have there precipitated. Every human body has
its stratified layers of consciousness. These strata have, like the earth, been
built up layer after layer through ages and ages of sidereal time.
The body we live in is the result of a labor that we began millions of years
ago. It is the stored-up memories of our experience in thought generation. We
may have dissolved that body ten millions of times, but no part of its reality
has ever been lost to us. Because we have failed to energize it to the
perpetuation of its form indefinitely is no argument against its being the very
body we have had for aeons upon aeons. The form of it changes, but the mental
pictures we have formed in all those ages are intact somewhere in our own
private gallery.
Selflessness
Now the clouds are clearing away from our world. The "sun of righteousness"
is rising with "healing in its wings." We are awakening to our powers and
possibilities as sons of the Most High.
The day of selflessness has come. This day delivers us from all our burdens.
We find that we do not have to bear any of the cares of existence on our
shoulders. We say with Jesus, "All things have been delivered to me by my
Father." We do not breathe for ourself, but rather God breathes in and through
us. We do not have a life of our own, but we feel the life of God surging
through all our organs. We say to every part of our body, "You are now one with
God; you are perfect in His sight."
We do not think and speak by ourself alone. We think and speak God's thoughts
after Him, which rush through our mind like a mighty wind. Then tongues of fire
come upon us, because we are inspired by the Holy Spirit. Neither do we have
possessions of our own nor cares nor troubles about our life or our family. We
leave all these things to God. We are absolutely without responsibility when we
have fully denied ourself and followed the Christ. All responsibility drops from
us when we let go of the belief that we are a personal being, and possessed of
parts, passions, and faculties that belong to us personally. Nothing like a
personal man exists in the idea of God.
The idea of God is Jesus Christ--one universal man. Men are but the mind
organs of that one man. They do not possess of themselves anything whatever, but
all that the Christ possesses flows through their consciousness when they have
ceased to believe in personality. This is the at-one-ment and the apprehension
of that at-one-ment dissolves forever the inner monitor called accusing
conscience.
