The power of conscience
The modern man has all the affluence and luxuries of life, has surrounded himself with the most sophisticated gadgets to build a world as dazzling as that of Aladdin and his genies. But loneliness and despair continue to gnaw his heart. To remember Goethe: “Epochs of faith are epochs of fruitfulness but epochs of unbelief, however, glittering, are barren of all permanent good.” What other force on earth, except faith, could restore to man his precious sanity?
The great psychiatrist Carl Jung makes a distinction between achievement on the one hand and culture and personality on the other. Jung warns that he who carries over to the second half of human life the philosophy of the first half, namely, achievement — all that constitutes worldly success — and makes that second half “merely pitiful appendage of life’s morning”, must pay a heavy price for doing so with damage to the soul, with diminution of personality and with inner poverty of spirit.
The great Sufi Rumi considers the human heart as an “amalgam” of both the good and bad. If the element of altruism dominates, the individual can surpass even angels in acts of kindness and benevolence. But when this element is overlaid by the dross of evil, the individual’s malevolence can put the wickedness of Satan to a shadow. Rumi captured the essence of this philosophy in his beautiful poetry:
“Thou partakest of the nature of the beast as well as the angel; Leave the nature of the beast, that thou mayest Surpass the angel”.
According to Tolstoy, there are two principles that work in a person. They are the law of love and the law of aggression. The law of love is very deep seated and is present in each of us. It is possible to reach out for it in others. Equally present in man, but not certainly as hard as the other, is the law of aggression. By extension, man is carrier of dual attributes: wild passions so characteristic of animals and noble impulses attributable to angels. These two divergent traits and urges can seldom be fully reconciled; but we find in our lives, the combined spirit always ministers to assist in subjecting the flesh more and more to the power of the spirit if our conscience is pure and virgin.
Norman Cousins reckoned: “The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.” It is only when we plumb the depths of our spiritual aquifers that we get the power to weld these discordant traits into a coherent blueprint and allow our s p i r i t u a l and moral personality to prevail. Till then we have to keep reconciling to the devilish instincts of man that are wreaking havoc on civilisation.”
There are always in a society some wonderful beings whose purity of heart keeps alive sweet cadences of the conscience; there are others whose music has ebbed out and their conscience has coarsened with the roughness of their emotions and morality. It was man’s weak heart, which had made George Washington repeatedly caution us to “labour to keep alive in his breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience”. Once that light has gone out, the soul sinks into darkness and we become hostages of the inner beast.