ONLY those committed to increasingly familiarising themselves with their own conscience have a justifiable hope of identifying whatever gratifications currently trap them, or what pursuits will be the most edifying.
You might think it a pointless argument trying to convince somebody that ‘blinding yourself makes you blind’, but the way we live our lives often suggests our need to be reminded.
Every time we suppress our conscience, ignore our values or live in discord with what we know to be right, we reinforce a desensitisation from our own conscience and in turn experience a defamiliarisation from the version of ourselves our conscience wants us to be.
We may regret, hate or fear one very specific aspect of our lives and so instead of appropriately addressing/processing it, we ignore it, run from it or suppress it, usually by drowning it out through countless other concerns and distractions. Effectively we’re simply trying to shut out the wisperings of our own conscience telling us to “pony up and pay the pied piper”. The thing we fail to appreciate when doing so, is that our conscience plays a very central role in our in how we see the world and its lens can’t be removed from our psychological eye.
It governs how we see everything else and desensitising ourselves to it, or trying to blur/smudge/darken it’s clarity in one area can’t occur without skewing the way we see everything else. If you don’t like looking at something, poking yourself in the eye so you can’t see it any more is obviously a poor solution, but it’s often what we do to ourselves when we don’t like looking at our problems. Whether you’ve ever been heavily addicted to something or not, most of us can relate to ‘distracting ourselves from reality’. Eye poke.
It’s going to blind you at large, and we lie to ourselves believing the rest of our existence can remain unaffected by our refusal to deal with an ever growing, ever unaddressed problem. Due to “all things by degrees” it’s not always black and white, the dampening is usually more gradual and progressive, however it certainly still occurs.
It’s impossible for any of us to consistently poke ourselves in the eye, dampen our sensitivity to our conscience, or live a lie, without it slowly but surely killing us. Hopefully it doesn’t get to the point of actually killing you, but we definitely identify when it’s in the process. We can feel death ‘occurring’ inside of us. Life becomes a numbing ‘ride-along’ and concepts of ‘living life’ reside solely in distant memories with a small hint found in vain hopes as we’re unwilling to act on them.
The bigger the issue you’re trying to bury/blur out, the more blind you’re going to have to make yourself in order to hide from its reality, which means the more blind your ‘conscience discord’ will make you to your whole world. Similarly the longer you’ve kept something buried, the less obvious your blindness can be. It’s got to be a terrifying shame when it occurs, but I genuinely believe that we house the capacity to genuinely transition from a state of ‘wishing you didn’t know something’ to ‘authentically not knowing’. We can ‘choose’ our way to authentic ignorance, but the price paid for doing so has to always be far greater than we appreciate, it must involve potentially permanent psychological damage and I dare say that it’s very dangerous territory.
We need to deal with the big stuff first, but then we also need to deal with the old stuff. Genuinely inconsequential old stuff should sort itself out, however genuinely consequential old stuff on the other hand, will evidence itself to you when you’re honestly trying to identify it. Whenever it’s difficult to tell the difference, just assume if it’s come to mind it’s important enough to deal with and then deal with it for the sake of being done with it.
We are our own biggest problem
I’m sure you’re heard the phrase, “We don’t see the world as it is, but as we are.” This is perhaps no more evidently true than when it comes to dealing with the consequences of gratification. Our frustrations with the world around us are all too often an outward venting of an internal conflict. We like to blame whatever or whoever it is around us for our stress and incapacity to deal, however the reality is our problems are primarily our own.
Our capacity to manage our world is synonymous with our willingness to align with our conscience. The peace that comes from adherence to one’s own conscience can truly be compared with or replaced by either the desensitisation of conscience discord, or even the flood of distractions often used to numb the one’s awareness of reality.
The longer or more intensely we ignore our conscience, the less functional we will become. The more sensitive and attuned we are to it, the more capable we will become.
The extent to which we can work together with others is calculated by multiplying each of our individual capacity factors. So long as two people both have a positive integer, no matter how small/great, we can make it work. If either of them however, are insistent on ignoring their conscience to the point of remaining dysfunction, it doesn’t matter what the other can do. If we’re struggling to get along with others, our most likely problem is failing to get along with ourselves.
Activity:
- What in your past do you feel has contributed the most to desensitising you from your own conscience?
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- What do you feel has contributed the most to increasing your sensitivity to your own conscience?
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- What things do you commonly engage in that might contribute most to suppressing your own conscience or ignoring your own values?
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- How in tune do you feel you are, with your own conscience or the person you want to be? What could you do that might dramatically help you better attune yourself?
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Edifying Success 