Goal
This week, I discuss your conscience: what it is, why it’s valuable, and how to listen to it.
Table of Contents
- What Is Your Conscience?
- How To Strengthen Your Conscience
- 1) Reduce the noise
- 2) Consume voices focused on virtue
- 3) Meditate and reflect on what is and what could be
- Your conscience will ensure that you’re pursuing the best course of action.
- Actionables
What Is Your Conscience?
“It is easier to fight the world than to wrestle your conscience.” – Matshona Dhliwayo
Our conscience is “an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior.”
Our conscience tries to lead us on the most righteous path. The more you strengthen this voice, the better its advice and the clearer it sounds. Despite the benefits of having a strong conscience, individuals can fail to listen to this voice. Many internal and external forces bury that voice, so you don’t have wise counsel in your day-to-day life.
The weaker your conscience, the blinder you are to what is virtuous and sustainable. The blinder you are, the easier it is for you to commit foolish actions and pursue vice over virtue.
How to strengthen your conscience
Listen to yourself. Do not allow society’s nihilism to drown your wants and needs.
The ruling classes, elites, and mob do not want you moving towards virtue. Why? Because individuals who are virtuous and not addicted to vice are harder to control. More importantly, the more righteous you are, the more effective you are at pushing back against evil in the government, family, or business world.
Today, we will explore the three ways to recover your conscience and strengthen it. These three techniques are easier to perform as you practice. Keep at it, and you’ll soon have a voice of wisdom guiding you daily.
1) Reduce the noise
“Follow your conscience. You have to live with yourself for the rest of your life.” – Frank Sonnenberg
The world doesn’t want you listening to the voice in your head that urges you to be virtuous. For example, when you were young, your teachers taught you useless tidbits of information, such as the powerhouse of the cell and calculus. They taught you these things to flood your growing mind with the nothingness that you could never use in your adult age. Instead of teaching you practical skills or how to self-reflect, they wasted your youth, hoping you could never think for yourself.
This trend followed you into adulthood. The media bombards you with pointless stories of despair and emptiness. Entertainment is noise. There are no heroes, no hope, and nothing for you to aspire to. And governments and corporations will give you every vice you can manage, from inflation to junk food. You are constantly surrounded by noise.
When you’re eating junk food or consuming the news, you aren’t thinking. The junk food slows you down physically, and the media you consume clogs your brain by giving you emotional highs that do not strengthen your soul. These things are killing you.
So you need to reduce the noise. Cut out the junk, stop watching the news, and reduce your consumption of popular entertainment. Reduction is the first step to empowering your conscience. As fewer things burden your mind and soul, your inner voice of wisdom can reemerge.
As always, start on small vices, then continue up. Be patient with any setbacks and reward your progress. Cutting back your vices will hurt you mentally and physically. You will be anxious. So, track your progress, get help for any major addictions, and keep your most virtuous self in mind.
2) Consume voices focused on virtue
Read wise men who advocate for your best self. Avoid the cynics. Avoid the “realists.” Avoid reading anything from weak individuals.
Whereas the previous step was about reduction, this next step is focused on consumption. It’s essential to consume works that uplift you. Never consume “realistic,” cynical works meant to tear away your potential. The more you absorb things that advocate for hopelessness, the easier it is to lose sight of your conscience.
Righteous things strengthen the inner voice of good. Therefore, you should read autobiographies of great men and women, consume fictional works that uplift your spirit and promote human goodness, and listen to inspirational and reflective music.
To be a good person, you need that goodness reflected in the world you consume and see.
3) Meditate and reflect on what is and what could be
By meditating on what has been or what could be, you can start to dig out the voice that auto-responds to virtue.
The easiest way to do this is to journal. Think deeply about what you’ve done today. What was good? What could you improve? These questions help you bolster your inner voice. By reflecting on what is good and what you can do better, you are actively practicing what you want your mind to passively do: provide wise, virtuous guidance during your daily life.
Once you look at what good you have done, look at what good failed to do. What could you have done better? Where did you act poorly? Commit evil? Give into vice? Defining these flaws and mistakes will be embarrassing, but you must do it. Once again, you are actively training your mind to passively point out your poor actions.
Lastly, look at where you want to be. What do you want to do? How are you going to get there? By providing your virtuous ends, you train your mind to guide you on the most honorable path and the path that fulfills your ends.
Your conscience is automatic. It can respond when you need it most if you train it during those quiet moments.
Your conscience will ensure that you’re pursuing the best course of action.
Every action you execute, thought you have, and words you speak either strengthen your conscience or weaken it. You will need this inner voice to direct your actions and provide guidance when no other voice of wisdom can be found.
The healthier your conscience, the easier it is to perform at your best.
Actionables
You are an individual. Listen to the voice that reminds you of this reality.
- What does your conscience tell you? Do you find it hard to hear it?
- What are internal voices telling you? How loud are the negative voices? How often do you agree with them or give in to their temptations?
- Who are the positive people in your life? Ask them what their inner monologues are like. How often do they struggle with poor self-talk or temptation? How strong is their conscience? How loudly does reason, empathy, and virtue speak in their hearts?
Please remember that it’s important to do the actionables. You’re not on this earth to simply read but to do. To become an individual, you must act more than you consume.
*Image credit to Unsplash.
