Freeing the will through conscience

We live in a world of nauseating access to choice that pretends to satisfy. Where allegiance to comfort, fantasy, pleasure, preference, fear of the unknown, fear of death, the death of the person and the life we would lead should nothing significantly change, keep us from leading our most ethical lives. This world competes with the conscience and challenges the notion of a “free will”, that is, a will free from addiction, confusion and vice, a will unobstructed by delusion or temptation that can hear the voice of conscience clearly. Living out of alignment with the conscience can result in much more than a loss of clarity. It will rob us of our virtue.

There are undoubtedly benefits to ignoring one’s conscience: little and sometimes big pleasures. But a neglected conscience often functions like a hungry ghost that comes knocking at unforeseen and inconvenient hours to remind us that not all is well. It will poke and annoy us, sometimes screaming into us as though aiming to reach those intangible depths we’d long forgotten we carried within us. The conscience doesn’t care about status, pleasure, or our “preferences”, and it reminds us of the truth: that real success has an ethical dimension, one born in love. There’s no physical sign post, no digital notification, nobody else who can tell us when our discomfort is due to being out of alignment with our conscience. We’re lucky if our conscience refuses to be ignored, and we’re even better off if we refuse to ignore it. Life can feel cruel to the one haunted by conscience. But the conscience wants to return and be reclaimed by those who’ve lost their way.

We often know when we feel uncomfortable, when we’re not at ease or lacking clarity. But we don’t always know why. Many who claim to suffer from a lack of clarity are unaware of how framing their situation according to conscience may help them understand the situation better. For example, those in discomfort may be tempted to buy something, copy what so-and-so did, scroll on social media to avoid the moment at hand, or fall back on other unhealthy habits to mask their true feelings. They might center their lives around “preference”, ranking this pleasure over that, or this convenient idea over another, as a way of temporarily self-soothing the ego as though the conscience itself were merely optional in this land of endless choices. They might delight momentarily in the presence of “options”, taking pride in their personal preferences. Still, none of these things offer the clarity that can be arrived at only by heeding the direction of our conscience. Living according to conscience forces us to prioritize what we believe to be right, not what we believe to be attractive, popular, convenient, socially acceptable, or personally preferable. The conscience may confuse us particularly when it counters the narrative of the ego and the story of who we believe ourselves and this world to be. The conscience functions like a compass, and sometimes the direction it points is exactly the way we feared to go. Into the unknown. After all, it comes with no guarantee of who or what will follow us where it leads; nonetheless, we’re called to follow it.

The term “free will” typically refers to the unique ability of human beings to live according to conscience or not. Of course, a will can function without a conscience, but it is through attention to conscience that the will becomes freed from addiction and confusion, the things that blind us. When someone is not living according to conscience, that is when they’re not living consciously, the will loses freedom in so far as its lack of harmony with consciousness robs that human being of clarity. The one who lives out of habit, who has lost touch with his conscience, who cannot hear his conscience or refuses to hear it, experiences a different world than the same person who attunes to conscience. The one who does not follow the conscience may be so familiar with delusion that their only understanding of this lack of freedom, this distance from conscience, is the routine absence of clarity that has come to color their life. Attention to conscience like the intentional use of a compass frees the will by directing the way forward, presenting a path that may have not been seen before. An intimate relationship with our conscience shapes us into different people than those who refuse dialogue with the conscience, and as different people, as evolving people, our walk in the world changes as the expression of our will transforms through harmony with conscience.

So many habitually align their ethics with the group, the spouse, the best friend, or some other significant relationship out of habit, convenience, or laziness. Yet those who put off or even fear advancing their own ethic while inside the apparatus of a relationship indeed sacrifice the very thing that would serve to strengthen their genuine participation in the world: their conscience. For it’s conscience that guides the will to live authentically, and conscience that helps the individual to distinguish between the subtleties of our experience so we may act nobly where it’s easier to sport vice like a crown. While we sort through emotional flux, mental chatter, and endless combinations of language, symbols, and visuals, conscience is our teacher and our guide, showing us right from wrong not as they are according to society’s rules and norms but according to the transcendental nature of goodness arrived at within individual experience. But the conscience must be followed if there is to be any “education”, and not just once or twice. To sustain clarity, the conscience must become an integral component to an individual’s everyday life, again and again. 

Some travel the world and take pictures, sharing their most adventurous moments to the world on social media, but do they dare venture into the abyss of a life lived according to conscience? The ethical life presents a risk, scarier than anything we’ve known. Historically, those who’ve followed their conscience have been met with social ridicule, a collapse of safety nets, even death. Sometimes the mere act of acknowledging one’s conscience can bring discomfort if not remorse and regret, which is often enough to steer people the other direction. Acknowledging one’s conscience may mean coming to terms with the times the conscience has been ignored. For those who wished they would have accessed their internal north star much sooner, noise and numbness might be preferred to connection to conscience.

Although listening to conscience may involve examining the past, the conscience ultimately takes the will forward to now. This being guided by the conscience can provide a person with a sense of connection to the moment at hand, a clarity that can only be known within the present. The experience of clarity can feel penetrating and powerful, like light bursting into a dark room that cannot be unseen. It lights the path, giving confidence to the will. For those who choose to ignore this light, their walk in the world will relate more to those who’ve blindfolded themselves as though the blindfold could be similarly forgotten like the conscience.

Conscience provides the clarity needed for conscious action to occur. It supports the formation of active, willing, and present participants in the world as opposed to wandering, aimless drifters in a sea of distraction. While the conscience may not hand someone a vocation in the name of a word or label, while it may not give an answer applicable to the whole of one’s life, though its effects may not be so easily translated, part of its purpose involves freeing our connection to the moment at hand, centering the will in a conscious relationship to the present which, like clarity, can be both amazing and terrifying to experience. It does this by awakening our ethical nature and our capacity for a virtuous life, a life of true nobility. The conscience will not tell us how to make money or what title to pursue, for example, but it will show us how to use our titles and our money to do good. For the one connected to conscience, personal experience takes on new depths as the individual ethic is continually refined and developed. Old fears are shed, motivations change, preferences change, and new obstacles emerge worthy of a strengthening character and growing wisdom.

A gift like the “gift of free will” must be claimed, cared for, and paid attention to if it is to be known as a gift. Like our hands, our hearts, and our minds, the conscience is a tool and a gift to be used by each individual. Having something others call a gift which we ourselves don’t care for doesn’t exactly make it feel any more like a gift. It’s possible that the fruits of conscience, like the fruits of the spirit themselves, are indeed the gift. The clarity achieved through a life lived ethically examined is a gift. Clarity arrived at through the conscience feels like freedom; imagine: knowing how to act, understanding one’s own motives, growing in virtue day by day, actually living out one’s part in the goodness of life as an expanding project. A will without clarity is a constrained will, not a free one, whereas attention to conscience frees the will by promoting virtue as an option which otherwise might not have even appeared as a possibility.