There is no need to develop a conscience at all. What is needed is consciousness, not conscience. Conscience is a pseudo thing. Conscience is created in you by the society. It is a subtle method of slavery. The society teaches you what is right and what is wrong. And it starts teaching the child before the child is aware, before the child can decide on his own what is right and what is wrong, before the child is even conscious of what is happening to him, before the child is even awake. In a kind of sleep, in a kind of dream, the child lives in the beginning. In the mother’s womb the child sleeps for twenty four hours. Then after the birth he sleeps for twenty-three hours, twenty-two hours, twenty-one hours, twenty hours……….slowly, slowly. But he remains in a kind of limbo, neither awake not asleep. The child cannot make any distinction between what is real and what is unreal. And we start teaching the child what is right and what is wrong – we are conditioning him. We are conditioning him according to our ideas. All these ideas – from parents, from priests, teachers, politicians, saints – all these ideas jumble together inside him. They become his conscience.
And because of this conscience he will never be able to grow consciousness – because conscience is a pseudo consciousness. And if you are satisfied with the pseudo you will never even think of the real. It is very deceptive; the way we have been bringing up children is very deceptive. It is ugly, it is violent, it is against humanity.
That’s why millions of people live without any consciousness. Before they could have grown into consciousness, we gave them pseudo toys to play with. And their whole lives they think this is all that is needed to live a good life. And their whole life they will be rewarded if they follow the conscience, and they will be punished if they don’t follow the conscience.
From the outside they will be punished and rewarded, and from the inside also. Whenever you do something that your conscience says is wrong, you feel guilty, you suffer, you feel inner pain. You are afraid, you are trembling; it creates anxiety. And the fear about heaven, that you may lose heaven, and the fear of hell, that you may fall into hell….. with great inventiveness your saints have painted the joys of heaven and the miseries of hell.
This is conscience. Conscience is artificial, arbitrary. Conscience is needed because the society does not want you to be intelligent. Hence rather than making you intelligent, it gives you fixed rules of behavior: do this, don’t do that.
The day humanity drops this whole nonsense of conscience and starts helping children to grow their consciousness will be the greatest day, will be the real birth of humanity, a new human being , a new earth. Then we will help the child to become more intelligent, so whenever a problem arises the child has enough intelligence to encounter it, to face it, to respond to it. Why should one need any conscience? Intelligence is enough, consciousness is enough.
Conciousness will make you capable of responding to the present immediately, and your response will be true. Conscience is old, and the situation is always new – and your conscience is always old. There is no meeting ground. You go on responding according to the conscience cultivated in you by the society, forced into you by the society, conditioned in you by the society – and situation is totally different.
One of my friends went to Tibet. He is a very religious Brahmin, very orthodox. He went there to study Buddhist scriptures, but he could not stay in Tibet – he had to come back as quickly as possible. The journey was simply a sheer wastage, an unnecessary trouble, because to go into Tibet is not easy.
And the problem was that from his very childhood he had been taught to take a cold bath before the sun rises. Now to take a cold bath in Tibet before the sun rises……. He was telling me that it was impossible. And if he did not take the cold bath before sunrise, the whole day he would feel guilty. The society has taught him that without taking a cold bath in the morning, you cannot pray. Your prayer is useless. And without prayer, you cannot eat anything. So he was taking cold bath in the morning, and that was dangerous to life.
In Tibetan scriptures it is said that once a year it is a must that one should take a bath. Once a few Tibetan lamas came to stay with me, and those were the days when Maneesha was not there and Radha was not there to smell these people – and I suffered so much.
For those few, seven, eight days that they stayed in my house, I was almost out of house. Any excuse and I would escape from the house – the whole house was stinking, because they would not take bath. And a hot summer in India….and they would not take any bath. They were following their conscience.
It has been a difficult thing for me to talk to Jain monks. They used to come to see me; it was so difficult to talk with them – because they don’t cleanse their mouths, rinse their mouths, they don’t clean their teeth. That is not allowed. That is thought to be a part of beautifying the body – and how can a jaina monk beautify the body? He is so dead set against it.
Just to talk to them is so difficult – they have such bad breath. It is bound to be so. And the jaina monks are not allowed to take a bath either, because why should you be so careful about your body? The anti-body attitude. Their bodies stink, their mouth stinks.
One jaina nun became so much impressed by me and became so much interested in me that I told her,” You can atleast take a sponge bath – nobody will know. Just a wet towel, you can……and nobody will ever know that you have taken the bath.”
The idea appealed to her. She took one sponge bath, felt very good and very bad too. She told me, “It feels very good and I feel fresh, but it hurts inside that I have commited a sin.”
Do you ever think when you take a bath that you have commited a sin? And she had not even taken a full bath – just a sponge bath. But she felt so guilty that she had to fast for three days as repentance.
This is conscience. Conscience goes on making you a fool. Situations change, but the conscience cannot change, it cannot grow – conscience remains static. You go on living with ideas that were given to you in your childhood, by your ignorant parents, ignorant teachers. And you will llive according to them, and you will suffer much. And your response will never be true because it will never fit with the situation. You will always be lagging behind.
There is no need to develop conscience. The need is to drop the conscience and develop consciousness. Drop all that you have been taught by others, and start living on your own and searching and seeking…… Yes, in the beginning it will be difficult because you won’t have any map. The map is contained by the conscience. You will have to move without the map, you will have to move into uncharted, with no guidelines. Cowards cannot move without guidelines; cowards cannot move without maps. And when you move with maps and guidelines, you are not really entering into new territory, into new realms – you are going in circles. You go moving into known; you never take a jump into the unknown. It is only courage that can drop conscience.
Consciousness is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan – it is simply consciousness. Conscience divides people, consciousness unites. What is the need of carrying a guide with you? Consciousness is enough. Whenever a certain need arises, your consciousness will respond. You have a mirror, you will reflect it. And the answer will be spontaneous. Life brings challenges, you bring consciousness to those challenges. And meditation is a way of dropping conscience and moving into consciousness.
The miracle is: if you can drop conscience, consciousness arises on its own – because consciousness is a natural phenomenon. You are born with it; just the conscience has become a hard crust around it and is not allowing its flow. Everything starts to fall in harmony with existence. And to be in harmony with existence is to be right – not to be in harmony with existence is wrong.
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