Excerpts from Maurice Nicoll: Psychological Commentaries.

Acquired Conscience is, of course, merely a matter of how we have been brought up and what
we have been taught is right or wrong. He (Gurdjieff) said that Acquired Conscience is different
in every nation. It could be anything. It was a matter of imitation. Some people are taught by
imitation and education that it is right to have many wives and others are taught that it is right to
have one wife, and so on, in a thousand different ways, but Real Conscience
is the same in all people, but it is buried beneath the surface of the False Personality.

False or Mechanical Conscience is formed in Personality. This False or Acquired Conscience is

not based on inner understanding.
It is related to False Personality and so to feeling merit and therefore feeling that one is right and
better than others

The difference between Real Conscience and Mechanical or False Conscience is that Real
Conscience is the same in all men and speaks,
as it were, the same language. Mechanical or False Conscience is different in different people,
according to their nationality, upbringing, customs, forms of belief, etc.

Acquired conscience makes us divide things into right and wrong according to its nature. Tradition
forms an acquired conscience in us and is stronger than individual contact with a person. Tradition
makes you not yourself. You have traditional ‘I’s in you that are acquired, which makes it very
difficult for you to become a real person, a real individual, free to communicate with everyone,
and so it narrows down your relationship to people. You may privately think political agreement is
a good thing but your traditional ‘I’s will prevent you from accepting it.

A man stands on his honour, his tradition, his patriotism, and so on, and all this is acquired
conscience, something he has been brought up to believe in, and such a man is not capable of
direct individual thinking in connection with an actual situation.

Acquired conscience is always connected with the self-love, which continually puffs itself up into
all forms of vanity, all forms of making difficulties, of duty, etc. based on prestige, tradition, honour,
nationality, and so on. In this way self-love incites continual antagonism, war, violence, and so
on.

Next we have a very good example of how acquired conscience is based on self-love and how
when the self-love is hit we feel miserable: “Our idea of what we should or should not do comes
solely from what we want thought about us—we make pictures of our-selves and are most
offended if other people do not believe in them. We think it is awful to be late because we don’t
want to be that sort of person, from a vanity point of view—not from external considering at all.
Acquired conscience does not seem to mind if these things are done in private! . . . Acquired
conscience always justifies if anything goes wrong, and we are found lacking in our own
estimation, because we can’t bear our self-love to be hurt. This shows how our acquired
conscience is connected with our self-love and is not Real Conscience, which has scarcely
anything to do with self-love.

Acquired conscience is only turned outwards and is only distressed when one has made a fool of
oneself externally in the opinion of other people of one’s own social rank, whereas Real
Conscience is turned inwards and has scarcely anything to do with this outwardly turned
conscience. As long as your lie has come off and is well-applauded it will not bother your external
conscience but your internal conscience will know that you have lied and possibly harmed a great
many people, however well you have carried it off. You must all understand that the awakening
of the Real Conscience undermines the Personality little by little, and first of all attacks or makes
uneasy the False Personality and all these pretences and facades and external appearances that
we spend so much force on keeping up until the Work begins to dissolve us.

All self-love is based on fear of other people’s opinion about you.

Real Conscience exists in everyone but is buried and so out of reach. Personality has grown over
it and as a result our feelings, our sense of ourselves, has shifted to Personality.

To awaken to Conscience you must begin to see the contradictions in yourself. But if you try to
see contradictions in yourself taking yourself all the time as one person you will get nowhere.

What especially prevent a man from seeing contradictions in himself are buffers. In place of having
Real Conscience a man has Artificial Conscience and buffers. Behind everyone there stand years
and years of a wrong and stupid life, of indulgence in every kind of weakness, of sleep, of
ignorance, of pretence, of lack of effort, of drifting, of shutting one's eyes, of striving to avoid
unpleasant facts, of constant lying to oneself, of abuse and blaming of others, of fault-finding, of
self-justifying, o femptiness, of wrong talking, and so on.

In the case of buffers in man their action is to prevent two contradictory sides of himself from
coming into consciousness together.

Buffers are created gradually and involuntarily by the life around us, in which we are brought up.
Their action is to prevent a man from feeling Conscience—that is, from feeling "all together".

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For example, very strong buffers exist between our likes and dislikes, between our pleasant
feelings towards someone and our unpleasant feelings. To
break a buffer it is necessary to observe oneself over a long period and remember how one felt
and how one is feeling. That is, it is necessary to see on both sides of a buffer together, to see
the contradictory sides of oneself that are separated by the buffer. Once a buffer is broken it
cannot form again.

Buffers make a man's life more easy. They prevent him from feeling Real Conscience. But they
also prevent him from developing. Inner development depends on shocks. Only shocks can lead
a man out of the state he is in. When a man realizes something about himself, he suffers a shock,
but the presence of buffers in him will prevent him from realizing anything. For buffers are made
to lessen shocks.

The object of the Work is to arouse "buried conscience" Buried conscience is the same in all
people but it is buried—that is, out of reach. Unless there
were this "buried conscience" in us, the Work would be useless—nothing more than a new craze,
a new fashion, a new jargon. Now if we could
touch this buried and real conscience, we would know instantly that all negative states were
wrong—and, in fact, poison to us. It is exactly by "inner taste", as it is called in the Work, that we
begin to realize this for ourselves. "Inner taste" makes a man realize when he is negative. Then
a struggle starts. He wishes to say something—and cannot. When this happens, when the Work
brings him to this point, the Work is then "working in him".

At the root of the whole problem lies this question of the hypnotic sleep of Man, which is kept up
by buffers. Buffers prevent us from seeing contradictions and so prevent us from awakening from
sleep. Buffers replace Real Conscience. If we had Real Conscience we would see and feel all
sides of ourselves together. Such a state would completely destroy False Personality and all
forms of imagination that contribute to its strength. We would become simpler, nicer. We all have
buffers in every part of a centre but do not see them. Buffers take the place of Conscience, of
Consciousness. As long as we are well-buffered we get through life fairly easily and have a good
sense of our worth. Yet if buffers were suddenly destroyed in us we would go mad.

After a time we may begin to get a Work conscience. This makes us very unhappy, not in a soul-
destroying way of self-pity and pseudo suffering, but in a much cleaner way. This is the beginning
of that force that can make you see your own lying. It is not an acquired life conscience from your
upbringing, but the beginning of real conscience which can change one’s life. It is the birth in you
of something quite new, and though its action is very gentle it is absolutely authentic and you
know and you recognize its authority. This is the beginning of awakening from sleep.

The work teaches that this real conscience which is always the same lies buried in everyone and
that the Work awakens it eventually. This conscience serves the Work. It leads to contact with
higher centres. This conscience can never awaken as long as Imaginary ‘I’ and False Personality
and all the forms of lying connected with them are dominant, because this conscience leads in
the direction of Real ‘l’, which is totally above the level of Imaginary ‘I’ and False Personality and
all their pretences.
Remember also lying that harms others in the Work. This is too big a subject for here—but
remember how you treat another in your mind.

You cannot overcome a negative emotion directly. It will only get stronger as a rule. But you can
through your mind, through arranging the Work in your mind, touch the emotional part of the
Intellectual Centre, which in turn awakens the Buried Conscience which will attack by itself the
negative emotions. The power of Buried Conscience derives from the Higher Emotional Centre.

A man will always remain the same. As long as a man thinks in the same habitual way, he will
remain the same. The Work can actually teach a man to think in a new way, I repeat, about
himself, about others, and about the meaning of life. With this change of mind his attitudes will
inevitably change. If your attitudes have not changed then you will not change and you can never
change. If, for example, your attitude is that you are a fully conscious man and that you are a unity
and you have a permanent Real 'I' and an inflexible will and that you can do and so on, then these
attitudes and this way of thinking will fix you always in the same psychological place as you are
in and no new development is possible. But if your attitudes change through new thinking, through
the ideas of the Work, from esoteric teaching, then you can change, because you will begin to
arouse Buried Conscience which cannot work in you as long as you have all these false notions
about yourself, about others, and about life, and ascribe all to yourself. It is exactly this new
thinking, this that the Work can give us, that when emotionally felt arouses into activity the Buried
Conscience which then begins to help.
Now once you begin to feel negative emotions are mechanical—to feel for yourself by inner taste
that this is so—you deprive them of a great deal of their power. Inner taste is the first sign of
Buried Conscience. Unless we had this deeper emotional perception, we could never feel that
negative emotions are undesirable. And if, in addition to this, you can see for yourself that they
always lie and do not present things in a true way, but twist and distort everything, then you will
not suffer from their continual dominion over you as most people do. I mean, of course, provided
you do not fall fast asleep. For if you feel they are mechanical and mentally see they tell lies, then
you are using two centres consciously and that makes something very powerful that can resist
the great power of mechanicalness. It is these quiet emotions and insights and perceptions of
truth that have the greatest healing power and help us against the tyranny of the machine—which
all this time we have assumed is oneself.

The Work judges your own work, because the Work is hidden in you. It is in you in the form of
Buried Conscience. If it were not, no man would work. You are not aware of Buried Conscience.
But it is quite aware of the sincerity or otherwise of all your Work-efforts and your thoughts and
emotions
about it. Sincere work begins to bring Buried Conscience into your consciousness, little by little,
as you can bear it. Insincere work buries it more than ever.