Continuing the Pursuit of the Missing Link - some Atlantean possibilities
Conscience is the way that Gurdjieff teaches, as opposed to a way primarily of love, or of faith or hope.
Please see Introduction and Further Bibliography for full citation of abbreviated references.
Continuing from:
Similarly to consciousness being defined as knowing all at once, in In Search of the Miraculous, conscience is described there as feeling all at once:
"In ordinary life the concept 'conscience' is taken too simply. As if we had a conscience. Actually the concept 'conscience' in the sphere of the emotions is equivalent to the concept 'consciousness' in the sphere of the intellect. And as we have no consciousness we have no conscience.
"Consciousness is a state in which a man knows all at once everything that he in general knows and in which he can see how little he does know and how many contradictions there are in what he knows.
"Conscience is a state in which a man feels all at once everything that he in general feels, or can feel. And as everyone has within him thousands of contradictory feelings which vary from a deeply hidden realization of his own nothingness and fears of all kinds to the most stupid kind of self-conceit, self-confidence, self-satisfaction, and self-praise, to feel all this together would not only be painful but literally unbearable.”1
Conscience is the way that Gurdjieff teaches, as opposed to a way primarily of love, or of faith or hope.2 All the sacred impulses3 - faith, hope, love and conscience - could indicate functions of an equivalent of what Gurdjieff calls the higher emotional centre in his early teaching,4 although that term is not used in All and Everything.