I hope you all know the famous cartoon character Tin Tin and his pet Snowy, and of course their friend Captain Haddock, am I correct? If you know them very well it would not be difficult to visualize this situation I am going to explain. Imagine, while three of them are climbing up a hill, a half filled bottle of wine fell off from Captain Haddock's backpack. Snowy sees this and he starts sniffing the bottle. Suddenly, two figures appear. One is a red colored devil, and the other one is an angel with fairy wings. The devil is encouraging Snowy to taste the nice smelling drink. And the angel is reminding Snowy about his responsibility to follow his master. Who are they – this devil and the angel? Both of them look just like Snowy. That means, both of them are belonged to Snowy.
Like wise, we also have such characters within ourselves too. This devil is no one else but our own greedy and selfish mind. If we follow the words of the devil, we would become the slaves of our mind. And who is this angel? That is our conscience – our knowledge that helps us to decide what is right and wrong.
The word conscience comes from the Latin word conscire, which means 'to know together with'. It has two moral functions: antecedent and sequent. Antecedent means that our conscience is guiding us to do the right and avoid the evil, before we do something. One day, a small boy saw a tortoise and picked up a stone to hit it. Suddenly, he heard a voice saying 'that is wrong!'. Not knowing where the voice came from, he went to his mother. After hearing his story, mother hugged him and explained: 'That is called conscience. If you listen to it and obey, it will continue to speak clearer and always guide you; but if you turn a deaf ear and rebel against it, its voice will fade little by little and leave you in moral and spiritual darkness. The growth of your spiritual life depends upon your hearing and obeying this little voice.'
And the second moral function, sequent, means that our conscious will act as a judge after we did something, either by rewarding or blaming. I will explain it with a story of another little boy. This boy was staying at a children's hospital and was a very stubborn trouble maker. One day, a visitor came and told him 'if you are a good boy for a week, I will give you ten rupees when I come back.' A week passed and the visitor came again. She said, 'I am not going to ask from the nurse how you have behaved. You must tell me yourself. Do you deserve to have the ten rupees?' After a moment of silence, the little boy said 'I'll take only a rupee.' He felt that he should listen to his conscience.
The best judge and the guide in the world is right here with us.
But there is one thing we have to be careful. Does our conscience always judge and guide us correctly? No. Why? I told earlier that it is a knowledge – a knowledge that helps us to decide what is right and wrong. Where does this knowledge come from? It comes from our education, from our living background and our culture. And as a Buddhist, I believe that our routines we have practiced through out this long journey also play a major role on this knowledge.
So if we can make sure that what our conscience believes is right, and if we live with a principle to follow it, I am sure we all would be able to become valuable human beings.
Finally, I would like to quote a saying from one of my favorite movies 'Legends of the Fall'. “Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legends.”