THE STILL SMALL VOICE OF

CONSCIENCE

by

Joel M. Skousen

Revision 2

When you finish reading this, you may not view life in quite the same way again––even if you are indifferent about, or passionately dislike what I have to say. I do not claim or presume that the reader will actually change what he or she is that’s a more difficult and individualized process—but what I do claim is that once a person understands the workings of conscience, in detail, they will not be able to escape its constant commentary on one’s thoughts, desires and actions, as easily as before. That is what will be different.

Those that already listen well to conscience, perhaps even without realizing it, will understand better how they get promptings, reminders, and warning signals; and will better be able to teach others around them about this great secret to life. If you learn to recognize this source of inspiration, criticism and help, and heed its advice, it will become your constant guide to a better life.

In contrast, those that have become experts in evading the warnings of conscience will not be able to rationalize, make excuses and justify their own problems and mistakes with the same ease as before. Promptings to change will never be as easy to disregard. Nervous feelings warning about bad habits, thoughts or actions will never be as easy to hide from again, although you are free to do so, the divine source of conscience penalizes those who persist in resisting good counsel by gradually reducing or eliminating the warnings people don’t want to hear. Over time, you are left to suffer the consequences.

This might sound negative, but if heeded, it can be the most positive thing in your life. When we develop the self-control to follow conscience accurately and with consistency, we find ourselves living better, happier lives. Eventually you will even long for more of its promptings and warnings–simply because, by following that little voice in our mind, everything in life goes better.

It warns us to not eat junk food, not to say things we shouldn’t, not to buy things we can’t really afford, and not to do things that will get us into trouble. It helps us avoid accidents, illness, investment mistakes, and bad judgment---if you learn to recognize those external promptings and develop the self control to abide by them. But, it does takes a lot of sensitivity because that voice is so tiny, so fleeting, and so easy to disregard.

With those kinds of benefits, why wouldn’t everyone want to listen? Simply because we can’t take the beneficial promptings without taking the criticism it offers about our improper thoughts and bad habits as well.

The criticism or guilt feelings that come via our conscience are sometimes so uncomfortable that people become expert at evading them. In fact, most people learn early in their youth to evade the voice of conscience. They develop a myriad of ways to suppress it, deny it, or rationalize it away, and in other ways deaden its tiny whisperings so they can feel good about doing what they want to do. But in deadening the voice that criticizes and brings legitimate guilt, they also kill the source of divine truth that leads to a better life. Of course, the fruit of conscience is not necessarily wealth, but rather truth and good judgment and good health—which is ultimately more valuable than gold.

My purpose in this writing is to help re-sensitize your mind to the voice of conscience, and in the process, encourage you to learn to love its promptings and heed its counsel. Almost everyone needs to be reminded from time to time how to recognize the signals of conscience. It’s like getting a reality check that rebalances and corrects our self-image so that we no longer live under the illusions of false pride, or the delusion that “God accepts me as I am.”

I realize that this can be emotionally painful, but the ultimate spiritual consequences of hiding from our errors and bad habits is not very pretty. In its worst form, it leads to haughtiness, verbal abuse of others, sin and bad judgment—or, in its most chronic forms, mental illness or suicide.

But those who take the tough road of listening to conscience, and develop the self-control to follow its counsel will come to possess an inner peace that will give constancy to their lives amid a world that is headed for increased turmoil. I can’t promise you happiness, per se, in a world that is capable of tremendous cruelty to others, but I can promise you the internal peace that comes from knowing you will have done your best in any given circumstance.

Many people have periods of happiness here and there in life, but never really get a solid handle on the workings of conscience, because they only selectively listen to the things they want to hear, picking and choosing from what is comfortable or what leads to success in a job or business.

But without listening to the full range of personal signals that criticize our bad personal habits and attitudes, we make lots of little errors in daily living that eventually add up to bigger problems, including irritations to a spouse and conflict with others.

Probably, the most crucial signals from conscience are those little warning feelings that precede every instance of bad judgment that is going to cause us to err or have future problems. Often these warning feelings are so subtle they are all too easy to dismiss, even when the consequences are grave.

Real Life Examples

Let me give you a few real-life examples of people who failed to heed the warning voice of conscience, and the sad consequences that followed.

You will probably see similar habit patterns and mistakes in disregarding conscience in your own background. Hopefully, by seeing how easily these people could have avoided nearly fatal accidents and serious injury by listening, you will be sufficiently motivated to correct any similar bad thinking patterns in your own lives.

Many years ago, the Reader’s Digest used to have an interesting section each month called “Drama in Real Life” with stories of people caught in life-threatening situations that normally lead to heroic acts of rescue or escape. Most all result in tremendous suffering. I have often wondered how differently these situations would have turned out if people had listened to the warning voice of conscience. Rarely do any of them admit to these warnings even though some make an urgent appeal to God once in trouble. Only a few recall any premonitions or warnings beforehand, though none relate it to conscience—just strong nervous feelings. In each sample, you will notice there were a series of little mistakes and missed opportunities to see what was coming.

First, there is the bad habit of taking undo risks, especially unnecessary ones that athletic, youthful individuals do for thrills, pride, bravado, daring or peer pressure. What they all have in common is that the more they engage in danger, the more they become desensitized to the warning voice in the mind-especially when they have survived similar dangers before. Putting oneself constantly in danger exposes a person to nervous feelings so often that it is possible to become insensitive to crucial warnings when you need them most.

In the process one also loses the ability to distinguish between two different types of nervousness: The first type is about a reaction to the danger or unfamiliarity of something you feel you have to do, but haven’t done before. Life the first time you give speech or perform music in front of others, which evokes nervous feelings and fear---not because it’s wrong, only that it’s new and difficult. Sometimes the proposed action may even be dangerous, but still correct to proceed.

The second type is the most important and most violated: when you are given a tiny nervous feeling because what you are about to do, say or think, is not right. These are especially difficult to hear when it’s something you may want to do, especially with friends that may not be good for you. Even when the activity may be safe (physically) you may be warned not to proceed because it goes against what your parents may have told you, what you know to be right, or even because the Lord knows it will lead to more mistakes and rebellion later on.

Everyone needs to learn to distinguish between these two types of nervous feelings. People who make it a habit of not heeding the second type of nervous feelings, warning about error and danger even when small, always end up making bigger mistakes eventually.

The first story is about excess bravado under peer pressure where a fellow allows himself to go beyond a barrage of nervous feelings in his quest to meet the challenge. He is an experienced “free solo” rock climber and is invited by his climbing partner (who is superior in skills) to compete with him (his first mistake), climbing dangerous cliffs. He then discovers as his friend starts out on the first pitch that he intends to do it without the aid of safety ropes (a second mistake).

The more cocky and talented partner taunts him into more and more difficult reaches. This “friend” also shows severe insensitivity to the warnings of conscience in what he pushes others to do, thinking only of his ability. The subject of our story fails to decline each increasing challenge despite growing fatigue. As he tires he feels extremely nervous about the last, death defying section ahead, but can’t resist the taunting of his friend (the third and near fatal mistake). He describes this last desperate ordeal in gripping detail. He barely survives in the end, and his partner makes some light comments, further indicating no remorse for his part in the near disaster. (Reader’s Digest, Feb. 1995, “Death Grip” pg. 128).

At least at the end of his story the author admits his mistake and seems determined not to repeat it. I wonder though. People who persist in being friends with those who are chronic violators of conscience are asking for trouble.

Next, let’s look at the bad habit of letting the fact that “everybody else does it” cloud obvious dangers, and undermine the warnings of conscience. There was a young woman who took a job tending the children of a couple working in the wilds of Africa. Everyone regularly swims and bathes in the Epulu River, even though there are crocodiles lurking. While this is rationalized because the river is the only source of bathing water, and “everyone does it,” one would think that prudence would dictate making a shallow “safe pool” next to the river, or at least having an armed person present and watching for danger. They did neither, and she was caught in waist deep water by a huge crocodile, while washing her hair.

She doesn’t mention any nervous premonitions directly related to the attack. But she does mention having felt that it was “time to go”–-she mentions the lateness of the hour.

Often people get nervous signals that don’t seem directly related to danger, but which if followed would have kept them out of danger. In mentioning the “lateness of the hour,” was she simply attaching a reason to her nervousness? I don’t know, but in any case, despite whatever warning she may have had, she continued to wash her hair in deep water. A large crocodile grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go, spinning and thrashing her around under the water. A nearby male friend came to help her, and after a horrible death struggle between her, the friend, and the crocodile, the crocodile finally tore her arm off, but she lived. -Great heroism on the part of the friend, but definitely avoidable. (Readers Digest, July 1994, “In the Jaws of a Crocodile” pg. 70).

In the next example, a couple from Europe goes canoeing and camping in Canada. They see at least two messages posted by other campers on the lake warning of the presence of an aggressive black bear. They agree to be cautious and seek out another campsite farther down the lake. When they find one with a cabin on it, they find it is already partially occupied by some hunters (strangers, but not unfriendly).

Because of the known danger, the hunters invite them to share the cabin with them. They decline rationalizing that they came to be in the outdoors, and would rather stay in their small tent. They probably wanted their privacy for intimacy as well, which their little tent would provide. But that tent didn’t even come close to providing any protection from the bear attack that came in the morning. The girl escaped, but her companion took the brunt of the attack, only barely surviving, with serious injuries. (Reader’s Digest, Jan 1995, “Caught in the Jaws of Death”).

It is amazing how huge consequences come from disregarding very small warnings. In hindsight one may question why they didn’t get a stronger warning when it was a matter of life or death. Sometimes that’s all we get, having established a habit pattern of disregarding prior warnings, or accepting rationalizations that often accompany warnings. The crucial point is that the warning was there, however small. They got it but disregarded it.

That’s why it’s important to develop a habit of always watching out for nervous feelings and not disregarding them so easily. Warnings are often just a tiny, fleeting thought, and that is why we must always be careful to stay sensitive to any interrupting thoughts of a warning nature. And, that is very difficult to do if you often engage in boisterous activities with groups of loud, light-minded people. They don’t even have to be doing anything “wrong” to divert you from being able to hear nervous feelings.

Here are some examples of failures to heed strong and clear warnings. In the first, a couple picked some mushrooms in the wild, without any particular training (informal or otherwise) in mushroom identification. But they did call a Korean friend when they got home, who knew about mushrooms (indicating they must have felt some anxiety about the dangers involved). The friend could not say for sure over the phone but cautioned them not to eat them until she could come over and check them out. They went ahead anyway, rationalizing that it would only make them sick, or that jokingly, “they would die together.” And they almost did die. (Reader’s Digest, July 1989, “Transplant Emergency” pg. 43.)

Next, a surfer in Oregon, who was a victim of a shark attack, doesn’t specifically mention his own feelings, but he does mention failing to heed several other more open warnings of shark danger: First, he noticed schools of fish leaping out of the water, which he knew was a sign of escape from a predator. Second, he heard fishermen mention having seen a huge shark, 30 miles to the south, attack and kill a large sea lion. And third, even as he was paddling out, two other surfers, who were leaving, said that they saw something, and felt nervous. At least, somebody listens.

He failed to heed all of these warnings, and got struck by the shark, and barely survived—mostly because of the buoyancy of his surf board which kept the shark from dragging him under (Reader’s Digest, July 1995, “Encounter with a Great White” Pg. 74).

Let us suppose he didn’t feel any particular nervousness inside, despite the outward warnings. Why do some people get warnings and others not? First, some forms of immoral behavior lead to loss of sensitivity to the warning voice of conscience. If the beneficial warnings or signals from conscience are from a divine source as I believe, then there may be penalties involved in resisting them and not wanting to hear them–because they get in the way of wrong things the person persists in doing.

In another case, a handicapped mother (in a wheelchair), leaves her young daughter by the swimming pool while she goes to answer the phone. While on the phone, she hears a splash and fails to heed any warning feelings to go back and check, rationalizing instead that it is the dog. By the time she returns the daughter has drowned and is only barely revived by her heroic efforts (Reader’s Digest, April 1989, “I have to save my baby” pg. 65).

I do not wish to appear harsh about someone else’s misfortune, but it often amazes me how tiny the warnings signals may be, even when the consequences are deadly. Most of the time it is nothing more than a fleeting thought which crosses your mind. It is up to us to grab each interrupting thought and hold on to it until it is analyzed for possible accuracy—and then act upon it, even if there is only a chance it is right. This takes consistent practice until one begins to gain a conviction of its benefits. So many little thoughts pass through our minds during the day, so it becomes easy to treat them all lightly. Work hard mentally to assess each idea that comes to mind.

In another story a woman was canoeing in waters known to harbor crocodiles and actually admits to feeling extreme nervousness prior to crossing a stretch of water where the attack occurred. She ignored this clear warning and was severely mauled by the crocodile-barely escaping alive. (Reader’s Digest, Oct 1989, “Crocodile Attack” pg. 71).

In another case, a man demonstrated multiple bad judgments in going along with a friend on a Mexican “jet ski” outing. The friend, an experienced handler of Jet Skis talks our future victim into going out into the ocean despite his nervous feelings. He is even more nervous when he sees the patched up condition of the Jet Ski he is about to rent. He notes that the operator has to use starting fluid to get it started—a bad omen if you are going far out away from land and have to restart it.

Sure enough, his machine stops out in the ocean and cannot be restarted. Then there is another error—his buddy offers to take him back in with his Jet Ski, but he is afraid to leave his Jet Ski because of the high deposit required on the rental. So his friend goes off to get help, leaving him alone to drift. The Jet Ski then sinks, and he is left to drift in the ocean in his life jacket—a mere speck, and is only miraculously found (Reader’s Digest, Nov. 1995 “A speck in the Endless Sea,” pg. 141.)

Finally, there is the sad case of a man with clear, distinct warnings that went unheeded. He was driving on a bumpy orchard road with cans of volatile fluid in the back of his vehicle. He got a distinct nervous feeling prompting him to secure those cans. He disregarded the warning, and shortly afterwards, they exploded, engulfing the vehicle in flames. He suffered severe burns and barely survived, attributing much of his recovery to the miraculous hand of God. Sadly, he never mentioned the sad lesson he should have learned--that had he heeded the warning of God through his conscience, he wouldn’t have needed the “miracle” and would not now be permanently disabled. (Ensign, March 1994)

Let’s now take some time to discuss in detail the full range of ideas and signs that come from conscience, including warning signals, how they appear and why they are sometimes difficult to distinguish from our own thoughts, or from those dangerous rationalizations from evil sources.

HOW CONSCIENCE WORKS

What precisely is conscience and how does it work? Although it is not possible to precisely define conscience in purely scientific terms, or determine how it functions, physically, I will try to describe the process according to my experience—which is similar to hundreds of other people I have talked to.

There are several mental experiences that everyone seems to sense regularly in life—some more than others, of course, but these are the universal ones:

1.  From time to time, thoughts or ideas seem to appear in the mind out of nowhere, which are not linked to what we were thinking about—that feeling that you just got “interrupted” or got an idea from “out of the blue.” Most inventors get key concepts and ideas like this at the moment of a break-through, often different from anything they had been thinking about previously.

2.  There are little reminders that come to mind, seemingly out of nowhere, prompting us to remember something, or go back and get something when leaving the home. It could be a reminder to call someone, to think about someone or to do something. I have found that when I act on those reminders when they come, it often turns out to be very timely: the person is home when I called, or the person needed help at the time I was reminded to call or visit.

3.  There are Promptings that push us to do something we know we should do, but don’t feel like doing. For kids, it is often a prompting to get up on time or do homework instead of playing with friends. For moms, it may be a prompting to turn off the television and clean up the house or do the dishes. For dads, it can often be a prompting to fix something the wife has been nagging about for months, when he feels “too tired” or wants to watch television.

4.  And last, but certainly not least, there are those irritating Nervous feelings that warn people about something they want to do that isn’t quite right or is a danger to them. It could even be over an offensive word in anger, about eating too much, about buying junk food, splurging on something they can’t afford, or making a bad investment. The contrasting feelings we are looking for are Calm Feelings or assurances that we’re on the right path without rationalization.

Social scientists have spent considerable time and effort trying to explain these phenomena in terms of environmental preconditioning, or subconscious workings of the mind, as “gut feelings.” The mental pressure of conscience about mistakes is generally referred to as guilt, and many psychologists are quick to ridicule the validity of guilt, especially in matters which do not appear to have any immediate or negative consequences.

It is true, that societal or parental guidelines and past experiences can partially precondition the mind to what is right or wrong. But I do not believe in environmental determinism per se. I believe that we are constantly comparing environmental influences to our own set of desires and choosing to follow one or the other. Ultimately our own innate personality set points—those deeply held proclivities to do or believe only what we are comfortable with—are the deciding factor.

Our own innateness (those hardened personality attitudes and proclivities that we acquired in the pre-mortal life as spirits) plays a far greater role in explaining why people placed in similar environments aren’t affected in the same way. The main scripture basis for a pre-mortal spiritual development is found in Jeremiah 1:4-10, where the Lord told Jeremiah as he called him as a prophet, “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee, and ordained thee a prophet.”

Because of this pre-earth development some are completely immune to or unaffected by certain environmental conditions, while others are easily susceptible, because of what they may have learned to like or be attracted to before coming to earth. Others, without a religious explanation, attribute the foregoing phenomenon to some mystical “sixth sense,” or “gut feeling” commonly used to define unexplainable spiritual experiences.

Let me explain the four ways in which we are influenced through the workings of conscience.

1. IDEAS THAT INTERRUPT OUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Everyone experiences ideas occasionally that seem to "come from nowhere"—an interruption of our present train of thought. These ideas always form expressions in the mind that sound like our own voice—the same grammar, same syntax, same vocabulary—like you are talking to yourself. The only thing distinguishable is that the idea didn't seem to come from us—it felt like it was external and broke our train of thought.

Science alone simply has no credible explanation for these phenomena, especially when you get a warning about someone else in danger when you had no possibility of knowing there was a problem—other than divine communication to your coincidence. It certainly is not mere coincidence.

I believe that wherever thoughts are processed in the conceptual middle of the brain, there is a receptor that is capable of receiving spiritual input. What is spiritual input? I think it is simply a refined medium of communication different from anything we can measure in physical spectrum. Spiritual communication is clearly not like electro-magnetic radio waves. However unknowable it may be in physics, there exists an ability of the mind to detect these spiritual signals.

The Three Different Voices in Conscience, that all sound the same

The primary voice in our mind is our own thought pattern. Each of us has a distinctive pattern of forming sentences and thoughts in our mind as we think. But what most people don’t realize is that there are two other voices or sources of spiritual influences that interact with our mind that are indistinguishable from our own thoughts in style and syntax.

In other words, all three voices sound like US TALKING TO OURSELVES. This is what makes it difficult to distinguish where external ideas are coming from. It is only through the content and the spiritual feelings accompanying the varying ideas that we can determine the source, but it takes time and lots of experience. It is purposely designed not to be easy so that it tests our spiritual sensitivity.

The two other external sources are:

1) Inspiration, reminders, promptings and warnings that we may receive from divine sources and

2), Ideas and temptations to lead us astray, or rationalizations that divert us from following the promptings of the divine source, which come from opposing Satanic forces.

I believe everyone receives external spiritual influence whether they consciously acknowledge them or not. In fact, it really isn’t necessary to know their nature to make use of them—and that may be even preferable for God’s testing purposes, so that man doesn’t know the “source from whence they come,” except through spiritual feelings.

As expected, neither divine nor Satanic influences in the mind are accepted by the academic world, because they cannot be proven or measured scientifically. But, they are nevertheless quite real.

As I said before, what makes the two forms of spiritual communication difficult to prove or even detect is that they both come into the mind as ideas that sound like our own words and thoughts. It is therefore both easy and natural to confuse them with our own human input and analysis. This adds to the interesting nature of life’s test we are going through.

Thinking is often a fairly conscious process, except when our thoughts are just drifting from one thing to another. But the better thinkers in life try to maintain a conscious awareness of the thinking process and try to analyze and control their thoughts as much as possible.

In contrast to this conscious thinking process, external spiritual input always comes as a very subtle “interrupt” in our thought patterns. This happens most often when the mind is not engaged in heavy rational thought, or when external sensory overload from loud groups of people or raucous music dominates—that is, when your mind is more open to being interrupted.

External ideas that interrupt may or may not have to do with the ideas you are currently thinking about, but generally one can recognize them as external since they come as an interjection with something new and unique that we recognize didn’t come from our current thought pattern.

It’s important to try and distinguish these interrupts from mere random thoughts. Some people’s minds are much less ordered than others and have lots of idle, random thoughts. As such, these people have the most difficult time perceiving external spiritual impressions—often because they aren’t going through the more difficult exercise of controlling and analyzing what they are thinking about. Here are the most common interrupting thoughts:

1.        REMINDERS

These are some of the most pleasant helps that come from an active conscience, such as when you suddenly remember something important, or the prompting to go back in the house for something you forgot, or the reception of a hint to look in a certain place when searching for something lost. You might be reminded to pay a bill before It is overdue or to call someone you’ve had trouble reaching before. When you respond right away to these reminders, things go better. I have found that if I disregard a reminder, I usually don’t get reminded again and only remember that I was reminded, when the consequence of that inaction has come and it is now too late to respond.

In business, you may be reminded to do something now, even though there seems to be no immediate pressing need—and later you learn that something unexpected came up that confirmed why it had to be done then. In finance, you may be prompted to take some financial action before anyone realizes the market is going to change.

I have also found it very valuable to assume reminders are from the divine source, and give thanks and credit accordingly. After doing this for many years, I now have the conviction that, because of this attitude of carefully remembering to say a mental “thank-you” to the source, I get a lot more beneficial reminders than I did as a youth. Perhaps someone up there is pleased when we recognize this divine source of reminders, blessings and warnings.

2.        PROMPTINGS

The kind of promptings I will address here have to do with nagging feelings from conscience that we should overcome some bad habit, or do some specific thing we know we should do, but don’t feel like doing. They can often feel like a reminder, but the difference here is that reminders are usually about something you aren’t resistant to. Promptings, on the other hand, almost always are pushing you to act because the divine source of the prompting knows you are going to be resistant.

Most people get these all the time, and these are the promptings or pushing feelings of conscience that nobody wants to hear. When we tell these to “go away” we are unwittingly telling the Lord to “get lost” and He does distance himself, and promptings diminish—a just consequence that will eventually prove costly in our long-term personal progress.

When one makes a habit of disregarding promptings to change and improve, one no longer merits certain common blessings--like protection, good judgment, and freedom from illness—at least not in the same degree as before. When we regularly deny inspired suggestions, we are often left to fend for ourselves, and sometimes denied help when we most want it.

Some talented people do quite well on their own, by the world’s standards, without paying attention to conscience, but they never know what they are missing had they learned to seek both professional competency and divine guidance. You don’t have to be a religious person to hear the voice of conscience, but as you learn to develop a love for the help you receive through conscience, that voice will eventually lead you to believe in God.

And if you are determined not to acknowledge the divine source of that help, divine assistance may diminish over time, and you’ll be left on your own---not completely perhaps, because the workings of conscience is an integral part of how the Lord will judge every person’s time on earth.

And ultimately, how does one calculate the value or merit of information one never receives? We can’t—but are left largely on our own—and we wonder why things just don’t seem to go well anymore, or why life doesn’t seem to have any spark anymore. Eventually major errors begin to creep in; some moral, some not.

The cutoff of inspiration is gradual, just like the acquisition of a refined conscience takes time. The Lord almost always avoids immediate consequences, to enhance this earthly test, so that it is not always obvious that there are consequences for mistakes of bad judgment.

All of us remember the promptings we got as teenagers to do our homework when we least felt like it. Rationalizations would flood in: “You can do it later,” “You can do it after you play with friends,” etc. Both teens and adults deal with the daily promptings to get up on time, or to help their Mom or wife with household chores, when they would rather watch TV. Some of the hardest promptings to handle are the ones that prompt you to do something better with your time than what you are doing—perhaps when it’s not actually wrong, but not the best use of your time.

In short, promptings almost always come when we are resistant—proving that we really need that nudge. It takes a lot of internal self-control to overcome our natural weaknesses, and to get good at always doing what we know we should do “especially when we don’t feel like it.” Following that little rule, as I will discuss later, is the best defense against depression.

Lastly, we need to distinguish between nagging feelings that come from recurring societal expectations about job, church, spouse, or family, versus the guidance of conscience on what is best to do at any specific time. Rigid rules like family or job being first aren’t always true. Let the Lord order your priorities through the signals of conscience. In other words, sometimes you will feel nervous about acting only out of societal or employer expectations or habit when there is something better or more important that you should be doing at that specific time. That’s what conscience is for—to help us order our priorities when there are multiple conflicting demands that may all be good.

Don’t let other people or expectations make you feel guilty about things when you know there is something more important that you should be doing at that specific time. It may even be for the sake of your own health or stress level that conscience will tell you to decline an obligation rather than spread yourself too thin. Learn to say no when you feel right about your decisions without regret. Always let conscience be your guide, above rigid or set expectations.

But be aware, that when you are young, your desires to do what you want to do may be so strong that they easily override the correct signals your parents are receiving. Learn to give preference to righteous leaders or parents that may have more experience listening to the voice of conscience and seeing proper priorities in a family situation---assuming they are right.

3.        NERVOUS FEELINGS

Whenever we receive any temptation, or create a thought of our own volition that is incorrect or less than correct, we will always receive a slight negative feeling either from our own mind (when it has been trained to analyze correctly) or lacking that, from the divine source through conscience, or both. Most often, this signal from conscience appears as an instantaneous nervous feeling, anxiety or fear as to the correctness of the thought or intention.

It usually is very subtle, unless life threatening (when it may be quite strong). When people make a habit of ignoring nervous feelings, they become calloused to them, and they run the risk that these critical signals become almost imperceptible to them. They may even go away completely when the Lord is offended by one’s chronic rebellion, and you are left on your own.

There are significant differences in people’s abilities to sense these little nervous warning feelings—especially in the small things. Some people are simply more sensitive to divine truths than other people—and it isn’t necessarily related to the presence of organized religious training. Many people seem to feel divine promptings or warnings even in the absence of religious training (which often relies on a “check list” approach to following only rules or commandments). I’m not against the commandments, but feel that an expert conscience fills in the gaps for things not covered by the basic commandments.

And others who receive a lot of formal religious training are sometimes taught not to trust their feelings, but follow scriptural commands rigidly. This can get in the way of internalizing the customized voice of the Lord to our personal needs--especially when they are fed the idea that “once born again, always born again” and that Jesus covers all future mistakes (a major Satanic rationalization) even when not fully repentant.

You might expect, or hope that the warning signals of conscience would be stronger and clearer the greater the danger or the mistake, but that isn’t necessarily true. Sometimes we get penalized for years of disregarding conscience. And sometimes, for people who are brought up correctly by their parents, and who know better, the Lord turns down the volume (to a mere whisper, sometimes) which forces us to further refine our sensitivity to truth in order to test our allegiance to even the smallest hint of error.

These nervous feelings can even disappear altogether if people becomes so hardened in evil desires (and thus become insensitive to them) that they no longer hear them. God is very reluctant to break the hidden veil around the earth, that obscures the spiritual world around us and which keeps His presence hidden, to intervene directly in the lives of the rebellious.

That’s part of this earthly test, to see who can sense small spiritual signals, rather than wait for some dramatic intervention by God. Yes, God intervened dramatically in the life of the Apostle Paul to get him on the right path, but Paul had to pay a lifelong price for having “kicked against the pricks of conscience” with a particular trial he had to endure---a “thorn in his side” as he described it.

As I mentioned before, it is important to differentiate between the nervous feelings that come from conscience and other normal nervousness that comes as a result of having to do something unfamiliar, new or outside our comfort zone. For example, a young person might be asked to give a short talk in front of an audience. It may be a proper and good experience, yet he feels very tense about it, as in stage fright.

Thus, it’s important to realize (and to teach your children) the difference between nervousness related to the wrongness of some thought or action and that which comes from doing something new or unfamiliar.

If uncertain, one way to resolve the question is to ask yourself, "Should I be doing this? Is it the right thing to do?" Assuming it is right; one will feel calm about answering, "yes" to the question, even if you’re still nervous about the difficulty of the performance. Sometimes if still in doubt, it helps to reverse the question and ask if it is “wrong” to do this. By now, the correct answer should be more clear.

At times everyone will encounter legitimate gray areas of doubt, especially when dealing with situations where there is nothing wrong with the action (that is wholly legal and good by everyone's standards), but where doubts still exist. Sometimes the timing is wrong. Worse yet, one might feel good about it, but a parent or spouse may not. What do you do, then?

In these cases, we have a conflict between someone's mind and another's conscience. Which one is getting the proper signal? I recommend one or two approaches.

Sometimes it is helpful to seek out the advice of another person whose judgments you know to be wise and trustworthy, and who is good at listening to conscience. But don’t confuse intelligence with wisdom. Wisdom always requires the moderating influence of divine influence in conscience. Sometimes very smart people are not wise.

For those you trust, ask for their opinion before you give them any rationalizations or justifications you may have received about the issue. Trustworthy or wise people may not always be those we consider our closest friends. Learn to distinguish between people you like and people in whom you have higher trust in their wisdom or good judgment, this which is the more important criteria, because wise people are more likely to tell you the truth, rather than what you want to hear. Hopefully, every parent should strive to be such a person of trust for their own children.

In like manner, every person should make it his highest priority to find a mate with a solid feeling for conscience. One of the most interesting things I learned from my mother’s refined intuition is that wives can often spot or sense a bad business deal even when they know nothing about the technical matters involved. Sometimes it is easier for them to feel the nervous feelings of conscience since they are not wrapped up in the business process or in the desire to make it go through.

Every one of the problem business deals made by my late father was presaged by my mother, who could always sense when my Father was going to have problems with an unreliable business partner. My mother's judgment rarely failed, and my father didn’t always learn from his business mistakes. Other than this flaw in his investment decision making due to the difficulties of providing for a large family, my father was otherwise a wise and loving father with deep spiritual insights into life.

If you have no source of trust to help you analyze your doubts, start mentally going forward with the best version of you plan in mind. If it is the wrong choice, nervous feelings will return and may even increase the closer you get to going through with it. That is a definite warning sign you don’t want to miss. In fact, the presence of rationalizations is always an indication that you don’t feel calm about it. Don’t move forward under the influence of rationalization.

Unfortunately, like in a commitment to marry the wrong person, too many people get so far down the road that pulling out can get very embarrassing, and expensive. Nevertheless, I have found that it is always better to listen to the warnings of conscience, no matter what the consequences—even if one has to notify all the guests that the wedding is called off. I’ve stopped counting the number of divorced people I have known who had such warnings in their mind even after committing to a marriage, but were too embarrassed to back out.

CALM FEELINGS (as the main contrast to nervous feelings)

The positive side of conscience works like this: when we think of appropriate thoughts and actions, we will feel calm about them (as to the correctness). It is still natural to be anxious about new or difficult things ahead, even when correct. In reality these calm assurances are what produce that internal peace that comes from doing what is right. Most of the time, calm feelings are simply the complete absence of doubt and nervous feelings (about the correctness). This then, is the reason Satan tries to feed rationalizations to your mind when God is trying to warn you with nervous feelings. Rationalizations are the false substitute for calm feelings of approval from the Lord.

EVIL INFLUENCES IN CONSCIENCE

This is the important thing I can teach you about the workings of conscience: that God isn’t the only one that has access to your conscience. Your conscience is a universal spiritual receiver and Satan has access to your mind through conscience and is always ready and waiting to intervene to try and divert your from following good promptings or warning feelings.

Religious people often work under the flawed assumption that if Satan is influencing their mind, they are going to feel a dark, brooding feelings. That does happen, but dark feelings usually come after Satan has long led you down the path of error and severe depression relative to your resistance to your parents or spouse when they are trying to restrict you from doing the wrong thing or heading in the wrong direction.

In fact, bitterness and dark brooding feelings are always a sign that Satan has a hold of your mind, even when you are in the right about conflict or criticism by another person. I’m not saying you should be a Pollyanna and think kindly thoughts about people doing wrong or evil things. But you should be able to see, confront and recognize wrong behavior in a spouse or parents without letting it develop into dark, brooding feelings.

The trouble is, when you are in conflict with a spouse or parent, Satan knows that you are wanting to feel negative feelings, and he jumps into your mind to provide the dark feelings that poison a relationship. And, accompanying those dark brooding feelings are wrong conclusions and ever more negative ideas that prohibit you from finding solutions and healing the relationship. So, remember, dark, brooding, and depressive feelings are never from the Lord. You can feel righteous anger and indignation from the Lord about error without getting dark and brooding about it.

But here is the danger in thinking Satan only uses dark and brooding thoughts. Most of the time, Satan’s voice in your conscience is the soft, soothing voice of rationalization and false comfort—trying to get you to “take it easy” and not follow through with the Lord’s efforts to get you to change those deeply ingrained innate weaknesses that you’ve become comfortable with.

So, Satan becomes the voice of permissiveness, and unconditional love—that subtle false doctrine that God “loves you in a positive sense no matter what you do.” God doesn’t relay feelings of approval under these conditions of rebellion because it takes away the incentive to change and overcome chronic weaknesses. It rationalizes away proper guilt feelings that you always get for willful rebellion and even for failure to do what you know you should be doing.

In summary, always remember that Satan knows our innate proclivities and weaknesses and will always be the first to appeal to those in order to have the greatest chance of success in keeping us weak. In short, don’t believe the false idea that God’s voice in your mind will always be loving and that Satan’s voice will always be dark.

God often provides real guilt feelings and even at times withdraws his Spirit from us so that we might feel the need to change our attitudes in order to bring back his approval type love. And Satan is most often that soothing false voice trying to keep you comfortable in your weaknesses, especially when dealing with issues of sin involving “love” where Satan tries to convince you that nothing involving love can be wrong.

Always be on the alert for Rationalizations

Evil spiritual forces attempt to imitate calm feelings whenever possible. This is most often done by getting people to rationalize away nervous feelings, or in other ways, talk themselves into something that isn’t right. Everyone knows what that process feels like. Rationalizations are especially powerful when they reinforce your own desires to do something that not right. When you want something badly enough, watch out for powerful rationalizations which may drown out nervous feelings.

It is important to establish a habit pattern of learning to recognize rationalizations just as they begin, and to cut them off. The deeper one gets into these excuses the more the false hope increases that it will turn out well, when it won’t. Rationalizations are a trap. When you are faced with someone in your family or group that feels nervous about what you are about to do, about your choice or friends, or even who you may want to marry, don’t try and feed them the same rationalizations you are getting. Their nervous feelings may be your last chance to escape future consequences—when you may already be determined to go ahead with it.

So, why do so many people persist in pushing past those warning feelings, even when they know better? As mentioned before, it is often because they established a habit pattern of disregarding conscience very early in life, in the pursuit of what they want to do. After all, those feelings are usually tiny and easy to disregard.

Sometimes it’s from a habit of heeding peer pressure too often, or being innately too dependent on friendship and being liked by others. Sometimes it is also the failure of parents to reinforce or remind children that every mistake or wrong decision is preceded by a small warning.

But, it’s not enough to teach conscience, parents have to correct conscience when their children are not listening, or not using sufficient self control to obey it.

All too often one parent will intervene to counter the parent who is more strict or upset and offer permissive counsel like, “let them go, dear—they’re just having fun.” Bad judgment like this isn’t easily corrected, even in the face of continual problems with your kids.

Permissive parents tend to excuse continued problems as if they weren’t permissive or “loving” enough! That’s where innate resistant to tough discipline in a parent causes a real blind spot—where they only feel nervous about being too strict, and not about being too permissive.

All too often, the parent’s own conscience has become so clouded with soft thinking that they don’t even feel intolerance for most bad behavior. It has long been a source of consternation to me when visiting other families, where children are out of control, and their behavior doesn’t seem to bother the parents at all—or at least not enough to stop it.

Differentiating Good and Evil Signals in Conscience

Promptings from the Lord will always feel uncomfortable, because the Lord knows you are resistant, hence the need for the prompting. But have faith that it will always point you in a direction that you will ultimately feel right after you do it, even if it is tough at first.

Satanic temptations and enticements, on the other hand, more often appeal to your soft or egotistical side, wherever your innate weaknesses and proclivities lie. They may involve complete falsehoods, or even partial truths, depending on how the dark side thinks they can best get you to make an error. But they almost always appeal to your weak comfort zone.

Going over the Mark:

Most of the time, you can judge the source of external spiritual input by the substance of the thought alone, if you feel right and calm about it, without rationalization. But not always, especially with good people. With the best people, who are innately resistant to obvious evil, Satan will often use full truth, partial truth, or even excess truth (meaning, more than what is appropriate for the circumstances) to get you to make a mistake, or “go over the mark” in something---meaning beyond that which is appropriate or wise.

In general, Satan will attempt to counter what the Lord desires for us. And, when Satan presents a bad idea in your mind, the Lord responds with nervous feelings to warn us of something is wrong with that idea, or at least that it is “not quite right.” You may not know what the right answer is, but at least you know to be wary and should seek to know in what ways it may be wrong.

At that point, Satan begins to counter with rationalizations to make you feel good about it—that’s the process of implanting a false sense of calmness. It takes significant time and experience to detect the difference the Lord’s calm feelings and Satan’s rationalizations—and become good at it. So don’t be discouraged if you get fooled once in a while. It’s part of the learning process.

The reason that rationalizations are so effective, if you insist on trying to convince yourself they are right, is that the Lord does not always persist in giving additional warnings for those determined to go their own way. Sometimes He does, when the issue is extremely serious, but often, the Lord allows us to be led away by our own desires, knowing that the inevitable consequences must follow. But even then many people never learn.

The greater, long-term danger of rationalization is that conscience itself becomes dull and insensitive. The mind is very quick and can learn to easily evade the subtle warnings of conscience or bring out habitual rationalizations from the past to help out. The Lord believes in letting people follow their innate desires if they are determined to do so—that’s part of the test of life.

Things don't go better in life (in the long-term) when you stifle the voice of conscience, no matter what the movies and commercials infer about immorality, worldly attitudes and “life in the fast lane.”

Let's take a more detailed look at how Satan works on people who have strong desires to do what’s right, and generally can’t be talked into big sins or temptations. Once a person becomes fairly good at recognizing temptation and is resolved to stay true to his or her principles, he or she becomes fair game for "overshooting the mark,” --being tempted to go beyond that which is appropriate even in a good cause.

In this deception, Satan takes advantage of a person’s desire to do something good or significant, and feeds them ideas that will get them to go to an extreme that will result in the person being rejected or discredited. This is a real danger mostly for good, ideological people with lots of drive or ambition.

I’ve seen a lot of examples of this with good people involved in the struggle for political truth and freedom, which I am a part of. The Lord has his own timetable for reversing tyranny or delivering dire consequences, and His sword of justice doesn’t usually fall upon evil until the majority of people have become corrupt enough to deserve the consequences that come upon the whole community or nation. It’s easy to get discouraged as years go by and we continue to lose liberty. Some may even be tempted to take revolutionary action before the Lord is ready to approve, or before a large enough minority is inconvenienced enough to join in.

This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t fight for justice and freedom, but that we must always be careful to stay within the bounds of what is appropriate. And a well trained conscience is the only way to judge between proper and extreme. Each person must find this balance, and must not be swayed by the establishment’s mislabeling of everything critical of them or in the fight for liberty as “extreme.”

Among the best people—those most sensitive to issues of truth, the temptation to overshoot the mark is the hardest deception to see, and difficult to undo once you go down that path.

Selective Spirituality

Of all the innate weaknesses, the most subtle is spiritual blindness—the inability to see when we are off track and become comfortable with what we are and stop progressing. That happens as we become self-satisfied with our material condition in life enough to stop feeling any further need to keep improving in personality, and in overcoming our remaining weaknesses. This is why most people don’t develop a sensitivity to the full range of truth.

By becoming sensitive to conscience, it will set you on a path finding more truth if you let it. People who innately are drawn to “truth” start out by being attracted to one particular aspect of truth. Maybe it’s good nutrition, losing weight and starting to exercise where they begin to hear the promptings of conscience. If they start living a higher standard in these areas, they start getting prompted in other truths, like better discipline of their children, or less time wasted on unproductive social media and television.

In this way, one truth leads to another until sincere people who are submissive to the will of the Lord finally embrace the full range of truth whether it be in health, education, religion and even in politics. Sadly, most people get satisfied too early with the easier truths and stop searching for further truth which are usually less comfortable and more complex. It’s also true that resistance to the harder truths is sometimes innate because many people learned to resist them before coming to earth.

For example, innately soft people or intellectuals may be resistant to hard physical exercise, and may never learn to enjoy it. If they allow themselves to be become overweight, that softness works against their resolve to change. Permissiveness in child rearing can happen to both soft and ambitious people, depending on their own innateness, family background or higher education (which is often hostile to rigorous discipline). And some people are just innately soft on other people so they can’t bring themselves to discipline others within their realm of responsibility.

But whatever your innate deficiencies or weakness are, be assured that God will make some attempt to try and help you overcome them. But if you don’t want to hear the promptings and corrections over time, or don’t like the message, He won’t keep pushing. You may be fine with that, but you must also realize that a failure to be open to change and all truth, leaves you with some spiritual blindness—and your progression will be limited.

So be careful about being comfortable with your present level of goodness, and thus slowly losing that spiritual intensity for listening to additional promptings that would lead to a higher level of perfection in your life.

While problem people become expert at evading conscience, good people run the risk of being satisfied enough with their present position in life that they start missing many smaller promptings about things they would consider minor. Even though the Lord appreciates everything we do in becoming good people, He’s always cognizant of other ways we can still improve and keeps pushing us. If you are only looking for comfort from the Lord, you’ll be susceptible to the voice of Satan which always works to keep you self-satisfied and never progressing. So keep listening for the “little things” that lead to more refinement and strength.

What I’m trying to point out is the danger of becoming “selective listeners” to the voice of conscience. It happens all the time. If worldly success is foremost in someone’s mind, especially relative to prestige and self-advancement, it is easy to become receptive only to promptings or temptations which lead to getting great wealth or getting ahead too quickly.

It’s not that advancement or recognition is bad in and of itself, but when we desire more truth only for reasons of self-aggrandizement, and not self-correction, the Spirit of Truth is offended and we run the risk of getting cut off from higher truths or help in the future when things don’t go according to your ambitious plan. People who play this selective game with truth may be allowed to advance for many more years, but eventually they stumble or fall when a major warning or prompting is missed. The core problem with spiritual blindness is that you never know what you didn’t receive from the Lord, until the next life the Lord explains to you why you failed to achieve the highest levels of salvation in His kingdom.

A highly successful lawyer, for example, will often use his success in the legal field to think he is so great, that he doesn’t have to lose weight, exercise, or treat people more courteously. In other words, his pride in one justifiable area allows him to cover his other weaknesses and justify failing to overcome them. Even religious leaders can get carried away with excessive pride and use flamboyant language and gestures in sermons, or brag about their presumed relationship with God. All that is offensive to the Lord.

GETTING RESTARTED WITH CONSCIENCE

I cannot overemphasize the importance of allegiance to truth as it comes via conscience. Even if you are not a religious person, or if you dispute my belief that God as the source of the positive promptings to conscience, try the following test:

For the next month, try to assiduously follow every prompting of conscience you feel is right, and see if two things don’t happen. First, if you are diligent in listening and responding to the promptings, they should increase in quantity, and get even more specific about mistakes you have been making, or things you have been missing. You will get more promptings than you want or are comfortable with, if your initial experience is like mine.

In the process, you will notice how conscience will tend to focus more and more on your personal weaknesses, rather than on simple reminders to do important things during the day. All told, you should be able to look back on your experience in that month and say that things went a lot better when the promptings were followed carefully and not resisted.

It is easy to become discouraged during this test. Your comfort levels will be challenged constantly, and there are dark spiritual forces out there that don’t want you to start listening closely to this guiding voice and will do anything to keep you from improving your sensitivity and commitment to self-control. Remember that the positive promptings of conscience almost always involve temporal things that we normally do not want to do----because we think “it’s too hard,” or inconvenient.

Get in a habit of forcing yourself to comply with every little prompting that you feel is right, no matter how trivial it seems—like picking up a piece of trash you see on the floor, or putting things back in their proper place. Often those come just to test how committed you are to listening and doing.

Some will overdo it thinking that they have to comply with every single thought that comes to mind. That’s not what I’m saying. You always need to be listening for that brief but subtle confirmation that it is the right thing to do at that specific time. Sometimes you shouldn’t stop and do some small thing when there are other more pressing priorities. If you leave off this last step, Satan can easily flood your mind with useless distractions that divert you from more important things. That’s all part of the trial and error part of developing better judgment with conscience.

Secondly, when you are reminded or prompted to do beneficial things, like remembering something you forgot, give credit to the Lord for the reminder, even if you aren’t sure it came from Him. If these things are from Him, He will be appreciative of your remembering and will bless you with more promptings. Try this and see.

With the exception of those dedicated to being indecisive or rebellious, I have never had any person come back to me after trying this test and say that he or she didn't begin to have an increase in promptings, and more positive outcomes when promptings were followed.

Finally, here are two simple rules to help everyone tie into the workings of conscience with more sensitivity and success. These aren’t mechanistic rules, but principles of life. If followed they will get people to focus on the two prime signals of conscience that involve a change in behavior. These two rules alone solve over 95% of all the mistakes people normally make in life. These signals are universally valid because they are individualized to your personal needs. Memorize them and teach them to your children:

 1. Never do anything you feel nervous about, as to the correctness.

 2. Always force yourself to do what you know you should do, especially when you don't feel like it.

The first rule (heeding nervous feelings) ensures against major errors. Yes, occasionally, if you and your wife are too cautious, you may lose an opportunity or two. But the important thing in life is to avoid major mistakes, from which you may not be able to recover. Life and the heavens can always guide you to other opportunities if you miss one through excessive caution, but when we disregard conscience, and make a major error, sometimes it takes years to recover, if at all.

When nervous feelings come, remember, that they don't tell you what you should do, only that what you have concluded is, at the least, not quite right. You have to apply yourself and think it through again, until you find a solution you feel is right.

The reason God works this way is so that we grow. If He simply provided all the answers directly in prayer, we would become overly dependent and weak and wouldn’t grow. By teaching us to hear a caution and then work hard to find out why, we grow and become more experienced in working things out.

Often we can’t find an answer when we want it, so we have to wait until something does come to mind. Even if the answer is right, you may feel nervous because the timing of your action may not be right. In any case, waiting will usually make the problem clearer at a later time. This is especially important as to lifelong decisions like marriage. If in doubt, wait. It will become clearer with time.

This first rule only works if you become very sensitive and keep listening for it always. These warnings are very feint and easy to miss unless you become sensitive to them.

The second rule (forcing yourself to do right things when you don’t feel like it) ensures that you will put pressure on yourself to do the positive things you are prompted to do in life, that you know are right.

And this rule doesn’t work unless you develop a lot of internal self control. There is no enforcer to crack the whip and make you get out of your lazy habits. Only you can do it. To help you develop this self control, many of these promptings in life focus on bad physical habits like overeating, and not exercising hard enough to get tough. Getting tough physically really helps you to develop the self-control to overcome mentally lazy or bad habits.

This second rule is the most important way to overcome depression, bar none. No one gets severely depressed without disregarding the first rule and getting into some error of thinking or action. And no one gets out of depression without living the second. Forcing yourself to do what you know to be right in any given circumstance, when you don’t feel like it, is the key to becoming a stronger and better person.

Whenever depressed, just ask yourself, “What should I be doing right now?” Several things will come to mind—you probably won’t feel like doing any of them (especially if an evil, brooding spirit is bearing down on you). But choose one you feel best about, even if it is only cleaning up around you or reading a good book, and then muster all your willpower and force yourself to get up and do it. Don’t just sit there and mope. Act.

Depression has a hard time plaguing a person that is actively doing something productive. If you can’t think of anything, go out and do some vigorous cardio-vascular exercise. This process gets easier every time you try it, unless you have Satan dragging you down with negative thoughts. If you feel that, it helps a lot to pray hard to get relief. But prayer alone won’t do it, if you continue to sit there hoping for relief. Listen to the promptings and get up and do something productive.

Remember also that the more you progress, the more subtle will become the temptations and trials. Rely on that still small voice of conscience and you will always have just the amount of inspiration and help you need to make it through your problems—but not without trial and effort. There is always be a way out.

Even if you never come to a complete surety of the truth of what I have said here, following conscience to the best of your ability at any given level of progress will ensure that eventually, you will come to a deeper understanding of these promptings over the course of this life. And when you finally meet your maker, you will recognize him as that friendly voice in your mind that always kept pushing you on towards perfection of the heart.

I honestly think that the Lord wants us to learn from conscience—not simply become mechanically obedient to it. That is why I think the signals are so subtle—so that you really have to feel and think about them, and figure out what is right when you get conflicting signals. Getting good at the workings of conscience is a trial and error process, so don’t be discouraged. It may be frustrating at first, but keep learning from the mistakes you make in listening and eventually you will get better at it.

This much I have learned; that no matter how intelligent and well trained we may become in life, we never know enough about the future to become independent from divine wisdom and foreknowledge. That is why conscience is the key to real wisdom and why it will always be around—because we need it.

TEACHING CHILDREN ABOUT CONSCIENCE

When teaching your children about the workings of conscience, be careful not to convert the signals of conscience into specific rules, as your only response to bad behavior. Rules are important in a home, but they aren’t as effective long-term as teaching a child how to be self-governing through listening to conscience. I realize that it is sometimes easier for parents to create a rule rather than explain how they had a warning or negative feeling as something went wrong, and that the child should have felt that too. Of the two, the latter reminder about the warnings of conscience will yield better results. The best parents use both rules and correction of conscience, by letting the children know what brief warnings they should have felt before the error occurred.

My own mother was a rule maker. She had an excellent conscience, but whenever she observed her children doing something wrong, she would always correct us and then make up a new rule governing that behavior. But, there were never enough rules to cover everything, and we could usually find exceptions to a rule. If she had instead corrected us and then asked, “Didn’t you feel nervous about that before you did that?” That way we might have begun to listen for those warning signals. Don’t be discouraged if it takes multiple reminders for children to learn to “check nervous signals” before acting.

It’s not enough to just tell kids “let conscience be your guide” because there is more than one voice in each person’s mind, and they need to learn to differentiate between good promptings and rationalizations and temptations, as I explained earlier. And the nuances of conscience can’t really be understood until about ages 4-6 depending on the child. But from even the toddler stage, they can begin to learn to clamp down on their uncontrolled minds as parents deliver proper discipline, as I will explain.

But most parents also have to learn to correct their own errors of conscience so they can set a good example before their children. If they don’t get up on time, keep the home clean or waste a lot of time, once you start to teach your children about the promptings of conscience, the children will quickly notice that you aren’t doing the same. One of the universal things about conscience is that others around you can get signals about your failures, just like you do. It’s OK if your children point out errors parents make as long as they do it respectfully.

When you apply the things I’ve mentioned here, you should be able to feel a distinct improvement in your ability to listen, and you’ll also experience an improved ability to detect the things your children are doing wrong—and that includes their attitudes as well. When you correct bad attitudes before they become bad actions, children will make fewer mistakes.

At what age can you begin to teach conscience?

In my experience, a child doesn’t begin to really understand or hear his conscience in the most minimal way until somewhere between 4 and 6 years of age. The ability to understand will be very basic and rudimentary at first and will get more intelligible the older they become as they start to hear reminders, or nervous feelings.

But child’s biggest problem is running on impulse more than thoughtful deliberation. Kid’s mind’s flit from one thing to another so fast that it’s almost impossible for them to hear a tiny nervous feeling---so don’t be frustrated at how long it takes for kids to catch on. You’ll know they are starting to feel nervous when they start looking around to see if the parents are watching before they do something devious.

Children will first confront their internal resistance to do what a parents wants them to do that involves work or mental effort. That often happens when you start requiring that they help out in cleaning and putting toys and clothes away, and even more when starting to learn to read, which is hard mental work. They will quickly begin to pick up on rationalizations and excuses Satan feeds to them even at that young age.

You don’t have to introduce them to the idea of Satan but you can tell them not to make excuses. Once they get to this age, instead of only telling a child what they did wrong, you need to start probing their thinking process before they did something wrong, helping them to remember that looking around to see if anybody is watching is a sure sign they feel nervous about it.

Get used to asking if they had any nervous feelings before they did what they did wrong. This will be most effective if the thing they did caused harm to themselves or broke something. Often they won’t feel anything if they are just running around uncontrolled or being silly, which most children do when young. A little of that is OK, but don’t let it become habitual without correction.

The basic process is to teach children to pay attention to the thoughts in their minds. Most children have a hard time picking up on the warning signals because they are running around doing things so fast, and their mind is running at such a pace, that they do not slow down their thinking enough to hear anything.

Don’t be afraid to demand a child slow down and stop acting in erratic ways–at all times. All children can learn to play without being wild, although it’s almost impossible when parents put their kids in situations where they are surrounded with dozens of other uncontrolled kids. Uncontrolled mental and physical behavior is the biggest enemy a child picking up on the signals of conscience.

If they don’t remember feeling anything, that is natural at first, but don’t be afraid to explain to them that they should begin to feel a tiny nervous feeling whenever they are about to do something wrong. Get their little minds used to looking for those nervous feelings. It will always be there when they become sensitive to it—which involves slowing down their actions and play more calmly so they can hear. That is why discipline about doing uncontrolled things is an important disciplinary step.

The Importance of Developing Self Control in Children

In preparation for teaching a child to abide by the tiny signals of conscience, you have to teach and expect a child to learn self-control when they are young. If you have to count to 3 before they obey your call to “come!” you’re allowing your child to develop a very bad habit of procrastination and perhaps even rebellion. If they can ignore and evade your verbal demands think how easily they will disregard the tiny voice of conscience.

When children get to that age when they are starting to hear the signals of conscience, they have to face the transition from a world of constant playing or being entertained to one of self-direction and begin to make productive decisions.

In this stage of life, they often complain to parents about being “bored” with “nothing to do.” That’s a sign that they aren’t used to checking their conscience for what they should be doing. I don’t expect kids to pick up on being productive all on their own. This takes some direction from parents—teaching them how to use a book, how to clean up their room, make something, or draw a picture or help younger siblings.

Once given some training and expectations, conscience can now begin to prompt them in little ways. Once you develop a good routine at home with chores for the kids, and lists of things they can do or learn in their spare time, you’ll start to see they still come up with the “I’m bored” routine. That’s a good time to suggest they check their mind for what they should be doing.

If they immediately come up with a string of rationalizations and excuses of why they don’t want to do those things, then you know they are starting to be fed rationalizations and excuses from the dark side of conscience. It’s natural. It happens to all kids, but it’s a good opportunity to sit down with them and explain how to tell the difference between the good promptings we get and the negative excuses that come into the mind to stop us from doing what’s right.

It takes a few years of interacting with your children about what you are feeling and what they are feeling for these concepts to sink in and become natural for them. Don’t think that you can sit them down and explain conscience from A to Z to them one time and be done with it. It is in the little reminders and corrections you give a child about his or her conscience that is most effective. But to do that, parents have to first be bothered by a child’s behavior, and a lot of parents I have observed simply tolerate way too much uncontrolled behavior, bad attitudes and especially tantrums---which need immediate and strong correction.

But hardly anyone even thinks consciously about conscience anymore, let alone how to correct it in others. That’s why we’ve become a rule-making people, and a legalistic society. It’s a poor system except in helping citizens avoid major crimes. Rules and laws are important, as they provide consequences when people don’t listen to conscience.

At the micro level of life, rules are never specific enough to cover every situation and every contingency, so it is natural for people to think they have a lot of leeway in their behavior between the rules. But they don’t, really. Conscience has an opinion about almost everything—though it won’t allow you to use it like a Ouija board—asking yes or no questions on who to marry or what stocks to put your money into. That takes deeper interaction with conscience and sound analysis.

MENTAL HABITS THAT DETER THE OPERATIONS OF CONSCIENCE

There are two tendencies in behavior that lend themselves to problems with conscience. The first are people that don’t control their thoughts or expressions well. Those types of people tend to get the most false signals and often develop chronic bad judgment.

The second are people who think too fast or flit from one thing to another without thinking. As with training children, even adults need to consciously slow down their idea stream in order to hear the small voice of conscience.

A third group are intellectual and scientific oriented people who lack any feelings for seeking out or dealing with spiritual promptings. Intellectual and scientific pursuits require very heavy emphasis on the deductive and inductive thought processes from sensory inputs alone. They also take great care to exclude random and non-traceable inputs. This can easily lead to bias against feelings or the acceptance of spiritual input that can’t be proven. Not all intellectuals and professionals have this problem, but many do.

Increasing Your Self Control

It does little good to hear the promptings of conscience unless one develops sufficient self-control to force yourself to follow those promptings. Conscience is an internal and subjective process. Once you’ve left home, there’s no one to prod you do what you know you should be doing except your own conscience. So, if you haven’t developed ample self-control skills during the formative years, you’ll have trouble with what I’m trying to teach here—perhaps not in the listening part, but certainly in the follow-through part.

For example, as I mentioned earlier, people often get reminders from conscience to do something, and put it off until it is convenient. That may involve listening to a rationalization or it may be a lack of self-control to do what you are prompted to do when it is inconvenient.

It takes a lot more self-control to abide by a prompting in conscience because the voice or idea is so tiny and because there is no one to enforce it except your own will. And though there usually are consequences for evasion and procrastination eventually, they may not show up for years. By that time, you may not even relate it to your bad habits of failing to listen to conscience and act. Hopefully, now you will.

So, how do we improve self-control? The answer lies in the interesting link between the physical and the mind. When the mind is required to put pressure on the physical side of self, either to suppress improper or untimely urges, or to make it perform something difficult, the mind gains strength and gets better at controlling urges that come from a complaining body. The mind does not develop the same degree of self-control when it is only required to operate on mental aspects alone. The mental effort required to suppress an idea is often easier than suppressing strong physical drives or fatigue.

Thus, it is no surprise that forcing yourself to do strenuous and invigorating physical exercise is one of the best ways to develop mental self-control. Hard breathing, calorie burning exercises are perfect for improving both mental and physical strength. There is also something about the fatigue that builds up over long distances and time with aerobic exercise that builds endurance and mental toughness. If you are not used to heavy exercise, get a good checkup and work up gradually in this toughening process.

Once a person has developed good mental powers over physical control, he or she needs to start applying this control to other weaknesses—being overweight is a common but tough one, and sexual drives for males are perhaps the toughest to control. Bad speech or conversation habits are another, and these are especially difficult to break.

CORRECTING CONSCIENCE

The most common problem with conscience is people’s tendency to make permanent rationalizations that seal off reception of certain signals. They no longer hear the warnings in such areas. When this happens, people talk themselves into accepting that a problem is no longer a problem—or that it is beyond their capacity to change. They become immune to any future nervous feelings on that subject and their judgment begins to deteriorate in other areas. Here is a list of some of the most common areas where people cut off the signals of conscience, and no longer hear them:

- Bad eating habits: consuming junk food and drinks, overeating in general and accepting ever increasing weight as normal.

- Ignoring bad behavior in their children, especially rebellion or tantrums.

- Watching too much TV and unhealthy movies, music, books and other “entertainment”

- Indulging in addictions: alcohol, pornography, smoking, etc.

There are many more but those are some of the most common in modern society.

It’s hard for any person to see what he or she is missing in conscience, but others close to you can often see your faults more easily. Your parents, spouse, or close friends can sometimes be your biggest help in correcting conscience if you let them. But almost everyone already knows what their problems and weaknesses are.

Problem people are often encouraged to pay for professionals for help, but most of these people don’t understand any of the principles of innateness or the workings of conscience that I’ve espoused here. Most of the rehab or self-help systems professionals developed for dealing with these problems involve gimmicks to reduce the pain of change. In fact many will tell you that “self-control doesn’t work.”

In reality, self-control always works, it is people that fail to develop enough of it or the strength to endure the mental pain of using self control that doesn’t work. The great thing about getting good about listening to conscience and finding the control to abide by it is that these larger addictions never happen. If they ever do, the self-control you’ve practiced with conscience will help you rebuild the mental strength to tackle the larger addictions, with the help of God, family and friends.

SUICIDE AND CONSCIENCE

Lastly, I have to mention suicide because it has become epidemic in our society and is a classic case of Satanic voices overwhelming the divine voice inside one’s mind. The major flaw in professional counseling is that establishment training in psychology denies the most important factor involved in suicidal thoughts —the overwhelming role of Satanic depression in a person’s mind.

It isn’t that there aren’t many initial causes of depression, whether hormonal, stress or fatigue, but Satan always takes advantage of those initial causes adding poisonous ideas and brooding feelings to the mind in order to inhibit divine help from getting through to correct the errors that are causing depression.

Sadly, mental health professions either don’t believe in Satan or have been conditioned by their secular training to never touch religious principles and to excuse all depression as a chemical imbalance, treatable with mood altering drugs—that I have found actually suppress the workings of conscience.

When SSRI drugs are used to treat depression, I believe that they end up suppressing the mind’s reception of the signals of conscience, including the bad signals from Satanic influences that often cause mental problems and erratic behavior--temporarily. That’s why they appear to work, while the patient is on them. These drugs are used a lot on children who have chronic ADD and other mental control problems but there are some pretty bad side effects and dangers in using them.

During withdrawal from these drugs, there appears to be a high correlation between withdrawal and suicidal thoughts which many have complained about. My personal opinion is that this is caused by the sudden reintroduction of satanic influence of the mind that was suppressed before by a deadened conscience.

I only found out about this suppression of conscience after trying to help a good friend’s teenage daughter who was abusing drugs and having moral problems. I taught her about the workings of conscience which resensitizes a person to those divine corrective signals. But, she clearly didn’t like engaging with her conscience, not wanting to change her behavior.

Her parents finally took her to a psychologist who put her on mood altering drugs, and she seemed to improve for a while, at least in attitude. I saw her about a month later with her new “carefree” mental attitude and asked her what made the difference. She said, “Once on this drug, I couldn’t hear that nagging voice of conscience anymore!”

That was a wake-up call for me. Yes, the high level of satanic influence might be suppressed when on a drug, yielding temporary stability, but she was no longer getting the corrective voice of conscience either. And, with the crutch of mood altering drugs, people never learn to overcome their own problems, unless they get off of them, and tie into the beneficial signals of conscience. So, parents beware of the lure of psychotropic drugs, the dumbing down of conscience and their potential link to suicide.

I’ve had a younger brother commit suicide, and have known several others who have succumbed to it. I have never met anyone with suicidal thoughts that wasn’t under the constant barrage of Satanic depression, and feeding them thoughts about how there’s “no way out” except by killing themselves. They are often prompted to use a gun, to further Satan’s desire to see all guns banned.

More than just trying to talk someone out of their negative thoughts, it’s important to teach them how Satan can also speak to their mind without them recognizing it—because everything coming through conscience comes in each person’s own voice and grammar. People with suicidal thoughts always think they are talking to themselves, but it isn’t necessarily true. Teach them that any idea about killing themselves is coming from Satan. It’s not really them, and how to resist it.

The two rules of conscience really help here. When anyone is depressed remind them of rule #2, to stop sulking and get up and do something they know they should be doing, especially now that they don’t feel like it. Often with deeply depressed people, who have zero positive motivation left, you have to go out and exercise with them or whatever they decide they should be doing. They need companionship with a conscience.

If you’ve raised your children with this habit of doing something productive when depressed, since they were young, they should have already developed the self-control to know how to force themselves to do this and resist the voice of Satan. It’s the most important training you can give them so that they develop a natural resistance to suicidal thoughts.

Sadly, few parents watch out for the signs of depression as it relates to chronic inaction or lack of desire. Worse, they have not learned how to discipline bad attitudes and get their children into productive action when depressed. If you don’t teach this early on, and expect them to do it, it will be much, much tougher to do when under severe Satanic depression which often comes in their teens or young adulthood, when they learn to love that depressing voice and the dark moods that go along with it.

Don’t forget to pray your heart out as well for Satanic spiritual influences to be lifted from your home. Teach your kids to pray deeply and sincerely when they recognize Satan’s influence on their mind. They need to develop their own successful experiences with prayer.

That said, remember that you can’t pray away Satanic influence if you are permissive and allow bad influences to enter your home constantly through television, cellphone social media, books or the influence of problem friends in public schools. Parents have to do their part to merit divine help.

Remember that a lot of societal shielding is necessary in today’s world until children get old enough and strong enough spiritually to see and resist. That’s why homeschooling has now become so important to discerning parents. The social influences in public schools can be poisonous once teens learn to love their relationships with friends more than family.

CONCLUSION

Within the workings of conscience is found the essence of our final examination on earth. No matter what you do publicly on earth—no matter how much fame, fortune or power you accumulate, the core judgment by God concerning your conduct on earth will center around how you have reacted to the thousands of promptings you received in conscience over a lifetime. How you react to the Lord’s personal promptings to you tells Him more about how you love Him and truth than superficial religious affiliation.

We’ve all made mistakes, but no matter what has gone on before, we can always repent, change, and begin the healing process by linking ourselves to the still small voice of conscience—which will lead you back to that God who sent us here.

It takes many years to become accurate and sensitive to the whisperings of conscience, even when we try our very best to listen and obey; so be patient. Learn to love the still small voice of conscience, and always be on guard for correction. Commit yourself to act when you know what is right—especially when you don’t feel like it. That’s the key to a better life.

Joel Skousen