Day Twenty-six

Today's thought-dimenson was 'conscience'. This means listening to and acting on what my conscience tells me, rather than feeling the guilt and doing the wrong thing anyway.

Somewhat depressingly, despite my faith, I seem to do this a lot. Sometimes I have problems with my conscience because it tells me to feel bad about things that I don't think are truly bad, and that is more to do with my self-esteem and various hang-ups than it is about what's really right and wrong. Like, not giving money to beggars. My conscience goes TWING TWING! whenever I pass a homeless person on the street, but I know that actually dispensing the cash does nothing to help them properly, so I save all the pennies that I would have given and then write a nice cheque to a homeless charity instead. Which is much better, even if it's only because of the fact that Gordon Brown has to give an extra 24p for every donation I make.

Cue Simpsons quote:

"Bart: I thought I'd be jumping for joy the day Skinner got fired. Now all I have is this weird hot feeling in the back of my head.
Lisa: That's guilt. You feel guilty because your stunt wound up costing a man his job
Bart: I guess it is guilt. [scratches his head; a small spider bites him repeatedly there]"

Anyhow, enough of the rambling self-justification!

I am getting better at sorting out when my consicence is giving me false guilt or true guilt. And there was one situation I encountered today which had engendered a lot of true guilt for a while. So I attempted to put it right. It didn't feel as satisfying as I thought it would... because ->augh<- I still felt guilty about the time which had elapsed between the situation cropping up and me rectifying it.

At least I did my task, anyway. I guess this conscience thing isn't going to go right all of a sudden. Maybe if I do it systematically - obeying my conscience straight away when I know it's right, and ignoring it when I know it's being tainted by my self-image - then slowly it will learn to stop with the silly false stuff.