We are all familiar with the term conscience. We have experienced its effects partly in ourselves, and partly in other people, and we have probably also experienced that it does not seem to be equally strong in everyone. What do we actually understand by conscience? It is a conflict in the terrestrial human being's mind, but what kind of forces are they that are struggling to take command in the mind? They are what people call "good" and "evil", and evil is what people call "sin", but what people do not know is what kind of forces in the consciousness good and evil are, or why people are good or evil.

It is a fact that terrestrial human beings belong to the animal kingdom, but it is also a fact that they are usually not too keen on being called animals. They feel that they are above the real animal kingdom because there is something in their consciousness that does not belong to the animal kingdom. Terrestrial human beings are not real animals. But then the question arises: are they real human beings? Some are certainly more humane than others; there are some who have absolutely not got it in them to say or do something that other people would be able to say or do with no scruples, and then there are others who in a moment's agitation or irritation end up saying or doing something that they later regret having said or done. The inner voice of their conscience allows them no peace. As Paul said, "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do", and I would not be surprised if everyone, if they are honest with themselves, would admit that this sentence also applies to them.

When a terrestrial human being acts or speaks in an agitated or irritated state of mind, it is as a result of automatic functioning. What takes place in its consciousness and in its organism is in principle the same as takes place in an animal that is agitated. The only difference is that an animal can deal with its agitation only by using physical strength, teeth or claws, which are its tools for attack and defence, whereas the terrestrial human being can make use of its intellect and can use those words and perform those actions that will hurt and disturb the opponent as much as possible, in fact, perhaps even bring them to despair. There are, of course, some who can do this with a "clear conscience", but in most people a certain amount of mental disquiet about the situation will begin to make itself felt once the agitation has subsided. In some, this disquiet is so strong that they are unable to find any peace of mind until they have done something to change the situation, to "make it up", as we say. The sense of conscience develops like a rising scale that starts at zero in the actual animal kingdom and leads step by step to states in which the humane aspect in the human being ends up dominating as neighbourly love in thought, feeling and action.

But how can human beings find out what is right and what is wrong? By using their conscience. Conscience is not a relative concept like, for example, good or evil. Conscience is something absolute; it is a principle and is the very factor in the terrestrial human being's consciousness that transforms it, over a series of incarnations, from an animal into a human being. It can be likened to a "shadow" that is both light and dark and this follows us around in the same way that a dark shadow does when we walk in the sunlight. We also have a light "shadow" or a light field that follows us purely mentally just as we also mentally have a dark shadow. Every single living being has its place as a link in the plan that Providence has and, as far as terrestrial human beings are concerned, every single terrestrial human has its place as a link in the creation of the true human kingdom on this Earth. In order to be completely in contact with the plan that Providence has or that the world has, humans have to be supplied with a principle that they can steer by, and such a principle is precisely this light field that accompanies them. It does not exist in physical matter, it is a psychic reality, and we all have in our consciousness this mental area of light in the form of ideals from the true human kingdom. These are the ideals we strive to be able to make real.

When we listen to beautiful music, it represents to us our ideal of being able to play or compose in the same way as the people who have produced the music. When we are out in the countryside marvelling at the colours of the scenery, there awakens in us a longing to know about and to give expression to everything that forms the basis of Nature's beauty and logic. So when we come face to face with the deficiencies and defects that are so clearly evident in our present-day culture and civilisation, we long to create a better social and international structure. We have a great many ideals, wishes, longings and aims that we would like to fulfil, and together these all make up the area of light that we have with us. When we read in the Bible that Moses led the Israelites through the desert with the help of a pillar of light that was before them all the time, what really led Moses was just such a mental area of light, it was not something physical. Our ideals are in the area of light that we have with us. Naturally, these ideals are bound to appear as something relative to the person who is able to take a comprehensive view of them. Observed with cosmic consciousness one sees that they constitute steps, steps above and steps below the area of light; the farther away they are from this area the darker they are, and, the more they are at one with it, the brighter they are. That is why "good" and "evil" are relative concepts; that is why we do not all suffer pangs of conscience over the same things. The extent to which the same manifestation will engender either joy or sorrow in our minds is dependent on how far we have come in our journey towards that great edifice known as the real human kingdom.

What are these pangs of conscience that can cut through the mind like knives? A pang of conscience is that mental unpleasantness, in fact in certain cases, that suffering and pain that arises when human beings' actions are in glaring opposition to the ideals that have begun to take shape in the area of bright vibration in their consciousness. It is as if they have created a split within themselves. To them, it feels as if they have gone backwards a little bit in their evolution. But this backward step is only how it seems on the surface. It was caused by the human beings believing that they were greater than they in fact are. They have neglected to look at the plan for their lives with the result they have to undergo those necessary learning processes in the form of unpleasant experiences, that are stored away in their catalogue of personal experience - in what we call the memory. These learning experiences gradually cause the human being to think, feel and act according to more humane principles; they cause it to make its way further on in its evolution towards higher steps, from where the structure of the real human kingdom, as well as the structure of the real human being, can be sensed more and more clearly and can be united with the human being's ideals, wishes and longings. They will then be less and less able to do anything that creates pangs of conscience, and all the energy that gets used up when the human being is upset or angry with itself or disappointed in itself, will be able to be used for the benefit of the whole in a quite different way.

If we look into the relationship between the living being and the world plan we see that the world plan is constantly presented to the being in exactly the way that its sensing faculty is adapted to receive. This plan is made manifest to primitive peoples through their medicine men, who show the people the way to live that they, the medicine men, have realised through their own experiences to be the most perfect and that fits exactly the next evolutionary step. When human beings advance further in their evolution it becomes apparent that the task of leading the beings forward is taken over by more highly evolved beings, for whom God's plan for the creation of human beings is completely conscious. Jesus was this sort of a higher being who was completely conscious of God's plan for the creation of human beings and who, so to speak, went ahead of mankind and was its "pillar of light." Thus, every genius will go ahead and be a "pillar of light" for his fellow beings, and be the model or the design that those beings long and desire to copy. Using the model, they can get an explanation of how they should live and think in order to fulfil their desires.

Christian people's conscience is - more or less - in contact with the mental light emanating from Christ, and naturally something similar applies to the people who had Buddha or Mohammed as their lodestar. But the external light, the external authority will gradually be replaced by people's own inner light, and in this respect personal experiences are the only things that can help. When you have gained a certain insight into the "design" that the model represents, and have seen where your duty lies and what your true field of endeavour is and have begun to get used to acting accordingly, and in some field or other you happen to lose sight of your goal, then you will suddenly discover that you cannot in all conscience do anything but what the "design" indicates. According to the divine laws, if you diverge even just the slightest little bit from what your conscience tells you, you will in one way or another experience unpleasantness. So when a human being comes up against an unhappy fate, it means in its deepest sense that in one or more areas the being has not been in contact with God's plan or design, it has been a poor helper to the Godhead in the creation of its own higher mentality.

The experience of undergoing an unhappy fate is bound to provoke the human being to reflect and to realise that it must change its course of action in order to come into contact with God's design. Experiencing an unhappy fate is basically an expression of absolute love on the part of Providence, even though, while it is going on, it does not feel like it. If one were not allowed to experience the consequences of one's own course of action, one would never reach the glorious world of wisdom. So it is divine that mistakes are always revealed. Revealing mistakes will always result in experiencing pangs of conscience. Were it not for what we call pangs of conscience, one would never find out whether something was right or wrong. These mistakes are what one formerly would have called "sins". But from a cosmic point of view there are no sins and no sinners; what we call sins are mistakes due to ignorance. People call a mistake a sin because in their own field of consciousness they are used to having a bitter or hostile attitude towards everything that transgresses conventions accepted at one time, but this attitude is in itself the expression of a mistake, of ignorance.

True wisdom has always been, and always will be, based on the living being's own experience. Through experiences of suffering, a being's ability to feel sympathy for other living beings grows. The greater the ability to feel sympathy a human being has, the less it has the heart to say or do something that could cause another human being suffering or despair. To the extent that it has the heart to do such a thing, or do something "thoughtlessly" as we say, it will be unable to avoid being exposed to the effects of its own words and actions, in that its lack of ability to think and act in harmony with the human form of love and logic will gradually be revealed to it. This human way of being is precisely the Godhead's design and plan for mankind; it is by means of this that human beings will succeed in creating a real human kingdom on Earth.

Once the human being has gained a certain amount of experience - enough for there to arise in its mind a need for greater knowledge and a wish to be more fully able to do the good that it would and to avoid doing the evil that it would not - it gradually becomes receptive to theoretical instruction. Naturally, this does not consist of a raised finger and expressions such as "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not", these belonging to earlier stages in evolution. The instruction has to be an explanation of: the entire evolution of mankind; the formation of the fate of mankind as well as that of the individual human being; the fact that everyone has to reap what he or she has sown; and, finally, the fact that this reaping does not just span the period from birth to death in a single lifetime, but stretches from one life to the next over a long period of evolution. If the seeking human being is receptive to this kind of instruction it will mean that, through it, he will be able to receive help towards helping himself. Help takes the form of being able to survey and understand the present situation on the basis of the past and a view far into the future, and the future will become that human being's fate, which it is itself taking part in creating with its thoughts, words and actions in the present. But teaching would be no help at all if one saw it only as something interesting and exciting by means of which one could end up knowing more than other people, perhaps thinking that because of the knowledge, one is also a little better than other people who do not have this knowledge in their consciousness. What is significant for the individual human being's evolution is the extent to which its daily way of being and behaviour is in contact with its "pillar of light", its conscience. This "pillar of light" represents your ideals, your conceptions and your knowledge about what is "the one thing needful". An examination of your knowledge will quickly show you that much of it is not to the forefront of your day - consciousness, which is why you cannot immediately make use of it. You are not conscious of this knowledge in a practice, only in a theory, which in this case means that it is a poor regulator of your actions. As a spiritual researcher you live to a large extent on a step where the "Holy Spirit" has a part to play in your daily conduct in many areas. But there are also areas where you are not so particular about whether your conduct is in contact with what this Holy Spirit, that is to say the truly loving consciousness, prescribes for you, and in these areas the difficulties and sufferings are to be found. For example, you may be strongly absorbed in becoming skilled in a certain area, so much so that you pay less attention to the other areas of your consciousness, and because of this you can very easily follow a course of conduct in these areas that turns out to be in disharmony with your "pillar of light", that is, with what is Providence's plan for you. Here my work can be of particular importance to you because it either shows you how you can prevent suffering and unpleasantness or how you can deal with these in such a way that you can extract the true learning experiences from them so that another time you can mix the mental energies correctly. My analyses can help you to see your own mental pillar of light correctly so that they make it easier for you to see the path you should follow. The way in which each one of us, with our specific combination of abilities, will manifest the light is foreseen by Providence, and a plan is made for our future, plan that our conscience and our ideals will tell us about if we listen to our inner voice intensely enough. So because we are taking part today in forming our future through our thoughts, words and actions, it is best for us to consider Providence's plan for us by listening to our conscience. Those effects that we give rise to today through our behaviour will be the cause of effects that we meet in the years and lives to come. They will contribute to our future physical and mental appearance, and play a part in forming the future patches of light and darkness in our consciousness.

Does this mean that we can go against the will of Providence and the plan that Providence has for us, so that it never becomes a reality in the physical world? No, we cannot. But we can go against it for a period of time by avoiding working with our own evolution or by going against the laws and destroying our organism and mentality by living wrongly. Life itself, however, will correct us in such a way that we, through the way our fate is formed, will encounter the experiences that will make contact once again with our pillar of light and so also with inspiration and joy in our existence.

There are two more principles it is natural to mention in connection with the concept of conscience, and they are the forgiveness of sins, and sin against the Holy Spirit. As I mentioned earlier in my lecture, there is, from a cosmic point of view, no such thing as a sin or a sinner; what we call a sin is a mistake, and what we call a sinner is a person who makes mistakes through ignorance. Revealing something as a mistake will sooner or later - and it may well take several lives - result in the person experiencing a guilty conscience, and that experience will in turn cause the conscience to gradually come into function before the action is carried out, and this means that the person will then, on account of his experiences and knowledge, no longer be a "sinner". Through Christianity, terrestrial human beings have learnt that one can receive "the forgiveness of sins", which means that if one has done something wrong one can, under certain circumstances, avoid the unpleasant consequences of one's conduct. Is this right from a cosmic point of view? In fact, it is when one understands the underlying universal laws. The conditions that I mentioned are that one is sorry about what one has done, that one really regrets it with the whole of one's heart and the whole of one's mind. This causes the vibrations in one's aura to be different to before. A guilty conscience has this effect when it is really genuine, and one is no longer able to carry out a deed comparable to the thing that one now bitterly regrets. Fate is not meant to have a punitive effect but an instructional one, and sufficient instruction has been received when one is no longer inclined to commit an act on a par with the act that one has regretted. And at this point, one has received "the forgiveness of sins", which means that even though one has sown several actions of a similar sort, that one has not yet reaped the effects of, these fate-waves, once they reach us, will be neutralised and dissolved causing us no unpleasantness or suffering. So, because of the vibrations of our aura, that is to say our way of thinking and feeling, and our conscience, we will be protected in precisely this area, and this is the only form of real protection that there is in the world.

But what does it mean that "the sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven"? It means that there are mistakes the consequences of are impossible to avoid. Of course, this does not mean that there are beings who will be punished for all eternity because they have committed some sin or other. That is a primitive, completely sadistic way of thinking, and God is not a sadist who wants beings who act unknowingly to be punished. It means that it is an eternal universal principle that living beings have to reap what they have sown, until their consciousness and their way of being have been changed by their conscience, and they begin to sow something else that they will subsequently reap. We actually meet the Holy Spirit in our conscience, and we can respond to it in two ways - partly because of the fact that there are areas where we still have absolutely no contact with our "pillar of light", so we still have no conscience and therefore no-one can make it clear to us that our way of acting is wrong. We then inevitably have to accept the consequences of our inadequate knowledge. These consequences will manifest as disharmony and an unhappy fate. We will arrive at the realisation that we have temporarily cut ourselves off from the divine plan for our lives. Because of our own behaviour and way of being a deep cleft has opened between the divine world-plan and us. We experience this as suffering and pain, through which we learn to understand the explanations that we were previously unable to grasp and we come into contact with that area of our pillar of light that will be able to help us and protect us when we confront these sorts of actions and their consequences.

We manifest the other way of sinning against the Holy Spirit when we act in conflict with our conscience. This really means that our contact with the "pillar of light" is not strong enough; if it were, we would not be able to do such things. A human being that acts in conflict with its conscience senses its inner voices only vaguely, its inner voice has not become real knowledge. So this being really has to meet the consequences of its actions which results in experiences that provide more than just a vague feeling, and which strengthen the conscience so much that the being is no longer able to act and think along those lines, and at this point he or she will, in this particular area, have received "the forgiveness of sins". "Sin against the Holy Spirit" is thus the same thing as breaking the laws of life or going against what is God's plan for one's life, and this cannot be "forgiven", which is to say these actions have to be reaped as experiences. Once the being has had these experiences, it is protected within this mental area, and has received the forgiveness of sins. No matter how many fate-waves of this sort have been sown in the past, and therefore await the being in the future, they will be dissolved or neutralised by the being's protecting aura.

Getting to know the divine laws means wanting to live in accordance with them, but in the border zone between the animal kingdom and the real human kingdom living in accordance with these laws is very difficult. It is not always easy for the uninitiated to know which course of conduct is the right one and which is the wrong one. It is at this point that studying my work lends a helping hand because it can contribute towards keeping your conscience awake. Because there are still some animal primal forces in you that have not been made civilised, and because this process of civilisation can take place only though the awake conscience constantly monitoring your thinking, the problem of "an awake conscience" is thus not insignificant. One of the places where the primal forces are still fairly active in terrestrial human beings is in marriage. Were it not for the constant regulating influence of the awake conscience, you could easily make mistakes in how you relate to the person you are most closely connected to. But also in relation to friends and enemies you will again and again notice the influence of the primal forces in your mind. It is the mistakes that you make in these relationships that you should especially look into. Recognising one's own defects is the quickest way towards loving one's neighbour as oneself. In order to achieve a harmonious life one has constantly to keep an eye open for whether the action one is about to carry out is masking something egoistic, or whether it has as its deepest motive the desire to create joy for people other than oneself. In your heart of hearts you want to do something that will benefit the creation of the real human kingdom. You are all taking part in this creation, and the fact that you already at this point have been permitted to come into contact with the cosmic analyses means that you have a responsibility as a human being. It is your task to show others a radiate form of existence.