This is a YouTube video titled "The Role of Conscience In The Awakening Experience" created in August 2020. The content features a monologue or lecture-style discussion exploring the concepts of conscience, empathy, and different levels of knowing—conceptual versus non-conceptual or unitive knowing. The speaker delves into how the ego obscures true empathy and conscience, and how awakening or presence leads to spontaneous right action and deeper human connection. The talk references historical and linguistic perspectives and emphasizes the growth of empathy as part of human evolution. The speaker is likely Eckhart Tolle, given the style and content, but the excerpt is a single continuous speech without multiple speakers.
Could you speak about the role of conscience in the awakening experience? How is the sense of moral right and wrong manifest in the egoic state versus a more awakened state, conscience? The strange thing is that in some languages, such as French or Spanish, consciousness and conscience are the same word. They don't have separate words for consciousness and conscience. English has separate words. German has separate words. French and Spanish don't. I don't know about other languages. So conscience, of course, is an intuitive knowing of right and wrong. And deep down, everybody has that in the same way that deep down everybody has consciousness. That may be obscured by the egoic mind. It's only when presence begins to run your life that you live predominantly through presence, that there's absolutely no longer any doubt about right and wrong. Right action happens spontaneously. You don't inflict suffering on others in order to enhance or protect yourself. The ego may talk about conscience or what's right or wrong, but when it comes to actual situations, the ego will always serve itself first, so it will inflict suffering on others without knowing it. In the egoic state, you have no empathy. The more you are in the grip of the ego, the less empathy you have with other humans or other life forms. So there is a complete absence of the conscience. The ability to have empathy is covered up. It's there somewhere, deep down, but it's covered up. And you cannot sense your way into another human being, which is what empathy is. So it's almost like suffering from a disability, certainly a dysfunction. And that is where this huge amount of suffering is created by humans for other humans, including killings. Because you don't know what you are doing anymore. Not anymore. You don't know what you are doing. In the words of Jesus on the cross, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And not knowing what you do, you may ask, what do you mean they don't know what they do? If you have a terrorist like the man in Norway who goes around shooting people, he has certain rational, seemingly rational explanations for what he's doing. He explains it all. He can write it down. This is. This is all. It all makes sense to me. He says, in what sense can we possibly say he doesn't know? He knows full well what he's doing. Well, yes, he knows. On the level of conceptual knowing, he knows what he's doing. But there are two ways of knowing in a human being. One is the conceptual knowing. When I walk in the forest, I know the forest to some extent, conceptually. The trees. I know the names of some of the trees or plants. I know the name of the forest. I can have other conceptual knowledge. I even know myself as the form that I am. Eckhart is walking in the forest. Conceptually, I know what's happening, I can explain it. I'm walking in the forest, I'm seeing this tree. I'm seeing that I'm smelling the air now and this and that. I can name it and know it conceptually. But whether I'm truly experiencing the forest depends on whether another level of knowledge is active or activated in me. And that's non conceptual knowing. And in non conceptual knowing, I look at a tree and I can feel. I can sense the tree's being or aliveness. And I can perceive the totality of the forest with all the look around and feel the. I can feel the energy field of the forest without any labeling. I feel the aliveness of it. I know it, but not through concepts. I also know myself walking in the forest, but not as a concept. Me, Eckhart the writer is walking in the forest. The concepts. But I can sense the consciousness that I am. That is the deeper knowing. And it's only through the consciousness that I am that I can be aware beyond concepts of the aliveness all around me. And only then am I in wonder and awe of the forest before. If only have conceptual knowledge of the forest, I may have some ideas in my head that say, oh, it's a nice forest, but I don't really know that. I certainly wouldn't be able to feel the sacredness of the forest. I wouldn't know the forest on that level. I would only know it on a superficial level. And so because so many humans are identified with concepts, the entire consciousness consists of an accumulation of concepts, including concepts they have about themselves, which is the ego. Concepts they have about others. They relate to others through their mental concepts. Naming, judging, opinions and concepts easily get agitated. The bundle of concepts in people's heads in the absence of a deeper level of knowing. Very often these bundles of concepts that people consist of become agitated about other concepts. The ego just look on the Internet what they write. Some people get angry and upset. It's full of that aggression. Concepts fighting other concepts. They're not relating to other human beings. It's a conceptualized reality trying to survive. It's all part of the madness of the ego. So the question is whether conscience implies an ability to empathize. And you can only have empathy if the second the deeper level of knowing has become activated in you so that you're no longer trapped in concepts can use them. But you're not trapped, imprisoned by concepts. Then you suddenly realize when you relate to another human, you empathize. Which means the word, by the way, is only about, I think, 200 years old or something like that. It came into English via German, translating a German term which wasn't also about created about their time. The German word is einfhlung, which means to feel yourself into someone. And then you don't. Now you know what you do. You cannot, in fact, you cannot inflict suffering. When you have empathy, then something stops you. It's like you're doing it to yourself. There seems to be a growth, a gradual growth, of the ability to empathize. If you look at the past, when humans, for example, they loved watching executions in the village square or the city square and laughing at disability was also common. Disabled people were treated very badly. It seems that it was harder for them to emphasize. Who knows? There's even a book I came across recently, quite interesting, that somebody wrote an account of. I don't remember, unfortunately, the name of the author. He wrote an account of world history from the point of view of the growth of empathy. And the title of the book is Empathic Civilization. So it all is to do with the two levels of knowing. Knowing through concepts. It has its place, but does not make you into a full human being. It's only when the deeper level is activated. We could call that unitive knowing. Then you become truly human. It.
