The group had been working for some weeks with a phrase from the Copper Rules in the Vadan: Do nothing which will make your conscience feel guilty. As they talked about their insights and experiences resulting from this work, one point was repeated several times: ‘To think of my conscience, I had to be more present.’

In our daily life, it is common to overlook our conscience; it makes its presence felt mostly by the uncomfortable feelings of regret that come after a word or deed (or rarely, a thought) that goes against some standard. Therefore we tend to think of it as a sort of finger-wagging disciplinarian, an old-style school teacher who has a list of rules we should follow–someone we usually disappoint, in short, and for that reason someone to be avoided. But Hazrat Inayat Khan describes the conscience as the meeting place of the human and the divine. If the ‘human’ is the dense and the limited, and the divine is infinite life and light, the conscience is the place where we reach upward, the field in which we can orient ourselves toward our ideal. That means the conscience should be a place any sincere seeker would long for, and as one member of the group observed, the conscience gives blame, but it also gives rewards.

Naturally, our conscience will evolve as we evolve. What might have seemed permissible when we were irrepressible teenagers might now be unacceptable to us. But if we are keeping our head down, like a student in school avoiding eye contact with the teacher, we will miss a lot.

To be present means to have our attention undivided in the moment. Popular culture has made a virtue of ‘multi-tasking,’ and if we could take a momentary snapshot of our consciousness, we would usually find it to be completely fragmented, a conglomeration of immediate tasks, related and unrelated memories, disconnected thoughts, random feelings, and so on. But we do not need to live this way; it is quite possible to function in this world — and to function more efficiently — with our attention purely in the moment.

In the Invocation, we say, “Toward the One…the only Being.” When our consciousness is divided, we are far from the One, and when we focus ourselves in the present, we come closer, for there is only One moment, as there is only One Being. Regularly consulting our conscience is a way of making that a reality.