A Record of Meetings held by P.D. Ouspensky - HolyBooks.com

experience on the same day a great many contradictory emotions,pleasant or unpleasant, on the same subject, either one after another, oreven simultaneously. And we do not notice it because of absence ofconscience. Buffers prevent one 'I' or one personality from seeinganother. But in a state of conscience a man cannot help seeing all thesecontradictions. If in the morning he said one thing, in the afternoonanother, in the evening yet another: he will remember it. But in life hewill not remember it, or he will insist that he does not know what isgood and what is bad.The way to conscience is through destroying buffers. And bufferscan be destroyed through self-remembering, not identifying, etc.The idea of conscience and the idea of buffers needs long study. Butwhat can be understood from the beginning, if we want to speak aboutthe moral side, is that a man must have a sense of good and bad. If hehas not—nothing can be done. He must start with a certain moralsense, a sense of right and wrong, in order to get more. He mustunderstand, first, the relativity of ordinary morality, and, second, hemust realize the necessity of objective right and wrong. When herealizes the necessity of objective, permanent right and wrong, then hewill look at things from the point of view of the system.The system begins with the possibility of objective state of consciousness,and, therefore, of objective truth. The system says that in a stateof objective consciousness man can know objective truth.In our ordinary understanding objective truth refers more to theintellectual side of life. A man can say that he wants to know it also onreligious side, moral side, aesthetic side, etc. The system explains thatman 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are all in a different position. There isreligion No. 1. No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, etc. And there is morality No. 1,2, 3, 4, 5, etc. It does not mean that it is wrong, but that one cannot beexplained by the other. Christ, if we take him, should be man No. 8.He did not preach inquisition. But if his teaching is distorted by men1, 2 and 3 to use for criminal purposes, this cannot be attributed toChrist.Coming back again to morality—a man must, first, have a moralsense. Second, he must be sufficiently sceptical in relation to ordinarymorality and ordinary moral principles. He must understand that thereis nothing general, nothing permanent in them, that they changeaccording to conventions, place and period. And, third, he must