Dear Brain
How about a little of your undivided attention? Up until this time, as far as I am concerned, your undivided attention has been scarcest of all identifiable commodities. You may well ask again as you have so often asked in the past in your own coarse fashion:
‘Who the hell are you?’
I’ll tell you who I am. I am that little inner voice which endeavours to tell you how to distinguish between right and wrong so that your whole being might come belatedly to know peace and tranquillity.
I am also the spirit of unrest and I will dog you to the end of your days. You have never been certain about my exact whereabouts and I have often heard you ask: ‘Where the hell are you?’ I am everywhere that you are but chiefly I reside in you although I have been known to make pilgrimages to your heart.
Often you have asked in frustration: What the hell are you?’
A religious person might call me the law of God written in the heart of every human. A layman might call me the judge and jury of human behaviour insofar as it relates to one person.
I know that I have caused you some anguish although not nearly enough because your spiritual hide is almost impervious to my proddings and prickings. I do unsettle you somewhat, however.
It’s not that I wish to unhinge you altogether. That is not my function. Only you have the power to unhinge yourself and alas! how often has the disorganised brain ended life prematurely with bullet, poison, rope or water according to prevailing tastes or contiguity of one or other of this gruesome four! Conscience hath not made cowards of these poor demented creatures. Rather have we invested them with the lunatic courage to commit the unthinkable lest they commit the ultimate upon those they love and cause the greater folly.
Now to you! I have found you to be morally unconscious mostly in your self-induced sexual deliriums although aided and abetted by responsive partners.
I have found you to be frequently deaf in your responses to my queries regarding your financial dealings but I have found you at your most declamatory when others do unto you as you would unto them.
I have lived with you since you attained the use of reason which, in your case, was somewhat delayed beyond the normal maturing stage. As you developed into manhood you gradually tried to refine me to a state where I would be subject to your will and failing this made subtler bids in an effect to get me to work in the same harness as your will. Will and conscience can never be bedfellows, so your bid failed.
It was these failures which brought you to that inevitable state at which all humans arrive sooner or later when they cannot dominate me. Then comes the painful realisation that I must somehow be salved and placated.
An agreement between you and me became a necessity but in that pact you would continually try to deceive me although your need for total forgiveness was always paramount in your thinking. Without it you were ever on edge, sleepless, restive, incapable of self-consolation and self-forgiveness.
Self-forgiveness. There’s a tricky one. Must man be shriven by outside agents or is the capacity to absolve himself within himself and is this legitimate in the sight of God? I am only the conscience and cannot say but it would make my work less complicated if there was an answer forthcoming.
I would be in favour of self-forgiveness where the brain, prompted by the heart, has already forgiven others. A man who has forgiven all those who have wronged him, however little or however mightily, should have the power to forgive himself.
It is not a power I would confer on all men, only on those whose natures are so forgiving that they would not even dream of withholding forgiveness from those who would ruin and destroy them.
The great question that arises here is my future in the event of your being consigned to damnation or hell or whatever. Being your conscience I am part of you, the most inbuilt part of you, the greatest single influence for good within the entire framework of your make-up. Am I, who has performed Trojan heroics in my efforts to guide you aright, to be dispatched to hell with you or am I to be segregated from the rest of the personality and sent aloft? Am I alone to be delivered, as it were, while my heart and my spirit and yourself and my all are consigned to everlasting and excruciating obscurity?
What becomes of consciences like me when you no longer function? Must I, who am not to blame, reside in hell with you or am I to be disposed to a limbo? If so you will be only partially in hell and I will be only partially in this new limbo or will I be received into heaven high and dry on my lonesome?
This in my estimation would constitute a forced breaking-up of the spiritual fundamentals, which I would hold to be illegitimate, and I must hereby advise you that it is your bounden duty to instruct your vocal cords so that they might express my views clearly and loudly to the responsible authorities and, thereby, avoid the reckless sundering of our very self.
Failing that, you might have your right hand address itself to notepaper where my views would be clearly set forth without embellishment; copies then to be made and dispatched to the more responsible newspapers in the hope that a sharp controversy might ensue which would eventually lead to badly-needed clarification on this vexatious topic.
Remember too that an act which might painfully prick one conscience often has no effect whatsoever on another so that you cannot expect to be guided by the complacency of another, so-called just man, after that person has perpetrated an evil act. The complacency does not reduce the abhorrence that should exist in you, dear brain.
There are consciences and consciences. There’s the Christian conscience, the Catholic conscience, the Mohammedan conscience; the Atheistic, often the most tormenting of all; there is the Pagan conscience, the Greek Orthodox conscience and the Buddhist, and the whole shooting gallery of sects, factions and assorted conventicles, all making different and often lunatic demands upon their respective proprietors. However, in the final reckoning it is the individual conscience that matters.
You may be impressed or intimidated by local conscience, by national conscience and by international conscience but while these are fine in themselves and while they reform for the better and highlight ills and evils you are still left with me. There are also some comic aspects of conscience which may not seem in the least comic to their adherents.
In the western hemisphere a man may possess only one woman at a time while under the public eye but in parts of the East he may possess as many as he likes. I would like to suggest that occasional hell, frequent purgatory and too little heaven are the dominant features of a comprehensive human life so that the hereafter should provide a predominance of heaven for every Tom, Dick and Harry who has passed this hazardous way, who upon entry to this often godforsaken world is immediately impregnated with insurmountable prejudice, greed, intolerance, bigotry and all the other countless faults so rampant and ever-fermenting in you, the human brain.
As your conscience it is my duty to point out these things as it is your duty to acknowledge and weigh them against your more edifying activities. I ask you to ponder on all that I have conveyed to you, all for your future good I might add. Finally, I must inform you of one inescapable truth against which there can be no real argument, so take heed!
You may repent and recant privately and publicly until you are blue in the face. You may be publicly and privately forgiven of all that you have publicly and privately confessed but remember that it is with me you will have to contend at the end of the day, and if I don’t give you the nod all your penitential posturings will count for naught.
As ever
Your Conscience