A

Conscience, Time, and Life 119

Perceiver fact of conscience. It is no longer “Someone who smokes will get
cancer,” but “I am smoking, therefore I will get cancer.” A
Guilt is still not the same as punishment. Guilt produces only mental
warnings and internal feelings; it is the prediction that I will have to
identify with a bad experience. Punishment is having that bad experience
come and visit me. Guilt is the internal voice telling me that I will get
cancer. Punishment is getting cancer. Guilt may be inaccurate. It can warn
of awful consequences which never materialize. Like the little old lady said,
“I have had innumerable traumas in my life, and most of them never
happened.” She had powerful guilt, but little punishment. While guilt
differs from punishment, feelings produced by conscience and guilt are
reinforced by past punishment. Suppose that I receive retribution for some
crime or that I mentally identity with the experience of someone else being
punished for a crime. The experience of suffering consequences will now
live within my internal Mercy world—it came in either through the act of
identification or it forced its way in because of its extreme emotion. If
Perceiver thought predicts that I will once again have to identify with this
unpleasant experience, then conscience and guilt become much more
effective.B On the other hand, if no experience of being punished lives
within my internal Mercy world, then guilt will not have any bad memory
with which to threaten Mercy strategy. This means that conscience will
only operate effectively when it can connect with „hooks‟ that already exist
within the internal Mercy world.

Perceiver

Fact

Conscience

A good
experience

A bad

Result

A B

(Eating causes Fatness)

(Eating) (Fat)

Perceiver

Fact

Guilt

A good

experience

A bad

Result

'ME' A B

Perceiver

Mercy

(I will get fat!!)

(I ate chocolates) (Fat)

Perceiver thought knows experience B always follows experience A.

A Mercy thought deals with specifics. Later on we will see that Teacher

strategy works with generalities. I suggest this distinction is significant.
B We are looking here at the Mercy side of conscience. We will see in a

moment that public punishment does not always succeed in building up
conscience. This is because the extreme emotion of the event may
undermine the Perceiver knowledge which connects cause with effect.