A

Conscience, Time, and Life 123

Perceiver internal world can also be believed with varying levels of
confidence.A
It is the interaction between Mercy emotion and Perceiver confidence
which makes conscience unpredictable. Earlier, I defined confidence as the
level of emotion which a fact can handle without falling apart. Let me
illustrate this definition now with a practical example. I remember one lab
in Engineering school in which we took small rods of various metals and
inserted them into testing machines which pulled these rods apart until they
snapped. The goal was to see how much tensile stress the material could
handle without failing. I suggest that confidence is like the strength of a
material. It measures the level of emotional stress which a fact can endure
without shattering. If a Perceiver belief has insufficient confidence to
handle a specific level of emotion, then the link of conscience will fail—
the mental connection between cause and effect will be broken. Of course,
breaking a mental link between „smoking‟ and „cancer‟ does not mean that
„smoking does not cause cancer.‟ It only means that Perceiver strategy no
longer believes that „smoking causes cancer.‟
If Perceiver strategy is like an observer sitting in the Perceiver room
looking through the window into the Mercy room for connections, then
emotion could be compared to the brightness of each experience. If the
emotional „light‟ is too strong, then Perceiver thought becomes „blinded‟
and can no longer discern connections. You can see now why Perceiver
strategy is often tempted to „close the curtain‟ on its window into Mercy
strategy. The constant glare of emotion from next door creates confusion
and makes it hard to think.

Conscience is a Perceiver fact which connects cause and effect.

 This fact ties together emotional Mercy experiences.

 Mercy feelings can disrupt Perceiver facts which form conscience.

I suggest that there are many ways in which Perceiver confidence can
be overwhelmed by emotional pressure. Let us look at some of the more
obvious ones. First, the „bait‟ may be too desirable. As the saying goes,
“Every person has his price.” Suppose conscience says, for example, that
„stealing is wrong.‟ This rule may survive a ten dollar bill on the ground,
but what happens if I run across a roll of one hundred dollar bills sitting
there just asking to be taken?

A A fact initially enters the internal Perceiver world when I believe that it is

definitely true and reliable. However, once in, it stays in, and is modified
by other facts. After a while, I may no longer fully believe it.