Conscience: A Guide to Tazkiyah

The conscience serves as a divine teacher and a guide to tazkiyah. The moment one is able to overcome one’s ego, one’s conscience will be able to play its natural role.

Man is endowed with a natural faculty called the conscience, which serves as a divine teacher and a guide to tazkiyah. Conscience guides man on all occasions, albeit wordlessly—do this, don’t do that, this behaviour is in accordance with tazkiyah and that behaviour is against tazkiyah. The former will help in developing a purified personality while the latter will defile your personality.

But experience shows that the majority of the people don’t allow their conscience to act as a guide to tazkiyah. What is the reason for this? The reason is that everyone is given another faculty, which is the opposite of conscience, and that is the ego. Man often comes under the influence of the self, or Satan, He does not let the conscience work for him. The voice of the conscience can be heard on all occasions, but the ego suppresses that voice and renders it ineffective.

It is essential for a seeker of tazkiyah to be abreast of this reality, so that he awakens his power of thinking, and nullifies his ego on all occasions. The moment one is able to overcome one’s ego, one’s conscience will be able to play its natural role and one will be able to traverse the path of tazkiyah without any deviation. The exercise of nullifying the ego or reducing it to zero has a decisive role to play. But no one can perform this task for another. One has to do it oneself; the moment one’s ego is awakened, one should become alert and by exercising one’s will power set one’s ego at naught.