Conscientia

and Metacognition

It’s said that among the many contributions Stoicism made to early Christianity is a wealth of terminology.

One example of this is the term “conscientia.”

Root of our word “conscience” (knowledge within oneself of the rightness or wrongness of one’s own actions), the term meant more in the ancient world.

For the prefix means “with,” making this knowledge a type of knowledge shared with others, à la distributed cognition.

But it’s not quite distributed cognition. It isn’t a shared knowledge created via participation directly with others.

Instead, it’s a type of shared cognition that is the result of social participation which has then been internalized within the individual’s own mind (the porous boundary between individual mind and universal mind being set aside).

My experience of conscience comes from an old Disney film, in which a Cricket named Jiminy reminds Pinocchio of the moral implications of Pinocchio’s behaviors.

Which is something of the way that my conscience actually functions, as a sort of embodied avatar of an “Other” who watches over my behavior, not unlike an internalization of Tara, Jesus, or even “God.”

This sensibility can be helpful for me, particularly when navigating troubling pattern behaviors.

When acting purely as the self-gratifying ego-self, the behavior is automatic, almost the same as eating or using the toilet.

But when I imagine an actual person (say Dave the nurse from Allen Hospital, or my Mother) a different type of cognition emerges.

Have you ever been slacking at work, and then suddenly see your boss coming around the corner?

The body instantly responds — what had seemed a natural inclination reconfigures itself in a snap to attune to the new social circumstance.

I suddenly “shape up.”

As has become my practice, I have begun doing my job as though my boss were watching me work.

When he comes out of nowhere, I become frantic, shaky, nervous.

But when I internalize the idea of his visage, I begin to develop patterns of style that are no longer ruffled by his sudden real appearance, and I can work more efficiently and with less anxiety.

I’m not professing that I have mastered this technique — rather, it is a life-long practice I continue to hone fail-fully.

But with faith, I have promise to ever improve, glimpsing brief visions of Sophia and gaining world-perspective which aligns my soul more fully to the inspired fire of the cosmos, ever-burning but never consumed.

Brief flare that I am, when I near this Ethos I find more abundant clarity and energy than I would otherwise.

Knowing that these ideas are present in Buddhism, Greco-Roman Virtue Ethics, and in the Abrahamic faiths only gives me more energy and hopefulness.

A good idea is often one that seems to naturally emerge in a variety of human contexts, and I suspect that conscience is present in other traditions as well.

This shared knowledge of what is right and just — what is mutually supportive between persons, what fosters acceptance, dignity, and respect — seems to be beneficial.

It seems pro-growth, and sustaining.

I cherish it and wish to continue cultivating it.

Aspiringly, 

Aaron