Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 's definition of Conscience:
1) the part of your mind that tells you whether your actions are right or wrong
- To have a clear/guilty Conscience (= to feel that you have done right/wrong)
- This is a matter of individual Conscience (= everyone must make their own judgment about it)
- He won't let it trouble his Conscience.
2) a guilty feeling about something you have done or failed to do
- She was seized by a sudden pang of Conscience.
- I have a terrible Conscience about it.
3) the fact of behaving in a way that you feel is right even though this may cause problems
- freedom of Conscience (= the freedom to do what you believe to be right)
- Emilia is the voice of Conscience in the play.
OED's definition of Consciousness
1) the state of being able to use your senses and mental powers to understand what is happening
- I can't remember anymore—I must have lost Consciousness.
- She did not regain Consciousness and died the next day.
2) the state of being aware of something
- Synonym awareness
- his Consciousness of the challenge facing him
- class-consciousness (= Consciousness of different classes in society)
3) the ideas and opinions of a person or group
- her newly developed political Consciousness
- issues affecting the popular Consciousness of the time
While OED does its lexigraphic job well, to my mind, the difference between the two words - Conscience and Consciousness - goes much deeper.
Conscience is the result of the inventions of God, sin, heaven and hell.
Philosophers of the Kantian school elevated Conscience beyond the myth/s of God/s to the plane of ethics and evolution. Thus, in the realm of philosophy, Conscience is the touchstone that enables us, humans, to strive to be good and evolve.
On the other hand, Consciousness transcends the realm of concepts, an undeniable part of reality that today is at the frontiers of modern philosophy and science.
It is undeniable that a baby is born with Consciousness but does it have a conscience? Is Conscience a result of nurture leading thus to the conclusion that good and evil are relative concepts and not absolutes?
The major religions of the book - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - strive to develop in their followers a conscience structured around a monotheistic God and concepts of good and evil, sin, heaven and hell.
In contrast, the so-called pagan religions - from the early Roman, Greek and Nordic civilizations -built around elaborate myths of a pantheon of Godly beings engaged in a larger-than-life never-ending play of Consciousness. As a result, Conscience and its commandments on good or evil, sin and the admission rules to heaven and hell were absent.
As practised today by hundreds of millions, Hinduism also has a rich panoply of divine beings. The difference is that the pagan religions of the early Roman, Greek and Nordic civilizations have faded away, while Hinduism still stands as one of the world's major religions. It is so because Hinduism is probably unique in having two distinct but connected modes. Quite aside from the colourful pageantry of the three million or so Gods stands the magnificence of the Vedas. At their essence, in their Shruti stream, the Vedas elevate every individual Consciousness to Godhead: a canonical assertion that consists of revelation and unquestionable, unchanging truth. On the other hand, with its notion of good and evil and social mores, Conscience is presented in its Smriti stream as supplemental and changeable with the times.
It seems to be an inversion of what the texts of other major religions do.
The holy grail that many socio-political commentators pursue is to pin down the idea of modern India. Instead, I think they would do well to examine the duality that allows Indians to practice personal spirituality that hankers after eternal truths while living in a social and public space that teems with self-serving strife and endless chaos.
India is a two-sided coin - its Consciousness on one side forever separate from the other - its Conscience. The difference is that in other great civilizations, the coin has melted, and the two sides have leached into one other.
