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that may be called call a conscience, is often the means by which i hear and understand my own true will for myself. one may ask, how did i get on the subject of **true** will when the reading appears to be all about GOD*s will? that is certainly a fair question and it comes down to the line that as i become more God-centered, God*s will for me, becomes my own true will. i can skip all the rigamarole about how i learned to listen for the will of a HIGHER POWER, what my concept of a HIGHER POWER may or may not look like and how the will of that POWER manifests in my life, because that is ground i have covered extensively in the past. conscience, on the other hand, is something i often acknowledge but hardly ever write about, as it just seems to be so freaking obvious to me, what it is. having said that, i realize that may not be the truth and perhaps, this is a good day to write a word or ten about conscience and its evolution into my own true will.
i can say without any reservations that using diminished my desire to do the next right thing, to practically nil. my first consideration when choosing a course of action, was not whether or not there might be others harmed in the commission of the act, but whether or not is suited my agenda. my agenda? feeling good, getting high and taking what i needed to be comfortable in the here and now, not bad work when one can get it‽ when i stumbled across a feeling or two, almost always after the deed was done, there was always a get high in my future to relieve any discomfort that arose fro the postmortem of what i just did. my true will in those days was all about me and certainly had little to do with what anything else. as a result, when i got clean and stayed clean, i was given the gift of a heightened awareness of what self-will meant and how i callously exercised it so freely. it was not that i did not have a conscience, it was just that is had morphed into a tool to feed active addiction, rather than being a force to change the well-trodden path that i was walking.
when i finally got clean, i started to see that even though i might be at the center of the universe, the universe was not structured to cater to my every need, whim or DESIRE. as a result, remorse and regret over my past started to overwhelm me as i became more aware that my actions had consequences that needed to be addressed. out of that remorse, grew a stronger sense of right and wrong and the ability to begin to detect the next wrong thing to do -- a conscience -- and choose to act differently. that is where the rub is, at first, even though i knew it was wrong, i often chose to go through with it anyway, as shady proved to me that i was not becoming the “two-shoes,” i always feared becoming. it was in a sense, a rebellion against becoming something more. as the days passed, my remorse and regret moved closer and closer to real-time and i chose less often to be a shady character and more often to do exactly the next right thing,m with little or no expectation of reward.
i am far from perfect even with several thousand days clean, but i do have a conscience today. i do understand that there are consequences for each and every choice i make, and i have a TENTH STEP to offer correction when my conscience gets pricked by my doing something that violates my spiritual code of conduct. in short, my conscience is a huge part of my own true will for myself, and while i may use the term “GOD's will,” it is actually not something that has come down to me from on high and certainly nothing that has been written on stone tablets. the time has come in my life, where i walk in the light of doing the next right, nearly auto-magically, almost all the time and the daily exceptions are me making less than savory choices. i can no longer blame addiction for my bad behavior, even if most of those behaviors arise out of the part of me i call addiction, as today i have a conscience, i have a spiritual path to follow and i have the ability to CHOOSE what i nvere could in the past ⇒ the path that leads to a better me.

∞ DT ∞