EP 113: The Battle Within: Your Two Consciences at War

The concept of the Two Consciences--what they are, how they work, and how to navigate them--has been one of the most helpful frameworks I've ever learned! It has enabled me to discern truth from error much more clearly and to better manage myself and my decisions with confidence.

While much more detail on this topic will be available in my upcoming book How Truth Makes You Free, I wanted to introduce you to this idea and enable you to begin utilizing it now.

I hope it blesses your life as immensely as it has blessed mine!

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Podcast Transcript (AI Generated)

Hey, welcome back to the podcast.
I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently working on my new book, How Truth Makes You Free.

This book is divided into two parts. Part One walks through the framework of what it really means for truth to make us free. Why does that matter? What is the nature of truth? How does this framework work? And most importantly—what is the mechanism by which we actually know what’s true?

I’ve been working on that chapter lately: the mechanism. How do we identify truth? How do we discern it? There are so many fascinating stories around this. One of my favorites, which I include in the book, is the story of Shinichi Suzuki—yes, the same Suzuki from the Suzuki method. You can also hear it in his mission-driven story from a previous podcast episode.

Suzuki’s father owned a violin factory, but young Suzuki didn’t play the violin and didn’t really understand what they were even for. One day, at about 17 or 18 years old, he went to work at the factory. Typewriters were a relatively new thing, and there happened to be one there. He’d never used one before, but he sat down and started playing around with it.

Just then, the factory manager walked in, saw what he was doing, and panicked:
“Master Suzuki! You can’t use a typewriter without paper—it will damage it!”

Without missing a beat, Suzuki replied,
“Oh, I wasn’t typing. I just had my fingers on the keys.”

But he had been typing—and he knew it. That small lie hit him hard. He was immediately filled with remorse. “Why would I lie about something so stupid?” he thought. The fact that he was so troubled by such a small lie actually speaks volumes about his character.

He left the factory and went home, but he couldn’t settle down. Pacing around the house, completely uncomfortable with himself, he eventually decided to go downtown. He wandered into a bookstore and picked up a copy of Tolstoy’s diary. The book fell open, and his eyes landed on these words:

“The conscience is the voice of God, and a man who lies to himself is worse than one who lies to others.”

That moment changed his life. He determined then and there that he would always follow his conscience. He bought the book, took it home, and devoured it. From that day forward, he carried it with him and committed to living in harmony with his conscience.

He, of course, went on to become an incredible person.

I’ve said this many times before on the podcast, but there are countless examples of great men and women who, in telling their life stories, describe a pivotal moment like this—when they chose to listen to their conscience, to let it guide them to better actions and higher outcomes.

So what is the mechanism by which we know truth? It’s our conscience.

I was reading today and reflecting again on what an absolute miracle that is. I’ve spoken at many events and led countless groups through a simple activity where I ask people to take just one quiet minute and answer this question:

What is one thing I know I need to do moving forward in my life?

And every single time, without fail, each person—thousands at this point—has been able to name at least one thing. That, to me, is miraculous. That we can instantly know what to do, simply by being still and listening.

Listening to what?
To whom?
To that inner voice—your conscience—that is trying to guide you. And here’s the beautiful thing: when people go home and act on what they heard in that moment of stillness, their lives actually get better.

It’s one of the most amazing tools we have. It helps us discern what’s true, what’s false, and what to do next.

Now, Stephen Covey introduced me to something that took this idea even further: the concept of the divine conscience.

He shared the story of a friend who had been taught some strange things growing up. For example, if he ever ran a stop sign, his parents told him he had to drive around the block three times to “make penance.” You can imagine—if that was one of the lessons he internalized, there were probably a lot of others like it.

Years later, in a conversation with Covey, this man shared that story and then said,
“That’s why I think sometimes it’s best to ignore your conscience and just use common sense.”

That experience may have contributed to Covey developing the idea of the two consciences, which has become one of the most helpful concepts I’ve ever learned. I’ll dive deeper into it in my upcoming book, but I want to introduce you to the idea today because it’s incredibly powerful.

If you look up the term social conscience, you’ll find definitions related to social consciousness—the idea that we should care about society, right its wrongs, and help the poor and needy. That’s a good thing. But it’s not what Covey was talking about.

He made a distinction between the social conscience and the divine conscience.

That story about going around the block three times? That’s an example of the social conscience in action—a conscience shaped by social conditioning and upbringing, not by eternal truth.

And if you stop to think about it, I bet you can identify examples of this in your own life—times when you felt compelled to act a certain way, not because it was truly right, but because you were taught to feel guilty, afraid, or ashamed.

Covey’s distinction helps us untangle these internal conflicts.
It helps us ask:

Is this my divine conscience speaking? Or just my social conditioning?

And that question can change everything.

That need to go around the block three times—that was a manifestation of what Stephen Covey would call the social conscience. Society had taught that young man this strange habit. His family, his social environment, had ingrained in him something completely unnecessary.

In contrast, his common sense—what Covey calls the divine conscience—overruled that nonsensical behavior and helped him realize, “No, you don’t actually need to do that.”

So what does this look like in our day-to-day lives?

Well, there’s a mechanism at play. One way to describe it comes from Thomas Reid, who taught that natural law is written in the hearts of mankind by the finger of God. What he's essentially saying—and I could give you many quotes to back this up—is that there are things that are right, and there are things that are wrong.

And the first principle of natural law is this: Seek the good.

It’s in our nature—woven into the very fabric of what we are as human beings—to know there’s a difference between right and wrong, and to feel drawn toward what’s right. Even as young children, we have an innate sense of this. And even when children are raised in unhealthy environments, they often still know something’s wrong. That’s how powerful this intuitive sense is.

Covey calls this the divine conscience because it comes from God—a higher power—something outside of us. It leads us toward light, goodness, truth, beauty—toward what we ought to be doing, and away from what we shouldn’t. And when we align ourselves with it, life goes better. Anyone who has seriously committed to following their conscience will tell you the same.

The social conscience, on the other hand, is what we’re trained into. It’s what we’re taught as children, but it’s bigger than just our families. It’s the culture we live in. The social conscience is shaped by collective norms and expectations about what’s right, wrong, good, true, and beautiful.

So if we think of conscience as a mechanism by which we discern truth and determine how to behave, we can see that the divine conscience is grounded in what is intrinsically, objectively true and good—while the social conscience reflects whatever the culture currently believes.

And if you know your history, you know that the social conscience changes.

For example, a hundred years ago, premarital sex was universally condemned in Western society. There were even laws with punishments for it. Today, it’s not only accepted, but often encouraged—and many people engage in it without a second thought. Why? Because the social conscience is now loud and culturally dominant on this issue.

Now, maybe the first time someone crosses that line, they hesitate. They feel conflicted. But then they override that hesitation, and eventually, it becomes normalized for them—because that divine conscience was drowned out by the social one.

There’s an old sitcom—I can’t remember the name, but it starred Valerie Bertinelli. You might remember it. The show followed a single mom and her two daughters.

In one episode, the daughter has a boyfriend, and she’s considering having sex with him. She goes to her mom and asks, “Is this right or wrong? Should I do this or not?” And the mom says something like,
“I can’t think of a good reason why you shouldn’t… but I don’t want you to.”

It was such a striking example. The mother couldn’t appeal to God, to truth, to moral law—because they’d lost their faith. And the social conscience around her was saying,
“It’s fine. We’ve got the pill. It’s safe. Everyone’s doing it.”

But despite all that, both the mother and daughter still hesitated. That moment of pause? That was their divine conscience, still alive, still speaking.

In the end, the girl felt too uncomfortable and refused. The boyfriend broke up with her—and in doing so, revealed who he truly was. She wanted to wait, and that told her something important about herself and him.

So these two consciences—the social and the divine—are always in tension. It’s like the classic image of the angel and the devil on your shoulders. There’s an internal battle between what society says and what your soul knows.

And when your divine conscience is out of sync with the social conscience, it creates inner turmoil. The wider that gap becomes, the harder it is to find moral clarity. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern the truth.

That’s why Covey taught that the solution is to educate the divine conscience. To train it to become more and more attuned to what is real, true, and right.

When your conscience tells you to do something—or not to do something—and you listen, you strengthen your character. You become more virtuous. You align your life with divine law, with natural law, with those true principles that govern human behavior.

And in the words of Cecil B. DeMille:
“We cannot break the law. We can only break ourselves against it.”

There are many ways to educate the divine conscience—I'll get to those in just a minute. But it’s so important to first understand this:
The social conscience can be deeply oppressive.
It tells you:
“You should believe this.”
“You must support that.”
“You ought to agree with us.”

And yet, if you pause long enough to listen—really listen—you’ll often hear that still, small voice saying:
“No. Something about this isn’t right.”

Sometimes society tells us, “Let it go. You should tolerate this or that behavior,” even when it feels intrinsically wrong to you. And that’s a really hard place to be.

As we’ve discussed, a hundred or two hundred years ago in the United States, the social conscience and the divine conscience were far more aligned—far more in sync and in harmony. People were still people, of course. They still made mistakes and had weaknesses. But at least society wasn’t patting them on the back for doing something dishonorable.

Some behaviors are inherently wrong. But if we aren't taught they’re wrong—and if society keeps insisting they’re not wrong—and if we don’t educate our divine conscience—we’ll eventually just agree with the social conscience.

If we don’t pull back… if we don’t train the divine conscience… then we won’t have anything to hold up against the social conscience. We’ll simply go with the times, go with the flow. Whatever society says is good, bad, right, or wrong—we’ll adopt it.

Now, we do have a divine conscience written on our hearts. So we’ll feel guilt when we do something wrong. We’ll know we shouldn’t have lied… cheated… cut corners… whatever the case may be.

But if we don’t correct ourselves—if we don’t make the change, if we don’t tell ourselves the truth about how our actions were out of alignment with what we know to be right—then we begin to dead-end our conscience.

We wear it down. Beat it back.

You can see this in people who once felt bad about a certain behavior—but then, over time, stopped feeling bad. As they continued doing it, they worked themselves into a new normal.

So if we want to hold fast to objective reality—the natural law, the moral law given by God—we have to educate ourselves in it. We have to align our behavior with it, so we have something to contrast against the social conscience.

And it’s become clear to me that as we do this—we also influence the social conscience.

In some kind of cosmic way, we all have a responsibility for the collective moral climate. We’re all either contributing to it or being shaped by it.

I hate to bring up Nazi Germany again, but I think it’s important.
There’s a book—recommended by Jordan Peterson—I’ll link it in the notes. I can’t remember the title offhand, but it’s a study of ordinary German men. Most were in their 30s or 40s, average citizens with families and normal jobs.

They were recruited into the war. At first, they found the tasks they were given deeply uncomfortable. Many even refused to do them. They knew they were wrong.

But eventually, under pressure from their peers, their superiors, and society, they began to comply. Over the course of just a year or two, they grew comfortable with what they had once found horrifying—mass killings of Jews.

They went from average men who rarely touched a gun, to men who could march Jewish children into a ditch in the woods and gun them down.

This is how it happens.
We all participate in making the world better—or worse.
We either challenge the social conscience… or we conform to it.

We can be the kind of people who stand firm, who shine with conviction, who strengthen the collective moral compass. Or we can be the kind of people who go along—because we want to keep our jobs, because it’s uncomfortable to stand out, or because we’ve rationalized that maybe it’s not a big deal.

So how do we educate our divine conscience?

First, we recognize it as a mechanism given by God.

And if it comes from God, then we get to know God better. We build a relationship with Him. We read His words. We work to become more like Him.

Second, we study the lives of men and women who followed their consciences. We draw strength from their examples. We learn how they made courageous choices—and we do the same.

Third, we commit to small acts of conscience every day. And over time, those small things become big things. We sculpt our character through daily obedience.

Fourth, we learn about the conscience itself. The word conscience literally means “knowledge with”—knowledge held in common with God and with others. That’s fascinating to me. It reminds us that conscience is not private whim—it’s a shared moral knowing.

Fifth, we teach conscience. We push back against cultural lies. We speak truth. Even in small ways, we build strength to stand tall when the big tests come.

As we do these things—refining our divine conscience, growing in virtue—we receive the beautiful rewards of moral clarity and inner peace. But it doesn’t stop there. We also begin to impact those around us. Our influence spreads—from our family, to our community, to our culture.

And if enough of us commit to this—like Suzuki did, like so many great men and women before us—we can help bring the social conscience back into alignment with the divine conscience.

That was the great moral tension in America during the 1800s.
A terrible practice had crept into the nation… and the North and South stood on opposite sides of the moral divide.

The North stood against it, and the South defended it—forced slavery—and that moral conflict created a deep tension in our nation for the first hundred years. It was an ongoing battle over the social conscience, and in the end, truth prevailed.

📍 Hundreds of thousands of men and boys—Black and white—gave their lives to fight against that egregious practice. They fought to bring our social conscience into better alignment with a higher truth. That, to me, is something truly beautiful.

Over time, the social conscience was corrected. And then, men and women continued to rise—leaders who helped us see each other more clearly as equals, who worked to put all people on a level playing field. Slowly but surely, more and more opportunities opened up for Black Americans. And today, we’ve had a Black president, we have powerful Black leaders, entrepreneurs, and influencers—people who are making a global impact.

So yes, beautiful things happen when we do the work to align our lives with our divine conscience, to educate it, and then work together to build a healthier social conscience.

There are still many areas in our world today where the social conscience needs healing—places where it has strayed far from truth, beauty, and goodness.

And so, my challenge to myself—and to you—is this:

Start today. Educate your divine conscience. Live in greater alignment with what you know deep down to be good, true, and right. Recognize that you are the greatest beneficiary of that effort—and so is the world around you.

Another key way to do this is by finding true principles and choosing to live by them—in every area of your life.

That’s what the Mission Driven Academy is designed to help you do. There, you’ll receive The Mission Driven Life, which teaches the Seven Laws of Life Mission—an incredible place to begin if you’re ready to move forward with clarity and purpose.

Because ultimately, when each of us takes this seriously—when we educate our divine conscience and courageously follow it—we become the kind of people who can help heal the world. We can help make our society more good, more beautiful, and more whole.

Thank you so much for joining me today.
I’ll see you next time.