Wakefulness perfects man as a person

The wakefulness of the truly conscious person also determines a more real and more significant mode of living. He alone, as we have seen, has a genuine comprehension of values; he recognizes their essential demand, and meets it with an explicit response. That eminently personal (and, as it were, sanctioned) form of response not only guarantees a conduct more deeply conceived from the moral point of view; in a direct sense also, it represents a reaction more adequately aimed, more bright with meaning, than is possible on the part of such a lack consciousness proper.

The conscious person’s contact with the objects is not deformed by an overestimation of accidental features; and an integral, explicit comprehension of values is equally his privilege. In his sanctioned, express, and integrally shaped response to values, and in such a response only, the whole person is present. We might almost say that the greater the wakefulness which presides over a man’s life the more he exists as a person.

We are now in a position to appreciate the vast difference between the false and the true kind of consciousness. Whereas the former precludes a real contact with the objects, and condemns its bearer always to watch himself without ever being touched by the logos of things that are, true consciousness postulates and establishes that genuine object-relationship. Here, man communes, he conspires, as it were, with the proper and valid meaning of what is: here, the true dialogue between subject and object takes place. All befogging twilight, all blind yielding to accidental impulses, all forms of determination by things taken as forces of nature instead of as intentional objects have disappeared: the response to values becomes clear and explicit, yet all the more intense and charged with experience.

True consciousness implies a recognition of our defects

Finally, true consciousness implies an intimate recognition of our defects (cf., Chapter 3). A person who is thus conscious, who has emancipated himself from his nature and no longer agrees automatically to its suggestions, who is awakened to a sense of his free personal center and of the essential, express, and lasting response which God demands of him, has also cast off his illusions concerning himself. His own being, too, is illumined by the light of God and he allows that light to penetrate into all corners of his soul. He spreads out his whole life before the face of Christ and suffers no hidden currents of life which have escaped a clear recognition by him and a confrontation with Christ, to be active in him. The spiritual vision, illumined by Christ, of his central personality clears up all recesses of his being and sees through all illusions. Hence, he leads a unified life—in contrast to unconscious man in whom disparate currents of life can exist side by side without his seeing their essential inconsistency with one another.

True consciousness unifies the soul

Frequently we come across people who reveal entirely disparate aspects of character, of which now one and then another prevails, so that on different occasions such a man or woman may almost strike us as a different person. According to the varying elements of his environment, with their fluctuating appeal to this or that strain in his mental composition, a person of this kind may seem again and again to change his identity. Not so the person with genuine consciousness. He always remains himself; his life is integrated, because he has brought everything to one denominator, with no hidden particle of his self escaping the formative effect of his basic direction towards Christ. In the highest sense of the term, he has become simple.