All 17 Uses of
conscious
in
The Screwtape Letters
- One can therefore formulate the general rule; in all activities of mind which favour our cause, encourage the patient to be unselfconscious and to concentrate on the object, but in all activities favourable to the Enemy bend his mind back on itself.†
Chpt 6 *unselfconscious = not concerned with what others might think of oneself
- A little real selfishness on your patient's part is often of less value in the long run, for securing his soul, than the first beginnings of that elaborate and self-consciousness unselfishness which may one day blossom into the sort of thing I have described.†
Chpt 26self-consciousness = nervousness or discomfort felt by someone due to concern about what others will think of them
- His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him.†
Chpt 2 *unconscious = a state similar to sleep where one is unaware of anythingstandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unconscious means not and reverses the meaning of conscious. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it.†
Chpt 3
- For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate.†
Chpt 4 *
- I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.†
Chpt 6
- Is he a man of great physical courage—so great that he will have no half-conscious misgivings about the real motives of his pacifism?†
Chpt 7
- Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives.†
Chpt 8
- All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold.†
Chpt 12
- You must try to exclude this reminder from the patient's consciousness at all costs.†
Chpt 14
- He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it—thus producing the Family, which is like the organism, only worse; for the members are more distinct, yet also united in a more conscious and responsible way.†
Chpt 18
- What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events.†
Chpt 27
- At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, "taken out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight.†
Chpt 28
- What you must do is to keep running in his mind (side by side with the conscious intention of doing his duty) the vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do, inside the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little safer.†
Chpt 29
- The point is to keep him feeling that he has something, other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, to fall back on, so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes honeycombed all through with little unconscious reservations.†
Chpt 29unconscious = a state similar to sleep where one is unaware of anythingstandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unconscious means not and reverses the meaning of conscious. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- On the other hand, they will also say "It's all very well discussing that high dive as you sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it's really like": here "real" is being used in the opposite sense to mean, not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the matter in armchairs) but the emotional effect those facts will have on a human consciousness.†
Chpt 30
- The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered.†
Chpt 31
Definitions:
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(1)
(conscious as in: conscious after the operation) awake (not asleep or in a state similar to sleep where one is unaware of anything)
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(2)
(conscious as in: a conscious effort to lose weight) intentional (done on purpose) -- perhaps with significant effort
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(3)
(conscious as in: environmentally conscious) aware or concerned about something
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(4)
(conscious as in: the conscious mind) mental activity of which one is self-aware
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(5)
(conscious as in: conscious life on other planets) capable of thought, self-reflection, and will