True Consciousness

“A person who is ...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 illuminated 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, illuminated 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.”
~Dietrich von Hildebrand