CONDITIONING

We are conditioned,
And conditional.
It goeswith being human.

I often speak of conditioning
And being conditioned
As something that has us in its clutches,
A state of affairs to be escaped from.
It is also true that
Conditioning is a state of being that we often cling to.
Either way, we're in it up to our eyeballs.

But don't believe me;
Check for yourself.
Notice what is so for you.
Pick a single area of your life (eg. relationship, family, finances...)
And notice some of the values and assumptions
That condition your perceiving, thinking and feeling in that area.
It's surprising, isn't it?

Conditioning is a self-imposed exile,
From our Self,
A protective custody --
A prison with a picket fence and roses,
And no matter how ptretty we make it look,
We're trapped,
And we seem to have left the keys to open the prison
On the outside.
The walls begin to crumble, however,
Not when we rebel against everything that has conditioned us,
But when we get that --

1. We are conditioned - inside a prison (no matter how enlightened our egos tell us they are!)
2. There is an outside; and
3. We know it, because we're not always locked away. In certain contexts we sometimes let ourselves out on day release.

It might be useful to note
Under what circumstances we're relatively free and unconditional,
And under what circumstances our buttons get pushed;
Against whom and what do we protect ourselves
By shutting ourselves in
Behind a fence of Conditions ("oughts")?

The presence of Conditioning,
Both as a noun and a verb,
Is evidenced by any idea, thought, family or cultural value, concept or belief that we hold dear.
Conditioning organises both our perceptions and responses
To help us filter and "make sense" of our world.
Conditioning stands between us and raw experience:
It is not our truth.
It is a pale, umpteenth-generation carbon-copy
Of someone else's conclusions
About one-time-long-forgotten experiences;
The conditioning lasts long after the experience that tripped it has expired.

Conditioning prevents us from fully living here and now.
Instead of experiencing what is happening in our faces,
We're experiencing our own conditioning.
Watch any public debate about any sensitive issue,
Whether it be "racism" on Q. and A., or any dispute over a neighbour's fence,
What we see is less an exchange of real experiences of the subject,
And more of an exchange of conditioning,
Combatants hurling hangups at each other.
That's a very dysfunctional way of living and doing.

We didn't get a lot of say about how this sorry state of affairs came to be.
We've been conditioned by others for our entire lives,
From our parents onwards --
The Un-experienced being led by the In-experienced.
But we're invited to acknowledge that, at some point,
Our conditioning has our own tacit approval and support;
We give it energy,
And the conditioning perseveres,
Day after day, year after year, generation after generation....

We don't have our conditioning:
It has us.

We reluct to let go of anything we hold dear
And venture, naked, out into the sunlight, the fresh air, the freedom and the thrill of discovering what is so
In this moment
For ourselves

The first step is not difficult:
When faced with a moment of either certainty or indecision,
Just look at it and ask yourself --
"Is this my experience?
Or is it possible that my vision at the moment is being impaired
By prior conditioning?
Is there something I believe here that I want to hang onto?
If I take a different tack here, how will that feel?
Am I stuck in conditioned comfort?
Am I willing to open up and embrace
Another possibility?