CONDITIONING and SOCIAL LEARNING
CONDITIONING The aim of healing is to be free from unwanted, negative, and disturbing subconscious conditioning, especially concerning our childhood, adolescence, and parental relationships. Our soul cannot shine through when it is shadowed by many layers of conditioning. This conditioning can be understand, healed, overcome, and left behind. The past can be left behind. The soul can recover conscious control of the body/mind instrument and live a happier life, free from subconscious conditioning that enslaves us to subconscious decision making that influences every area of our life. Conditioning can be overcome. SOCIAL LEARNING Most of our social learning is based upon the process of:
For example, the child concentrates upon and imitates the parents behavior. Parents are the individual's first role models and we learn a great deal of our behavioral habits from them. This will leave us with a mixed bag of positive and negative behaviors that we may need to analyze and sort out later in life. The successful individual retains their inner center and connectivity with the unique qualities of the individual, whilst attempting to harmonize with the groups that they interact with - integrating positive and useful values and rejecting negative and harmful values. The successful individual retains their inner center and is not completely taken over by the attitudes and values of the groups that they interact with. |
"We can use the seven chakra system to reclaim our total mind and regain our INNER freedom - the ability to think and feel without conditioned mental filters."
The childhood family situation that we are born into will furnish us with a definite perception of life (a conditioned mindstate).
We are not bound to live from these conditions for the rest of our life. When we have learned the usefulness or uselessness of different mindstates, then we grow wise in our conscious decisions about how we choose to perceive and respond to life. We can (and often must) challenge our conditioning so that we can learn new ways to relate to life.
Once the lesson has been learned, we can move on to new experiences.
There are two modes of conditioning:
There are differing social spheres which influence the way we think, feel, and behave.
These five major conditioning influences can lead the individual to robotic and culturally based behaviour and value judgements - prejudice based on inner fictions rather than external facts. This is a negative quality that we must drop if we are to meet life in a mature and reasonable manner. The successful individual retains their inner center of unique qualities whilst attempting to harmonize with the groups that they interact with - integrating positive and useful values and rejecting negative and harmful values. The successful individual retains their inner center and is not completely taken over by the groups that they interact with. The successful, global citizen is:
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Strong mental conditioning from anyone that we trust in life (especially during childhood and adolescence) may provoke an involuntary loss of INNER freedom - cognitive and emotional freedom. It can set up automatic and involuntary filters in our being that control the way we perceive ourselves, the world, and Life. We can become victims of unconscious cognitive programming; thinking, feeling, relating, and behaving from unconscious conditioning. It is this "unconscious conditioning" that we aim to bring to the light of consciousness and then choose whether to retain or discard it from our life.
Any unconscious conditioning means that our mind is no longer fully our own. In most people, this leads to unhappiness and holistic disease.
We can use the seven chakra system to reclaim our total mind and regain our INNER freedom - the ability to think and feel without conditioned mental filters.
The usual process of conditioning involves the production of our personality around inherited and socially instilled blockages in the seven chakra system. These blockages can be negative and ignorant relationships with one or more of our chakras.
Because this "production of an involuntary personality based upon conditioning of our chakras" usually takes place when we are young, we are often so used to this "conditioned personality" that we adopt it as our only way of perceiving and experiencing life.
The birth of our personality begins in our childhood family.
CONDITIONING: Two important lessons.
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In your childhood your parents, siblings, educators and friends taught you how to behave. You learned to play certain roles and the circumstances and values around you determined your habits of thinking, feeling, mood, temperament, and behavioural repertoire.
What often happens is that the values and the circumstances in childhood forced you into roles that didn't fit all of your natural abilities and temperament. That was the start of neglect - the wounds that need conscious healing so that you can get back to your more natural temperament without suffering unnecessary disturbances of your cognitive, emotional, and physical life.
Something like this may have happened: "I was interested in art, but my family thought art
was a waste of time. So I forgot about art. I have a helpful side to my personality, but I was brought up in a tough neighborhood, so I had to forget about being nice. I wanted to learn, but we didn't have money. So I didn't do it."
The level of development of young people in a family situation is often "capped" (stopped at a definite level) at the holistic developmental level of the
parents. Jealous and controlling (tyrannical) parents feel insecure by displays of holistic behavior that threaten their self-image of themselves as "authorative and superior adults" in the eyes of their children and society. This horrible control mechanism is very destructive to the development of their children and their chance to holistically develop and take part in the world. It is these issues that are addressed in healing therapy.
Parents who use their own children to avoid taking the responsibility to look at their own problems, maturation, and development. These
parents are immature in themselves and cannot let go of the delusion that their children are not children anymore and that they are young adults with the right to explore all the experiences of maturity and adulthood. This type of parenting is no good for developing healthy, happy, and self-accepting adults.
When we are young, we receive a massive conditioning process from our external environmental conditions - family and society. It is a set of conditionings, psychological clothing, habits, thoughts, ideologies, prejudices, likes and dislikes, desires and aversions that have been heavily conditioned over many years by the society - parents, teachers, priests, mentors, group leaders, employers, politicians, and other authoritative figures in the individuals life.
The conditioning process programs our mind with the attitudes and values of our conditioners. Then we run these programs until the time comes to change them. If you're not happy then now is the time to begin some changes.
Often the conditioning process merely produces carbon copies - replicas - of the parents and other authoritative figures in the child's external environment.
There is no point in blaming the conditioners - the people that gave us the psychological conditions - because they were unconsciously running those programs in their minds and simply obeyed the life rule "as within, so without." Whatever the inner attitudes to each center, so the outer life will also be an expression of these attitudes (programs in the chakras). To blame our conditioners and do nothing more about the situation is just another "conditioning." We need to go beyond this point of acknowledgement and begin our own healing process, in which we will understand and master our total mind (our total being). We will also learn the importance of forgiving all those that have had a negative and destructive influence on our lives.
Some of the chakra programs will be useful and good for life, some will be useless and harmful to life. Inherited positive and negative programs.
Although we live through this conditioned personality and often react robotically from its repertoire of behavioral patterns - programs in our chakras - a lot of the time this behavior may not be in tune with our true and real self - the harmony of our happy self cooperating with existence. We experience a deep conflict as we try to be somebody who we are not. This conflict creates all sorts of self-hatred, guilt and resentments, it can makes us unhappy.
When we are not in harmony then we are not happy, and unnecessary suffering makes for an unhappy life. If we are unhappy then all we can give to life is unhappiness - as within, so without.
Because of the false personality, we may end up thinking, feeling, and behaving in ways that are contrary to our inner feelings, but are ways that we have been informed are correct. For example, many people are conditioned to become highly competitive at the expense of their neighbour and even their friends. This kind of behavior can only end in tears for everybody. We are being influenced by our conditionings and we are not happy about it. We feel that we are not who we would like to be because of the influence of our past. We suffer the self-hatred, guilt, and resentment of being split. (The book "You can heal your life" - by Louise Hay, covers these concepts very well.)
So, the conditioned personality acts as a set of filters, rather like a dam of a water-reservoir. The personality only allows one to interact with those aspects of life that the filters allow.
The Personality acting as a set of filters between aspects of the human form. The conditionings of the personality dictate interaction with the collective contents of the three major spheres of human experience plus the transcendent and philosophical areas.
The seven center system is a model of the holistic human experience. By healing and working with the Chakras, we can become free from the dictatorship of our personality. Free to experience new ways of behaving and being.
The other aspects of life disallowed by the filters, do not simply disappear, for where can they go? They do not disappear. Instead, they are pushed into the subconscious mind and exert a stronger and stronger, often disturbing and uncontrollable, influence on the individual, creating the abnormal behavior patterns that we witness in ourselves and others. All the disallowed and filtered material from the conditioning process goes to form the subconscious mind.
Like a pendulum seeking equanimity, if the mind (the seven chakras) is forced in one direction it will naturally want to swing in the equal but opposite direction. All aspects of the mind are perfectly natural as long as we maintain the sattvic balance.
In most cultures, the developing individual will begin to form a subconscious mind almost straight away. Depending upon the severity of an individuals conditionings, their subconscious mind may interfere with the ability to live a happy, healthy, fulfilled, and satisfying life. The subconscious material often influences the dreaming state and we can gain much insight into the contents of our subconscious mind through our dreams. But why do this? Because the conditionings and blockages that cause the subconscious mind to arise in the first place, are often the very root of any unhappiness and disturbance within our conscious waking state.
Of course, we don't need to rely upon dream analysis to understand ourselves. Simply by understanding and using the seven chakra system, we can work upon those areas of life that we find difficult to express. Sometimes we need to heal a difficult relationship or a difficult period in our lives. This helps us to release the blockages that these pains represent.
We do not generally desire to be unhappy and disturbed. If we are to understand our behavior in the conscious waking state, then we must realize that the conditioning process may have split our gestalt - our wholeness.
However far we try to run from our subconscious mind elements we can never escape in this manner. The only way to solve the problem is to investigate what is troubling us.
ROBOTIC HABITUAL BEHAVIOR.
Because of fear and some form of developmental sabotage, many people respond with a neurotic coping mechanism of “robotic habitual behavior.” They become brickwalls – closed to life and deaf to new ideas and behavioral possibilities. They are so afraid of change that they become obsessively controlling, of themselves, their home, and those around them. They become unpopular because they cannot stop asserting this control upon their environment because it is a reflection of their own neurotic self control coping mechanism – as within, so without.
You cannot change anybody if they do not want to change, and the law of resistance states that “for every force there is an equal yet opposite force.” If you push someone into change they will push you back, unless they have some internal (intrinsic) motivation and interest in changing themselves. If you get involved with these people on a personal level, it is you that will be changed by them because all you will be doing is banging your head against a brickwall. What is the result of banging your head against a brickwall? You damage your health. Stop banging and save your health and life.
Some people are in so much denial about areas of their life that they use this “robotic behavior” as a coping mechanism. This can be effective for short periods of time, suppressing the problem for later solution. A possible side-effect is that the person forgets that they are using a coping strategy and actually continue with this behavior without addressing the real problems. This is no good. We must face and acknowledge our problems otherwise we will hurt other people by projecting our problems onto them and by becoming holistically unhealthy in the process. “As within, so without.”
Stop Self-Blaming
Maybe a first solid step to take, is to realize that we are not fully to blame for the way we are at this present moment - if we are acting, often quite unconsciously from the conditioned personality. The next step is to avoid blaming everybody in our lives that may have contributed to this unfortunate state of affairs. Instead of blaming we need to learn how to forgive - "Forgive us we know not what we do." Forgiveness involves a complete letting go of all our emotional content concerning a person or an event. Forgiveness is not about allowing yourself to be a doormat, if you feel that a situation or a person is being harmful to you, you will need to express your feelings appropriately. The Techniques of Energy Enhancement helps us to forgive and let go of people, events, and conditions.
Taking Responsibility for the Damage
The next crucial step is to realize that although we had little influence upon our conditioning process in the past, we will now have to take responsibility to understand and transform - or rid ourselves of what we find within ourselves that we don't like.
We may have had to adopt many repressive, distracting, and bizarre behavior patterns to adapt and survive to situations that we have found ourselves in - when we were in powerless states, i.e. that of the child or adolescent, or partner, etc., Although those situations may now be long gone, we have become so used to our behavior patterns that we now assume them to be 'the way we are.' Like a prisoner who has become institutionalized.
We may have been conditioned to resent, chastise, harm, or even hate ourselves. As within, so without. If we are full of pain then that is all that we will genuinely be able to give to life.
We can change for the better. We can restore our health, happiness, and well being. We can reach a balance.
Using the Seven Chakra System to Understand and MODIFY our Personality - healing and expanding our repertoire of life experiences
We may find that we do not understand or know how to transform ourselves, or simply remove those 'psychological behavior patterns' that we no longer want, need, or have any use for.
More often than not, we get stuck in behavioral patterns that are detrimental to our well being and the lives of our family and friends.
In these situations, we may need to use a tried and tested system like the seven chakra system that will help us to understand and heal ourselves and change outmoded and harmful or useless behavior patterns. The Chakra system will help us understand ourselves and thus rid ourselves of the limited life patterns of the conditioned personality.
LEARNING TO EXPERIMENT
Imbalanced, negative, harmful, unhealthy, and destructive conditioning of the chakras leads to blockages in the chakras which soon manifest as holistic disease. A severe reduction in our repertoire of life experiences and responses will lead us to the disease of depression.
Strong mental conditionings like guilt, fear, perfectionism, and lack of confidence can be overcome if we learn to be experimental with our lives.
To be experimentally healthy, we must stick to the vow of harmlessness (ahimsa) in every area of our lives. Then, if we are experimental, we will have an ethical code of harmlessness with which to guide our experiments.
This ensures that neither you or others are harmed by the need to become experimental.
It allows us to make mistakes without consciously hurting others.
We are bound to make mistakes as this is the nature of learning. We need to simply learn from the mistakes and try not to repeat the mistaken behaviors.
It gives a rudder - wise guidelines - to our learning.
CONDITIONING STARTS IN CHILDHOOD
"Pity those who were not accepted by their parents."
Consider your childhood family and it's holistic behavior:
- The activities they involved themselves in.
- The areas of life they allowed/denied themselves.
- The opinions, attitudes, and beliefs they held.
- What they taught you about each of the seven centers.
Do you still live according to the dictates of this inherited conditioning? In what ways does this conditioning limit your life experiences? Can we learn to perceive ourselves and the world in different, life enhancing ways?
Can we learn to relate to our centers with a more holistically healthy attitude?
We must not blame anybody for the transference of ignorant, negative, and unhealthy attitudes towards life - these attitudes simply exist and it is our choice whether or not to consciously adopt these for our life. This is maturity and authentic adult behaviour.
TECHNIQUES THAT PEOPLE USE TO CONTROL OTHERS
- Conditional acceptance and rejection.
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Conditional disapproval and approval.
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Dominance.
- Emotional tyranny.
- Fear and tyranny.
- Guilt and shame.
- Hostility.
- Judgementalism and prejudice.
- Punishment and Reward
- Threats of anger.
- Unfair criticism.
- Use and abuse of power.