Conditioning: You're Soaking In It

Your life is a conditioned one.  All aspects of it.  Everything you see, hear, think and do is modified by and works through conditions.  Your birth itself is conditional.  Without the conditions of your parents having had intercourse, you would not be. The food you eat, the rest you get, the motorists not running you down, your life depends on a thousand and one conditions every day.  Without these conditions you cease.

Likewise your decisions, comportment, and way of passing through life are all conditioned.  Your beliefs, culture, habits, and physical composition all impose themselves on how you perceive, and how you interact with the world.

For my part, when I am able to watch myself closely I see that all of the reasons and justifications for the actions I take come after the fact in 99 cases out of 100. I may have truly brilliant reasons for something I said, or an action I took, but almost all of them, almost all the time, bubble to the surface and are realized after the fact. This is my natural state of affairs, it is the sum and substance of the life I live.

Such conditioning is inescapable.  Some spiritual paths make a call for living an unconditioned life, living spontaneously in the moment, choicelessly aware.  I say bollocks.  Such a moment is much more likely to be accidental than not, and even then any thing done has a backdrop of conditions, even if one of the conditions is to be influenced by as few conditions as possible!  It's a goose-chase, and in my not very humble opinion something of a waste of time.

Now, having said all that I will say that something can still be done.  Just because our actions may be, for a large (if not most) part non-spontaneous, and driven by conditioning does not mean there is nothing to be done.  Quite the contrary.  What can be done is to modify the conditioning. You can "re-program" yourself in certain ways to have the habitual conditioned response produce results more in keeping with whatever set of ethics, and morals you may claim to have. The methods for doing this are myriad, and I would suggest that doing it for yourself is a hell of a lot saner and safer than having someone else do it for you.

• Journaling
• Meditation
• Psychotherapy
• Voice Dialogue
• Socratic Inquiry
• The Sedona Method
• A 4th-Step Inventory
• Reflection
• Daily reviews of our actions
• Scenario driven role-play
• Chaos Magik
• etc, etc, etc

All of these can be used to uncover our habitual actions and the net of conditioning we carry with us.  Likewise, simple "Aha!" moments of, "Why the hell did I do that?" are pure gold for showing us bald-faced the programming of conditions we carry with us.

A simple exercise I picked up from Robert Anton Wilson easily reveals the depths of this conditional existence, as well as it's inherit-ness and necessity.  Take a seat, put a blank piece of paper before you, and raise up a pen. (Note paper and pen are crucial to avoid ease of self-editing and second guessing while jotting the list.) Now, write down 10 "programs" that run in your life that keep that life going.  Don't get fancy.  If you're experience is anything like mine when doing this list you will have some entries which are purely physical in nature.  They are the basic running rules of the human-animal body, the conditions without which life would not sustain.  To me that was an "Aha!" moment of realizing just how ubiquitous, and needed, conditioning is.