How does conditioning take place in the world around us? How do we deal with it?
Conditioning happens in many ways in many places. It begins in our families when we pick up what is important to our parents. If every time she looked in the mirror, our mother said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m so fat, I’m so ugly’, and if we heard her constantly say to our dad, ‘This makes me look fat’, that’s conditioning. It’s a neural pathway.
If every time we drive home from a social event, our father yells at our mother, ‘I can’t believe how you interrupted me in front of the others! Don’t you realize that’s what makes people not respect me? Why can’t you be more like Rajesh’s wife?’ we are conditioned. We learn that if you’re a woman, you have to ‘be quiet’. If you’re a man and are interrupted by a woman, your entire self-worth is in jeopardy. This is conditioning, and it forms the basis of our sanskara.
In school, children are told, ‘Be quiet, speak only when spoken to, write neatly.’ What gets valued is how well you conform to rules. In order for society to operate, there has to be some rules. But there are very few places where what’s valued is looking within and knowing who you are and having the courage to share that and to be that. So, we move through our world judging ourselves based on how well we’ve been able to adapt to such conditioning. Conditioning is different across cultures, families and jobs, but in many ways, it is what ends up suffocating us, because there’s no room for the self.
I’ll give you a personal example of this. India has a lot of spoken and unspoken cultural rules, particularly regarding women. They’re not rules laid down in any law book, but they’re cultural standards of how women should be, particularly women in a spiritual world—how you should sit, speak, what you should look like and think about, what your values and priorities should be. For me, coming from the West, particularly the progressive California West, it was really difficult.
When I had been here only a few months, we had gone on this trip to Gujarat, including a day in Dwarka. It was evening and we had visited many temples in the day. I was so excited to be staying in a town close to the ocean and couldn’t wait to be back on a beach. I said to the religious leader I was with, ‘I’m going to go take a walk on the beach.’ And he said, ‘Oh wonderful!’ and then instructed two men to go with me.
I said, ‘Oh no, I don’t want people to come with me, I’m going to be quiet on the beach.’
And he said, ‘Yes, they’ll come with you.’
I repeated that I didn’t need them, and he repeated that they’d go with me. I was twenty-five, a backpacker, a trekker. I had spent countless hours walking on trails and mountains, on the beach, by myself. For me, that’s how it was always supposed to be done, just me and nature, me and the ocean. But here in India, you don’t do that. Here, women should be taken care of and protected.
It’s a real dance to figure out which aspects of our conditioning are issues to be addressed and changed and which are merely simple innocuous socialization. It’s important to keep checking and asking ourselves: ‘Is this really how I feel, or is this how I’ve been conditioned to believe I should feel?’
The answer to conditioning sis not anarchy, it is not being a renegade in every way, because then that becomes my identity. And it just becomes a different type of conditioning. Under the guise of being free, if what I’ve decided is I’m going to rebel against conditioning, that just becomes my new identity—I’m still just as stuck.
In many cases, the highest freedom is to realize that I can still be myself in the situation. I can connect with my soul on the beach even with two guys trailing ten feet behind me. Even though that wasn’t my first choice and wasn’t how I would’ve wanted to do it, freedom is not to be found in saying, ‘No, for God’s sake, don’t send them, I need to be free!’ Rather, it’s about finding my freedom within those roles, because freedom is internal.
Every time you hear yourself saying: ‘You’re so stupid, you’re worthless, you’re too old’ and so on, ask yourself: ‘Where did I learn that?’ That is not the voice of the Self. It is a conditioned voice. When we’re able to step out of our conditioned, automatic beliefs and say: ‘Yes, I remember, this is the voice of my mother, my teacher, a commercial’, we will see the voice for what it is, not the Truth, not our inner voice, but simply an internalized pattern from the way we were conditioned in our youth. We then have the opportunity to say: ‘No. I don’t actually believe that. I know my teacher was going through a rough divorce when she told me I was stupid and worthless. It’s not really true.’ Then we have found freedom. My highest freedom is in knowing that who I am is full and complete, and we must refuse any conditioning which encroaches upon that.