Conditioning Is Not A Given

It’s the last 100-degree (nearly 40 C) day of the year in northern California, and the miles-long park is nearly empty. But it’s comfortable in the shade at creekside. 

The light is changing; the days grow noticeably shorter in the northern hemisphere. After a meeting in town, the busy mind yields to passive awareness gathering non-directed attention, and meditation ignites. 

Thought cannot quiet thought. That includes all systems and methods of meditation, which are essentially inventions of thought to control thought. One can only let the mind run and ruminate as it will, and observe intensely, without the infinite regress of the observer interpreting and analyzing what is. 

Why do so few people allow the mind the freedom to flow as it will, without attempting to control or direct it? Is it because we are afraid to be nothing, and afraid of nothingness? Why is being nothing so difficult, when it is the gateway to wholeness and bliss?

It’s strange how one knows when one leaves the stream of the known even though it means the temporary ending of the faculty of recognition. The intellect cannot know when it happens, since knowledge, experience and memory have ceased in the stillness of attention. The ‘I’ doesn’t know, since the separate self is seen through, and isn’t operating. 

It’s new each time it happens, and feels like a “bolt from the blue” when the phenomenon it occurs, so it isn’t a matter of recognizing the feeling. So what knows when one leaves the stream of the known? 

It’s a proprioceptive thing. One feels the ending of thought and time proprioceptively in the body. That’s how one sees without recognition. 

Can one function in the world in this state of negation, or is it only for the very few that have the capacity, self-knowing, passion and free time to watch the mind into stillness and the heart into emptiness? 

I don’t see how it can be just for the few. You see the capacity for attention in nearly all children before they become too conditioned, or to use the euphemism, “socialized.” Little ones are alert and curious like smart birds, but soon conform to the implicit assumptions of their parents and teachers. 

As a young man I had the occasion to be around a little boy from the time he was a baby until he was two and half. His parents were fundamentalist Christians, but they were friends, and they encouraged, at least initially, a relationship with the boy. 

At ten months, when of course he was still pre-verbal, Ivan responded to my attention around him in a way that surprised me. Though I had worked in a pre-school, I had assumed that babies couldn’t communicate at a deeper level until they had acquired language. 

But suddenly there was strong non-verbal communication with a child that hadn’t even learned to walk yet. A bond grew between us. But the clash between two completely different ways of being -- one based on freedom and attention, the other on control and conditioning -- was growing below the surface with his parents. 

On one of my last visits before Ivan’s fundamentalist parents cut all ties, the little guy, now two and half, took me into his room and sat me down on his little chair. He stood over me and began to berate me, waving his finger and saying things like, “you’re a bad boy.” 

He was reenacting what his parents were doing to him, and seeking to understand why. I couldn’t explain it to him of course; I could only show that I empathized, and laugh with him at how absurd it was. Years passed. I didn’t see Ivan again until he was about to marry a fundamentalist Christian young woman. 

To be human is to be conditioned; to be a human being is to be unconditioned. There may be a primal tendency toward conditionability in children. But the intentional imposition of conditioning is violence. That doesn’t mean making the opposite mistake so many parents make, equating psychological and emotional neglect with freedom for the child.

The brain is capable of two completely different orders of consciousness. However there is no duality because the negation of one is the emergence of the other. 

There is the consciousness we know, based on symbol, memory, conditioning and experience. And with sufficient self-knowing and unguided attention, the silent and empty consciousness emerges. 

Why people are having children in this godforsaken culture is beyond me, though the care and feeding of the self is no alternative. Parents don’t own their children, and they don’t have the right to brutally condition them as they were conditioned. 

It’s essential for one to awaken and be unconditioning oneself before having children. Then one’s first responsibility, after the physical care and security of the child, is to prevent conditioning from destroying him or her. 

Self-knowing parents and teachers deepening in insight will see how to help children intelligently navigate society, in which the old strictures and structures have broken down, replaced by toxic social media. 

Freedom comes through directly perceiving and remaining with what is. Attention alone breaks the shackles of conditioning in adults, and prevents the chains of conditioning from destroying children. 

Martin LeFevre

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