How does our mind get conditioned?

Mental conditioning prevents us from  practicing even the simplest techniques..

like 'Focusing on breathing'

If this method is so simple and easy to practice and it gives many benefits, why is it that majority of 100 people who read the flyer are not interested in even trying it and ridding themselves of stress and it’s related problems. Why do people behave like a prisoner who sees a clear escape door to get out of the prison but does not feel like escaping?. Why? This is the first paradox.

The second paradox is, why is it that the few out of many, who start a good practice like – getting up early in the morning, exercise, diet control, yoga or meditation with all serious intentions, discontinue the practice after some time, giving some lame excuses? This is like a prisoner who is released from prison, misses the jail atmosphere to which he got used and gets back to prison doing some new crime.

There is no behavior without a cause. We will see the causes for these paradoxes now. 

The secret behind the above paradoxes is simple. It is the continuous conditioning of mind to which we are subjected, right from birth. And we are not even aware of the poisonous effect of that conditioning!  Though the secret is simple, to realize and counteract it is not a simple task. Let us look at this phenomena from different angles.

Obstacles looking like giants

In a typical folk tale, a demon kidnaps the princess and the prince goes to liberate her. He comes to know that the life of the demon is in an insect kept in a box, guarded by several giant and fierce creatures. But when he boldly faces them and strikes them with his sword, all of them instantly disappear. Similarly, to tap the power of this method, we have to first realize that the hurdles looking like giant creatures exist only in our imagination. When we start taking simple action without caring for them, the giant creatures immediately vanish. Every time they reappear, our decisive action eliminates them from the scene. Every time we feel the breath, the mind gets comforted and likes the method. It becomes easier for the mind to remember and repeat the effort. Gradually the opposing thoughts or feelings become weaker due to lack of attention and response from our side. It becomes an ascending circle.

Living in delusion

Another good example is from a Hindi (the national language of India) movie ‘Namak Haram’.  The actors Amitabh Bachan and Rajesh Khanna drink a hallucinating brew. Amitabh sits down fiddling with his fingers, inserting the fingers of one hand into another. Suddenly he feels that his interlinked fingers are stuck, and not getting separated in spite of his best efforts. He cries loudly like a child, that his fingers were stuck and he was not able to separate them. His friend Rajesh comes running on hearing his cries and sees the situation. He understands the delusion of his friend. To help him get rid of the delusion, he holds both hands of his friend with his two hands and quickly pulls them apart. His friend Amitabh is overjoyed with the separation of his fingers. Similarly, we are under the delusion that the mind can not be controlled. Once we taste a little success in controlling it, we will get rid of that delusion. Let us see the reasons for living in such a delusion.

Negative thoughts

The whole process of mental conditioning that keeps us in the prison of negative mode starts from birth. A child is brain washed by it’s elders with 450 negatively colored massages and 75 positively colored messages in a day. Hence we develop a great appetite for negative thoughts, negative news and negative gossip about ourselves and others.  The mind gets addicted to negative thoughts due to round the clock repetition of the negatives. It feels restless if there are no negative thoughts. Positive thoughts are felt to be tasteless and boring.

Nurturing of thoughts

Mind is like a field and thoughts are like plants. Negative thoughts are weeds and positive thoughts are useful plants. Our attention is like water and our response to thoughts is like fertilizer. As we are presently used to giving more attention and response to the negative thoughts, they become more strong and deep rooted. It becomes very difficult to uproot them, once they reach that stage.

Our personality is changing all the time

It is a false idea to feel that our personality is something final and nothing can be done about it. It is simply not true. Consider this. Suppose you are now 40 years and somebody had taken your picture on your birth day, every year. He now displays all the 40 pictures on the wall and asks you “which of the 40 pictures is yours?” . What will you reply? All are yours but none is exactly like you, as you are now.  It is because you have been changing to some extent from year to year physically. Now suppose another instrument had taken your mental attributes every year and now they are displayed on the wall and you are asked to say which is yours. Again all are yours but none is exactly you as you are now. What does this mean? It only means we are changing all the time, physically and mentally, whether we like it or not. We are not finished products. We are work-in-process till the last moment of life – ever changing.

As the statue of a person emerges a little bit from a block of stone with every chisel cut of the sculptor, our targeted personality also emerges a little bit with every new experience, thought and action. We can take some actions to cultivate a new habit. Every such action shapes us a little. Does it not take millions of chisel strokes to get the shape of the person out of the block of stone? What if the block of stone is cut wrongly into a different shape? Will not the job of correcting that shape more difficult than making a statue form a fresh stone?

Our current personality is not our real potential personality. It is the result of deep conditioning of our mind by all those who had power over us from our birth and our passive way of responding to it. This truth can be understood symbolically from following stories and observations which bring out how our mind gets conditioned.

The giant elephant submitting meekly to a thin rope

After a baby elephant is born, the trainer ties its leg is with a heavy chain to a tree. Every time it tries to make that leg free, it feels the heavy weight of the chain and realizes that it can not make its leg free, in spite putting all its effort. After many weeks of this struggle, it feels helpless and stops even trying to make an effort to free its leg. The elephant grows over a period of time into a giant and powerful animal which can even break big trees, but it remains tied down meekly, by a thin rope.

The fisherwomen and smell of flowers

This story was told by Sri Ramakrishna an Indian saint. Two fisherwomen were going home with their empty salted dry fish baskets after selling all their dry fish in the market. Suddenly there was a storm and they sought shelter in a house nearby. The house owner asked them to sleep in an unused room for the night. They were not able to sleep in that room, in spite of their best efforts. They realized that the room contained unsold flowers because their host was a flower seller. With his permission, they put the flower baskets out of the room and brought in their foul smelling fish baskets which they left outside the house, when they entered. Then they could sleep happily!

Learned pessimism

Psychologists conducted some experiments on dogs. The first experiment was to condition them to a stressful experience. The first group was the control group, not subjected to any experience. Second group was subjected to the experience of getting a mild shock periodically from the floor on which they were standing which they could escape by pressing a bar accessible to them. They accidentally discovered this solution by hitting the bar while jumping randomly to escape the shocks. Every time the shocks started, they learned to hit the bar purposely and stop the shocks. We can call them optimistically conditioned dogs.

The third group of dogs were subjected to the same shocks but no provision was made for them to escape the shocks. So they continued to suffer from the shocks in spite of all kinds of jumping. After some time they felt that whatever they may do, they could not avoid the shocks. They then simply sat down passively and continued to suffer the mild shocks till the experiment was called off. We can call them pessimistically conditioned dogs.

These three groups of dogs were then subjected to a second experiment in an enclosure divided into two parts by a low partition like a tennis court. One half of the floor area in which the dogs were initially placed, was wired to give mild shocks and the other half area was free from shocks.

All the three groups of dogs were subjected to this second experiment. The first group soon jumped over the partition and escaped the shocks. The second group also escaped jumping over the partition. But the third group of pessimistically conditioned dogs simply sat down and continued to bear the mild shocks even though the low partition was visible to them just as it was visible to the other two groups of dogs.

Next, a similar conditioning experiment was conducted on three groups of people by subjecting them to a high level of noise in a room. They could escape it by pressing a particular sequence of numbers on a panel, accessible to them. Surprisingly they also behaved exactly like the dogs. The pessimistically conditioned people did not try to escape the noise though the panel with buttons was visible to them, whereas the other two groups tried many things and finally found the method to stop the noise.

The priest and the four thieves

Here is a story. One pundit (a priest who performs religious ceremonies in India) was going home carrying a goat gifted to him, on his shoulders. Four thieves saw him and planned to cheat him and take the goat to enjoy a meal. They stood at four different places on the road the pundit was traveling. The first thief asked him sarcastically ‘What is this pundit? why are you carrying a dog on your shoulders? Somebody has cheated you. He has given you a dog instead of a goat as a gift”. The pundit brushed him aside and went forward. But after the second, third and fourth thief repeated the same statement in similar manner, he was totally convinced that it was a dog, threw the goat down and went home in disgust. The thieves enjoyed a feast killing the goat.

Monkey and the peanut plants – (Expecting unrealistic results)

Once upon a time, there was a monkey who was ambitious and highly result oriented. Somebody gave him a few peanut plants and asked that they be planted and watered every day and they would in due course give peanuts that he could enjoy. The monkey planted them and watered them on the first day. He was sleepless that night, thinking about the peanuts growing inside the soil. As soon as it was morning, he rushed to the garden and pulled up the peanut plants one by one, to see how many peanuts each had. Finding none, he was disappointed, planted them again, watered them and pulled them up again the second morning. He continued this process every day. When will he get peanuts? Moral of the story: Allow the process to work for appropriate time, then it will give results. As long as you find some tiny comfort from a process like ‘Focusing on breathing’, feel a little bit happy and continue the practice. Every bit of comfort is a precious gain, as we are not investing anything in this method – time, money, effort , not even belief! We are only utilizing the wandering time of the mind.

Goat minus mentality

A goat held by a rope would graze in a circle whose size depends on the length of the rope. Longer the rope, larger the circle of land on which it grazes. Similarly, a person also accepts the mental and physical freedom he feels he has been given. In this sense, man is like a goat. But man is superior to goat in the scale of evolution. Does he behave in a superior manner ?

The goat runs away and enjoys full freedom, soon after realizing the rope is missing. But a man, even after finding the rope missing, would continue to confine himself strictly to the same circle, as though an invisible rope is still around his neck. If you wonder and ask him why he is not using the freedom now available to him, he would reply that “they” might have forgotten and would anyway find out and tie him up. So what is the point in running away !

In other words, a human being gets mentally conditioned by the circumstances in which he has been living, even though he may be suffering badly. He does not realize that he has the power to choose his thoughts, feelings and reactions at every moment. Even on the occasions he is aware, he surrenders meekly to the inner tendencies that make him think and behave in the same set fashion, like a robot. In respect of grabbing opportunities readily available to him, a human being is worse than a goat, “goat minus! “

Comparing our progress

Comparing with others on similar paths, feeling discouraged and giving up totally, is another trap for the practitioners of the method. No two thumb impressions or DNA’s match. No two people were same in the past, now, nor will be in future. Hence there is no sense in comparing the performances of people and feeling discouraged or encouraged. Every one has to make own efforts and follow own path.

Celebrity (celeb) advertisements (ads)

Of all the examples on mental conditioning, this is the most insulting one, even for the intelligent human beings today. We see ads every day in newspapers and magazines, in which some celebrity is shown associated with a product. We know many things when we see it – that the celeb may have never used the product even once and that he is simply selling his popular image, to some company, to earn a huge amount of money. In simple language, he is most likely cheating us in giving us the impression that he used that product and feels happy about it. We also know that the celeb is getting his money out of all the money we pay for the product. What does all this mean? Are we not knowingly paying the celeb to cheat us blatantly and we do not even seem to be aware about this cheating. Is it not an extreme case of mental conditioning, that is making us spend our hard earned money, to be cheated by a person we admire?

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