Reconditioning the conditioned mind
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment
The mind is an instrument that is able to make sense of the world and find experiences within it. It is also capable of solving problems, inventing and using tools, gaining practical knowledge, and perceiving duality. This same mind that makes life easier is psychologically conditioned, causing it (as the sense of self, the egoic self) to suffer. Suffering often leads to a psychologist or some other therapist who employs her skills to make things better by either changing behavior or trying to adjust thought patterns and attachments to ideas).
There are two main approaches to our suffering as human beings that lead to transformation:
- To recondition the conditioned mind, and
- To fully realize that the conditioned mind, which is the personal (also called “me,” the egoic self, the egoic mind, the sense of “I,” the center, etc.) self, is only a belief system.
By “transformation,” I mean a new paradigm, a new way of seeing the world and one’s place in it.
The conditioned mind that is ‘me’
The sense of a personal self is created by psychological conditioning of the mind. This “me” is an accretion of thoughts arising out of consciousness and instilled in a person by way of parents, authority figures, relatives, religion, culture, tribalism, teachers, and many other factors. This resulting“me” is the belief that we are associated, and identified, with ideas, memories, experiences, losses, accomplishments, failures, successes, physical appearances, abilities, talents, relationships, genetics, and more. Ultimately, the “me” believes itself to be fully associated with the body and all things associated with the body. When, for example, a person points to himself and says, “I have a job,” he is seeing himself as a body that is engaged in a particular form of work.
There is no ‘me’
The “me”does not realize that it is actually a belief within the context of consciousness, which is the totality of all that is. Because the (practical) mind is an instrument that helps us navigate this world and solve problems, it is a valuable asset.
The mind must fragment the totality of consciousness into parts, or digestible facets, so that it can experience a life in a world of duality. For example, the mind must discriminate between hot and cold, tall and short, blue and red, fast and slow, and every other conceivable and perceivable duality. To play in this world, one must see the world as a tapestry of pieces even though it is actually a singular and indivisible movement. However, when the mind is conditioned by thoughts that create the “me,” it also applies the sense of duality to itself, setting itself apart from the rest of consciousness. This is the fundamental cause of suffering, because the sense of an individual self moves through its entire lifetime trying to be whole, which means trying to acquire, obtain, attain, arrange, rearrange, fix, repel, attract, and so on. The result is frustration, anger, rage, jealousy, hate, revenge, engagement in entertainment, pursuing metaphysical and religious teachings, practicing austerities and rituals, rudeness, violence, conflict, the need to find the meaning of life, argumentation, and other behaviors and thoughts that are employed in an effort to become something. But there is no becoming as consciousness, because consciousness is already complete, dynamic, and complex.
The idea of becoming is only associated with the egoic self that is compelled to find completeness. The personal self, the “me,” suffers because it does not know what it already is, which is consciousness; it believes that it is something other than consciousness, which is an individual apart from the whole.
Very, very few people want to know what they are at the core, beyond this sense of the “me,” at any cost. There seems to be many reasons for this, but in fact there is only one: Fear. The egoic self fears annihilation, so it most commonly resists any idea or action that may threaten its own perpetuation. In most cases, the self seems so real that it cannot possibly entertain the fact that it does not exist, does not act on its own volition, and does not determine the fate of the world (its immediate circle or the world at large), because all of these behaviors actually occur in the totality of consciousness and not at the individual level. It takes the entire movement of consciousness for causation at any and all levels.
In the context of psychology, we may look at the works of Viktor Frankl and others — Freud, Jung, Adler, and the rest — as valuable and necessary in most cases, which is is to say that reconditioning the already-conditioned mind that forms the sense of “me” is not a bad thing at all. It is what most people want and need. Reconditioning thinking patterns and behaviors is the backbone of modern psychology in which the words “change,” “improvement,” and “growth, “ are forefront. By contrast, in the world of self-enquiry meditation, the word “change” merely suggests a shift of the attention from one aspect of our illusory world to another; but there is no transformation away from the egoic state to the totality of consciousness that so many erroneously refer to as “ego death.”
Helping as needed
Attempting to help a suffering human being by telling him/her that there is no meaning to life and that he/she is nothing but a belief system is irresponsible, damaging, hurtful, and imprudent. It takes a rare and particular kind of person to have the burning desire to do away with (move beyond) the egoic self. All others need nurturing and reconditioning to at least resolve their suffering temporarily — even if by temporarily we mean for the rest of their lives.
There is nothing wrong with reconditioning the conditioned mind if it leads to a happier, more fulfilling and adjusted life. If you want to achieve enlightenment, you need to go through another door than the one Psychology shows you.
