After watching this video, the following thoughts came to mind: THE CONDITIONED MIND WON’T HEAR OF IT: The Elephant In the Middle of the Room In Plain Sight Continues To Escape Notice To Our Peril Of course, the parents in the video below were once the children absorbing the behavior patterns of THEIR early environment... a karmic chain that goes back to the very beginning -- back long before Adam and Eve made their metaphoric debut as the first humans on the evolutionary stage… long before DNA fashioned the first single-celled organisms… long before the first stars were formed… back before the first seedling impulses of energy congealed to form the first atoms… back before the earliest, subtlest, most tender expressions of intelligence flooded the cosmos with meaning and purpose… back to that very first primordial desire to create something, anything, from nothing… back to the very start of that long, enormously convoluted evolutionary trail… back to the very first stirrings of consciousness… to the very heart of all being. We are the descendents of all that… the descendents of all these billions of years of increasingly entrenched patterns of conditioning. The conditioned patterns of behavior that permeate our lives have the inertial weight of this entire history behind them. It’s no wonder that our every effort to free ourselves of their overriding influence meets with failure after failure. Our minds are so thoroughly saturated with those conditioned patterns that our every action taken to subvert them is itself an expression of those very same patterns, serving only to further strengthen them. The kinds of conditioned behaviors on display in the video are literally just the tip of the iceberg. The deeper, subtler patterns from which they are descended, and from which they draw their strength, are hidden from view, and it is these deeper, unacknowledged conditioned patterns that wreak the real havoc in our lives. Recognizing the repetitive, conditioned, destructive patterns of behavior that are playing themselves out in our lives is rarely as obvious as it appears in the video, and each time they go unrecognized, each time we fail to experience them with full consciousness, we invite yet another reenactment of the same pattern. The problem is this: each time these conditioned patterns repeat themselves they do so in an entirely different context, and so more often than not appear to us to be quite different than they appeared in their previous incarnation, making the likelihood of recognizing each subsequent expression of them as a repeat performance of the same pattern increasingly unlikely. But, despite appearances to the contrary, it’s the same conditioned pattern being played out in wholly new circumstances… modified, but not transformed. What, then, is the way out of this mess? What, then, is the way of transformation? It’s not a matter of belief… Not a matter of faith… Not a matter of prayer… Not a matter of appealing to this or that deity, this or that savior… Not a matter of following in the way of this or that religion or adhering to this or that philosophy… Not a matter of any kind of intellectual awakening coming at the tail end of some highly recommended mental gymnastics… Not a matter of any kind of analysis or synthesis of past or present events… Not a matter of adopting a new diet or a new worldview… Not a matter of supplanting “negative” conditioning with so-called “positive” conditioning… Not a matter of making a mood of whatever our idea of enlightenment happens to be. And, most assuredly, not a matter of choice! All of these have their relative value at different times, under different circumstances, and, of course, in some cases that may be a negative value. But the point here is that not a single one of these contrivances, or any other contrivances we can think of, alone or in combination, over any length of time, is capable of freeing the mind from the conditioned patterns that hold it captive. The unconditioned state that is our only saving grace is simply not among their many and varied effects. Of course, the conditioned mind won’t hear any of this. The conditioned mind is a master of self-deception, cherishing complications in the name of simplicity… promoting darkness in the name of light, bondage in the name of freedom, ignorance in the name of enlightenment… clinging to material values in the name of all that is spiritual. The one, single overriding concern of the conditioned mind is to maintain and perpetuate itself… nothing more. This is its prime directive! And it will go to whatever deceptive lengths are necessary to accomplish that! The elephant standing in the middle of the room that almost no one wants to acknowledge is simply this: there is NOTHING the conditioned mind can do to free itself of its own conditioning. We’ve all heard it said that the reason humanity’s problems are so intractable is because we are trying to solve them with the same quality of consciousness that created them in the first place. Well, the same principle applies here. ANYTHING the conditioned mind does to free itself of its conditioning is itself an expression of that conditioning… just another self-deceptive link in that same conditioned chain of events that has been steering us deeper and deeper into the illusion, to our own and other’s detriment, in the service of its own continued existence. The unconditioned state is not the EFFECT of some CAUSE. It is not the RESULT of any kind of DOING at all. Not the RESULT of any ACTION whatsoever. Rather, when we speak of the unconditioned state we speak of the unbidden, unprompted immersion of the self into a wholly unqualified field of NONACTION. But it’s not until the self has become fully acclimated to that field of nonaction, such that it finds itself taking up permanent residence there, even as the mind and body continue to act, that the real value of this hallmark of all human striving is fully realized. It’s simply a matter of one’s own self SPONTANEOUSLY shedding the last vestiges of its many clever disguises, as it EFFORTLESSY settles into and comes to full, complete, and permanent rest in the very source of its own being… the one and only unconditioned source of ALL being. The unconditioned mind is the grace-full death of everything we imagine ourselves to be, and the unceasing birth of that which has always been our one and only True Identity. (Copyright © 2014 by Robert F. Quinn) (See comment below)
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 16:19:11 +0000
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