Love Your Conditioning: Leveraging Your Traditions vs. Rejecting Them

I often argue that all of us are members of many “cults.”  CULTure is simply a human way of being that demands compliance to receive social benefits.  Our religious, political, and economic systems, and many families all very much operate like cults—conformity is psychologically enforced, nonconformity, penalized.

But this doesn’t mean we throw out our traditions or dispense with our favored cults—we just have the awareness to realize our membership in them. It is only when we assume any cult’s superiority or perfection that we get stuck.

So we must start by recognizing that for us to find any honest free will, we have to do a little unpacking of our programming.

Our conditioning, or traditions, generally both help and hold us back. They provide solid ground for us to grow and learn and become ourselves in the world.  They create order where there is chaos. Our time, place, family and traditions become the lenses we use to see the world.

But as we mature, we begin to expand our ability to view the world through a wider range of lenses, and if we can avoid falling into the trap of calling any lens wrong or right, we gain more space to live more fully and wholly.

We Humans are Extremely Adaptable! 

A human baby born in rural China, wealthy Southern California, the jungle of the Amazon, the Siberian tundra—any corner of the globe—will speak the language in two years, comply with the mores and rules by five, and believe their system is the one, only and best way to be a human until their frontal lobe fully develops in their third and fourth decades of life (unless they’re never exposed to any other systems).

While there is almost always a corner of every human tradition that points us to this inner system and supports our connection to it, unfortunately, this is usually the quietest, most neglected corner.  It’s much more common for us to get pulled into focusing mainly on the external priorities our traditions demand of us–the daily grind, the bills, appearances, and the fires needing to be put out.  Our attention is drawn outward by the more negative, noisy, or controlling elements of our traditions.

This is the shadow side of our conditioning and can drain our life force.

This pattern causes us to either be unaware of, or neglect learning how to, operate and regulate our inner coherence system. Without it, we are further vulnerable to the chaotic, conflicting external signals and we remain oblivious to the immense inner resources we all have on hand.  Learning to use and master our inner systems actually gives us the clarity and energy to meet the daily demands of our external world more easily, whatever they may be.

Embracing Our Conditioning and the World Beyond It

The good news is, we don’t need to (nor can we) fully wipe clean our hard drives and be a perfectly clear vessel for reality. Simply understanding that all humans see through multiple lenses instilled from their time, place, parents, ancestors, country, political, religious, and economic views gives us the humility to always be learning and non-judgmental approach.

When we gain some self-perspective, we can find the peace of the “middle way,” where we can cherish, appreciate, and work within our traditions—or forgive and move on when they hurt more than help. We can take helpful things from new perspectives that widen our view without needing to condemn anything or anyone.

Development Doesn’t Stop at Adulthood

Human beings can continually mature and gain wider and wider perspective. Understanding our conditioning and taking “the step backward” to look at our thinking and why we think the way we do simply allows us to keep growing up.