Conditioning Plus Consciousness
“Forgive them father they know not what they do…” said Jesus while watching Roman soldiers gamble for his clothing while he suffered on the cross (Luke 23:34.)
What was Jesus talking about? What would it take to “know what they do?”
To know what they were doing they would have needed to be conscious. Conscious of what? Well, to start with, conscious of their conditioning.
What is conditioning?
Conditioning is the external and internal stimuli that have impacted our brains and bodies to bring us to this present moment. What we have seen, tasted, touched, smelled, heard, and felt along with what has been taught to us by experience navigating the world and the lessons and values we inherited from our parents, culture, and education. In short, everything we have experienced to date impacting the biology we were born with. That, in short, is our complete conditioned self. Our “relative” self. And those processes are COMPLETELY out of our control.
“You hit the lottery…” a fellow spiritual practitioner told me after asking my “story of enlightenment.”
I hit the lottery because I wasn’t even seeking spiritual or philosophical guidance. I was looking for chess lessons and stumbled across a spiritual master. That meeting was completely out of my control. And it ultimately impacted my conditioning profoundly. This was meant to be. So, yes, from the perspective of liberation, I hit the lottery. But the Goddess wasn’t done with her gift. She also had me born to a family of great dysfunction, with parents who lacked nurturing skills and were poorly educated as well. This was an excellent soil for “enough suffering” to grow in.
Why is suffering so useful? Because suffering, enough suffering, forces us to examine what is causing it and can be the beginning of consciousness.
Conscious of what? Well, conscious of what was lacking in those Roman soldiers. Conscious of why I do the things I do.
Without the lottery fortune of access to a spiritual master and enough suffering I would simply have never asked. I would have continued on blithely like those Roman soldiers.
My spiritual teacher had a similar path of fortune with suffering which drew him to ask “what is true?”
And without his path, I would not have won the lottery.
You see, much of all this is grace – or if you prefer luck…
If you can feel the intelligence of the universe and be humble enough to call it “God” you’ll prefer the term “grace.” If you want to believe that it’s all mechanical and not mysterious at all you’ll call it “luck.”
But either way, if you don’t have the grace, you don’t get access to the consciousness.
This can be true in the relative as well. If you can’t afford to go to college, what they teach there is made that much harder to access. Not impossible, but not spoon fed. Again, this can be determined by the luck of the draw in terms of the resources we were born into.
So, why do I bring up grace? Why are we discussing luck? That is where the forgiveness comes from.
Those two processes are COMPLETELY out of our control. And if someone is barred from access to the truth, either the Absolute or Relative Truth, we “forgive them for they know not what they do…”
They are merely products of their conditioning plus the level of consciousness they have learned about that conditioning.
No human can be more than the combination of those two factors.
In fact, when I meet any person, I spend most of my initial time gauging these two factors.
What is their general conditioning?
And…
What is their level of consciousness around that conditioning?
When I get answers to these two questions I am usually able to predict behaviors with little or no margin for error.
I am then able to trust them. Or if you prefer I am able to have “faith” in the mixture of those two qualities when generating my expectations.
Eckhart Tolle likes to refer to this mixing of qualities as “varying degrees of unconsciousness…”
This varies from the most common “completely unconscious” which means they are merely walking expressions of their unseen conditioning to “very conscious” which means they have learned enough about it to have a meaningful degree of control over the behaviors.
And this trust leads to the faith that allows for forgiveness. If everyone you meet is merely the result of the combination of conditioning plus consciousness, and those levels are ultimately out of their control. Then any judgment of them is useless and ultimately harmful.
It is also ignorant.
So, the next time you see someone, ask yourself “what is their level of consciousness and conditioning” and leave the judgments to the universe.