2007-10-22-Positive Conditioning
Marin #142
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Positive Conditioning
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Nebadonia
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
Topic: Positive Conditioning
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit and Michael: We are really tickled with your cheerful and helpful messages on our God-given potential for growing into a more free-willed life by taking responsibility for it. Perhaps our negative feelings about responsibility come from the fact that for so many of us the earliest presentations were always coupled with a rather dogmatic indoctrination of traditional, unexamined mores we felt it our duty as adolescents to rebel against. Yet we came to realize in time that our earliest techniques of indifference and superficial, knee-jerk rebellion did not create any good alternatives. We appreciate your pointing out it is only by way of our spiritual creativity that we become aware of the full extent of this conditioning and are able to replace it with something better; and this is the true duty of each new generation. And so we thank you very much. Amen
NEBADONIA: Good evening, this is Nebadonia. Well then: to continue in this saga, your human adventure into consciousness. For this is the critical, operative word, my children, I would like to introduce right off this evening. We’ve talked about the necessity to bring your conditioning into consciousness so you can make free-willed decisions as to what you will honor and what you will discard.
Lesson
(Positive conditioning)
I would like to balance the scales a bit and point out all the positive conditioning that is part of your day to day life. This is what you normally call abilities. These too you began to learn right from the cradle—so to speak. You absorbed them like a living little sponge from your parents and siblings in your first few years of life, not only the basic motor skills of crawling and standing and walking, and the instinctual verbal skills of hearing and then responding to the words around you, but even facial expressions and body language–all this minute physical behavior. It includes attitudes, or how you consider and relate to all the thousand and one small facets of your daily life. This is all conditioning, along with all the skills, all the abilities you had to learn just to keep uninjured and alive in a very technically advanced mechanical society full of sharp objects, dangerous chemicals, fearful heights, extraordinary velocities and energies. You can consider all this as positive conditioning, all these skills and abilities you use unconsciously but which form your real functional wealth, they contribute so much to your success in accomplishing what your free will decides to do.
Ironically, it is good to be positively aware of and consider all the negative conditioning you’ve seen through and outgrown yourself, just in terms of social recognition—to recognize and forgive many of the unintended and unconscious immature habits of your fellows. It can even be a spiritual grace to go about your society a bit thick-skinned and not take offence with these unintended insults from those who bruise your delicate feelings without meaning to.
I said the operative word is consciousness, to be able to bring all your conditioning into consciousness so you can decide now, as an adult—in order to be an adult, which of these you are going to continue using. Equally important is deciding which behaviors you are going to pass on to your children. What are you going to teach them by example and how are you going to help them achieve their own inner freedom of choice, their own independence of spirit, their own uniqueness of personality?
Consider your cultural conditioning in this larger context where you can be appreciative of the positive skills and abilities you’ve inherited from thousands and thousands of years of human experimentation. This is the true history of civilization for you are not born with any of this. Each generation must appropriate for itself all that has gone before it. There is no avoiding the fact each successive generation will interpret history somewhat differently as they too need to make their own conscious decisions in the light of an ongoing evolution as to what is still, and what is no longer important This is often decried as revisionism, but to a large degree it is inevitable. You are experiential beings and each new generation can only interpret the past by way of its own day to day experience.
This is not a bad thing for at the same time you are enormously expanding your print and electronic media and gaining a much broader and deeper, infinitely more detailed grasp of history than was ever available before. Your modern societies are so wealthy they can devote untold billions of dollars toward archaeology and other pure sciences aimed at penetrating the past and then cross-referencing and comparing it all. Your modern DNA analysis allows you to trace a majority of the world’s populations and their travels and intermingling far back into time. You’ve mapped nearly the entire surface of planet and its ocean depths, and your telescopes are peering far out into space and back into time on a cosmic scale. So of course you will reinterpret human history, even geological time, in the light of these new discoveries.
Subjectivity, Objectivity (Objective and subjective history)
It is somewhat sadly inevitable too that the subjective, experiential life of each generation is for that very reason wrapped up in itself and lost to the succeeding ones. Even as you get a broader overview of what it was like to live, say, in ancient Rome, the true historian realizes how little he or she can enter their day to day minds that experienced reality so differently. But you are trying to. Now you have genuinely respectful anthropologists spending their time just observing some of the most primitive remaining tribes of earth and not rushing in like eighteenth or nineteenth century missionaries to convert native cultures without any real grasp of what they were confronting. And so they are able to capture now, before it is lost, a real depth of what primitive mentality is all about, and discovering that every stage of human existence was, and is, both complete and transcendent. Every true human from Andon and Fonta–one million years ago, on down to yourselves, has been endowed with spiritual potential just in being one of God’s children.
And so fear not, my children, this conditioning we’ve been cautioning you to be aware of. Embrace it. Understand it. Enjoy it. Reach out, or should I say, reach in within yourselves to be aware of it. As Michael said last week, go forward to embrace all that you are, for this implies there is a forward. There is a growth, an evolution possible. This is God’s will abroad in the cosmos, and in each individual. All of life has this potential of growth, collectively and individually. You can thrill to be a conscious part of it.
My message this evening is rather short. I just wanted to review the central notion of your potential, and I sincerely hope you can get a greater feeling of it and not be afraid of it, even if it is tied to uncertainty. As we’ve pointed out, accepting potential, accepting your need to grow into your free will estate is part and parcel of realizing how much of the future is unfixed and only possible, not assured, but depending upon your decisiveness. It means you have a part to play in realizing your inner uniqueness. It requires the courage to stand alone, within, and grow your response-ability.
(Overcoming denial)
There is such a human psychological phenomena as denial, where it seems, contradictory enough, the mind chooses not to be aware of some disturbing facts it holds in total, but keeps them unconscious. The question is: how do you become aware of what you are hiding from yourself, especially if it seems to be more comfortable to remain blissfully unaware? This is the necessity for welcoming responsibility, seeing with maturity the need to respond to what is happening all about and within you. It is what enables you to grow to meet what is really happening. This is the understanding, the wisdom that this orientation toward reality is the only way to a better life, however momentarily uncomfortable. Graciously enough: it works! There is always a way forward. There is indeed a “forward” to seek and find, to use and enjoy. We call it God’s will for you, my children. This is the love our Universal Father pours out upon all His creation, that such a glorious reality is possible. We invite you to discover it, and then lean in that direction..
If you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s just feel our way along.
Dialogue
Student: Yes, Mother, we are at times confronted with situations where our conditioning is kind-of uprooted, like in Southern California with the wildfires where thousands have to leave their homes and stay in shelters: same with hurricane Katrina, where whole sections of New Orleans were destroyed. So many people had their whole lives taken away and had to find new homes, new jobs, maybe far away. It takes a strong person to start anew and not fall back into old ways. Even with the birth of a child, like my granddaughter, we need to live differently and maybe break away from familiar patterns to live with this new person. With moving forward and experiencing our potential… That word—I’m pondering what that is, because from what I see, I see very few people living their potential. I know for myself there’s so much I’m barely even accepting about my potential. In a way we’re even afraid of what that looks like. So…
Catastrophism (The challenges of catastrophe)
NEBADONIA: Yes indeed, my son, this is why we consider it a supreme spiritual achievement when, confronted with a catastrophe like loosing your home to fire or flood, you are able to use the terrible experience positively to start anew in a way that is an improvement over how you—personally–were before. As you know from experience, many do, and yet many are not able to. It brings both to the greater underlying bedrock of their physical, mental, and spiritual health day to day. The human animal is so marvelously adaptable you can indulge in some unhealthy ways of living in all these three dimensions of life for quite a while before you—as you say—hit bottom, or a catastrophe happens, and you are forced to survive, or not, in difficult circumstances. We once pointed out your very success leads you to your greatest challenge of all—to keep going forward. Michael gave his due respect to how humanly difficult this is, to keep moving forward day after day, month after month, and year after year. But there is always a “forward” there to seek and head toward. You cannot exhaust God’s will and love for you.
The acceptance of possible catastrophes–the wisdom of that acceptance suggests that you do your best to stay healthy physically and mentally and spiritually even when there is seemingly no immediate need for it. Then if some catastrophe—major or minor–does occur, you can take it in stride. You can experience the spiritual achievement of using it positively to reexamine your whole life’s attitude toward experience; use it as a launching pad to go on to something better yet. We readily acknowledge, my dear children, this is not easy. But that just points up the glory in the achievement.
Potential is something of another one of our “ungraspable imponderables”… (Mother Spirit chuckles, and the student joins in…) but it is good to ponder it anyway. What does it mean when we say you are so much pure potential?
