BENGALURU : I wonder what we mean by conditioning. Is it the tradition, not only present day tradition, but centuries of tradition that has been handed down from generation to generation, and is this conditioning the whole background of civilisation, culture, the social impacts and the many, many experiences that one has? Does all this contribute to the conditioning of the brain? Not only all this but also the various impressions, the propaganda, the literature, the television, all this seems to add to the background, to the conditioning of every human being, whether he is very, very, very poor, uneducated, most primitive, and to the most highly educated, sophisticated human beings.
This conditioning seems to be inevitable. It has been a factor that has endured probably for a million years, or fifty thousand years. If all that is the conditioning, or the background of every human being, and that obviously shapes our thinking, controls our reactions and responses, and our way of behaviour, conduct, and the way we eat and think and feel and react, and all that. That seems to be the normal conditioning of human beings.
And that has shaped our society in which we live. The society is what we have made of it, what each individual throughout the million or fifty thousand years have according to their desires, ambitions, conditioning to their personal tendencies, to their aggression and so on, all this has actually contributed to the society in which we live. So the society is not different from us.
That is a fact we seem to forget when we talk about society. Society is something that gradually has come into being, to which we have given all our endeavour, all our struggles, all our imprints and tendencies. This is the society, and society is us. It is not two separate entities. I think this must be clearly understood.
The Socialists, perhaps some of the Capitalists, and certainly the Communists, tried to change the social structure by laws, by various edicts and so on.
It appears that they forget the human quality, the human conditioning and tried to shape the outward structure without taking into deep consideration the human character, the human behaviour, the human structure, the condition of his brain which has been programmed for thousands of years. And it seems to us the conditioning of the human being is to be examined much more thoroughly, gone into very, very deeply and find out whether the human condition can ever be radically changed, and so the social structure which is born of human conditioning can also be changed.
That is the real problem, not only the freedom of human beings who have been programmed - we are using the word ‘programmed’ in the sense that a computer is being programmed by experts, by specialists and so on, so we human beings, whether we live in the most primitive, brutal state, or the highest educated, scientific community, we seem to neglect, or even forget that this psychological structure, the subjective entity, who has brought about this really rather insane world, whether that human condition can ever be radically changed.