Quotessence
Home / Topics / Conditioning Quotes

Conditioning Quotes

Browse 356 quotes about Conditioning.

Related topics

Conditioning Quotes

“Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”

“If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.”

“Is your life story the truth? Yes, the chronological events are true. Is it the whole truth? No, you see and judge it through your conditioned eyes and mind - not of all involved - nor do you see the entire overview. Is it nothing but the truth? No, you select, share, delete, distort, subtract, assume and add what you want, need and choose to.”

“The meaning of life in western secular society is to be successful. So many people are success mad and they are encouraged to reach for something and have so called "worthwhile goals". Money, fame, power, good looks, possessions are the indicators of success and the media and advertising companies exploit this. People are conditioned to believe that they can only feel happy or good about themselves if they have these things. This of course is not true.”

“They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white..., they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.”

“Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.”

“We all live in the past. Your parents have given you a certain conditioning. The society has given you a certain conditioning, and to live in that conditioning is to live your life in a prison. The religions have forced you to be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan or a Buddhist, which are all conditionings. Meditation is a freedom from all these conditionings that parents, the society and the religions have forced on you. Unless you are free you will never be able to hear your own authentic inner voice. Your parents will tell you "do this and don't do this." The priests will goon creating guilt and shame in you. They will not allow you to be yourself.  Nobody in the world is really interested in anybody else being given the freedom to be himself or herself. Everybody is trying to impose their ideas and ideologies on others.  That is why humanity is in such misery and chaos. We have created an ugly world, where we have not allowed children to be themselves.  We have created a prison made of ideas, theologies and ideologies. You can think that you are free, but you are not free. We have to get rid of this prison. We have to uncondition ourselves, sothat we become free. It is first when the whole sky is ours that the whole existence is ours. When one realizes this, one just wants freedom, joy, silence,  awareness, truth and love. In that inner silence and freedom,the whole heritage of humanity becomes ours. Then we know that truth is within ourselves. My first book in English, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart, is dedicated to my parents, Essy and Sven, with the dedication: "My parents, who taught me what love and freedom are.” My whole childhood was an atmosphere and climate of love and freedom. An American astrologer said in an astrology  session in the United States that my mother seemed to be a very special  woman. She was so rebellious that the boys in elementary school held herdown and shot her in the foot with an air rifle.  Once when I was in high school, I wanted to  have a little parental conflict, and said to my mother that I would never go back to school again. My mother replied: I would never do that either. This atmosphere and climate of love and freedom made me always feel that I could be who I am. It also taught me early to listen to my inner true voice, which early began to guide me in life.”

“It is what it is because you let it be so.”

“Be nice,' we're often told, particularly we women-- along with other populations under-appreciated and over-oppressed... Until recently, that has mostly been said to those without power... Because those in power didn't have to be nice, were never expected to be nice. Recently it's being said more often to those with great power, and there is value in that.”

“Suppose you have 2L of nectar and you want a vessel to keep it. There is a golden vessel of 1L capacity and there is a steel vessel of 2L capacity. If your mind were free, you would choose the steel vessel and be happy. But your mind is conditioned to believe that gold is better than steel. So none of the vessels will make you happy. Steel one will make you feel inferior and gold one can't contain all of your nectar.”

“Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission…. But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past “equivalent” and “paradoxical” phases—you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave… who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, “I think,” Pavlov writing to Janet, “it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients.” Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile—”

“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once. “Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it.”

“The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies, re-enforced by the recent Nordic experience, is that humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage.”

“Since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”

“If you see suspicious behaviour from someone who you can more easily identify with, you are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt than those enacting the same behaviour but who you can not so easily identify with. This does not make you a bad person, it makes you a conditioned person. The quality of your character is, instead, measured by how you respond to that conditioning, both in the moment and in the rest of your life.”

“Robert Ader, a research psychologist at the University of Rochester, was engaged in an experiment in which he was trying to condition rats to dislike saccharin-sweetened water. This was similar to the classic experiment of Pavlov in which he conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. In order to develop an aversion to the saccharin, Dr. Ader injected the rats with a chemical that made them nauseated so that they associated the sweet water with nausea. What he didn't realize until later was that the chemical be injected, cyclophosphamide, also suppressed the rats immune systems, so that they were dying mysteriously. But the striking thing was that now all he had to do was feed the rats saccharin-sweetened water and their immune systems would be suppressed, even though they had not been injected with the chemical, because they had learned (been conditioned) to associate the sweet water with the nausea-producing chemical. Now, simply feeding saccharin could produce suppression of the immune system. This was a landmark discovery, for it demonstrated that a brain phenomenon, in this case aversion to a taste, could control the immune system. (page 183)”

“Your real nature is to move at your own pace but your conscious mind and all its conditioning is constantly racing around like a monkey swinging from branch to branch looking for something it can never find.”

“The conditioning of society is to destroy your capacity to be aware, to be conscious, to feel and to see. Then people can accept any kind of state in society. Just to survive they accept all kinds of humiliations. They are ready to live on a survival level. They are ready to live on a very low level of consciousness. Many people are existing below the human level. A person who is aware, conscious, who feel and see will rebel wherever he sees anything unjust and inhuman. He will not tolerate it. There is so much injustice everywhere. To protect this injustice and all the political and economical investments that depends on it, society starts from the beginning to socialize and conform the child to live only on a minimum level. This guarantees that the control and exploitation of society continues. The state, the politicians, the pedagogues, the priests, the media and the rich, they all control, manipulate and exploit people. The conditioning of societyis to make people unaware, unconscious and dull, because to allow people to be aware and conscious are dangerous to society. The whole society basically functions against making people aware and conscious. Meditation is the way to learn to be aware, awake, conscious, watchful and available, which is why society basically is against meditation. Meditation makes you aware enough to find love. Meditation makes you aware enough to rebel wherever there is anything injust and inhuman. Meditation makes you aware and conscious enough to go against the unconscious mob psychology, which functions from the lowest state of consciousness.”

“Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements that plague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable, more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.”

“Genuine self-love is the most profound experience in the universe. However, it usually takes time, sincere dedication, and discipline to develop. We are surrounded by so many images, beliefs, and behaviors that reinforce the idea of self-hatred every day that it can be extremely difficult for us to connect to the love inside of us.”

“Male social conditioning encourages boys and men to aim to bed as many women as possible....so much so, that their self esteem and self worth become intertwined with the number of sexual partners they have; and when that number is low or even zero, so too is their self-confidence.”

“Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called "programming" -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.”

“Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.”

“Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.”

“The truly wise are meek. Yet being small and meek do not make one weak. Arming oneself with true knowledge generates strong confidence and a bold spirit that makes you a lion of God. The Creator does not want you to suffer, yet we are being conditioned by society to accept suffering, weak and passive dispositions under the belief that such conditions are favorable by God. Weakness is not a virtue praised by God. How could he desire for you to be weak if he tells us to stand by our conscience? Doing so requires strength. However, there is a difference between arrogance when inflating your ego, and confidence when one truly gets closer to God. One feels large, while the other feels small. Why? Because a man of wisdom understands that he is just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms, and that in the end — we are all connected. And did you not know that the smaller a creature is, the bolder its spirit?”

“You can spread an ideology only by bombs. Either by real bombs or love bombs (manipulation).”

“And the majority of the world is hypnotized the majority of the time. This is why education is so important. If we are programming children anyway, we might as well keep our ideals high and instill charity, curiosity, generosity, creativity and joy. Just imagine!”