Conditioning of the mind

The installation

No human is born with a personality. You are born as a blank potential.

From the moment you arrive, the people around you begin to install software. Your parents, teachers, and culture hand you a script. They tell you what is good, what is bad, what is safe, and what is dangerous. They tell you who you are.

You accept this software because you are a child. You need their protection to survive. To reject the script is to risk abandonment, and for a child, abandonment is death.

The operating system

By the time you are an adult, this conditioning has hardened into an operating system. You call it "Me."

You think you are choosing your career, your partner, and your beliefs. In reality, you are executing a program written by people who were running programs written by their parents.

You are anxious because your mother was anxious. You are risk-averse because your father valued security. You seek approval because your school rewarded compliance.

The glitch

The suffering you feel is the friction between your essential nature and this installed software.

The machine is running code that is outdated and often malicious. It was designed to keep a child safe in a specific environment that no longer exists. Now, it is keeping a grown adult small in a world where you could expand instead.

The audit

You cannot delete the software until you recognize it is not you.

When a thought arises, "I shouldn't do that," "That is too risky," "I need to be nice", you must ask: Whose voice is this? Is this me, or is this a recording I have been playing for thirty years?

Conditioning is not a life sentence. It is just code. And code can be rewritten.

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The result of conditioning: Identity

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