The Nature of Samskaras and Conditioning

The other day I was watching my step-daughter, Madhavi, playing with her Webkinz toys. She was making them reenact her dance competition (which she had just attended the week before), complete with music, dances and cheers from the crowd. It made me remember how another time, after attending my wife's graduation ceremony, that she acted out the ceremony with her Webkinz for the next few days, even setting up a stage, making diplomas, etc.

Then I had the thought that children will act out or play according to what they're experiencing in their environments. Why do they do this? It's because they're reinforcing their experiences and strengthening those neurological pathways in their brains. In other words, they're becoming conditioned.

We've spent our whole life being conditioned. We're conditioned by our parents, peers, the environment, the society, culture, etc. A small child in India grows up learning that when you have to go to the bathroom you go out to the field with a pot of water and then you take a bath. A small child in America learns that when you have to go to the bathroom you sit on a bowl and wipe with toilet paper. They've both been conditioned to accept these practices as being "the right way" to do things, yet intrinsically neither way is right or wrong.

In the Vedic theology we have samskaras or rites of passage in which impressions are placed upon the mind and consciousness for certain major events in our lives. These samskaras leave lasting impressions within the heart and are ultimately meant for our purification and spiritual advancement.

In the same way, once we're born into this material world, we go through various mundane samskaras that leave impressions in our hearts. Conditioning is taking place, whether it's material or spiritual and whether we're aware of it or not. We grow up in our early years being conditioned by the norms and expectations of our parents and in our youth and teens we're more influenced by our peers. We follow the fads and trends in an effort to fit in. We do what other's are doing because it's accepted and seen as something beneficial and important. Sometimes this sort of blind following leads into our adult life and we find ourselves never questioning the world around us.

A major problem in today's society is this sort of blind following. We've become conditioned as a society to NOT think and to just accept the norms as the way of life. We take everything at face value: the news, the media, etc. We've become so conditioned to accept the material body as the self that we can't think beyond it. We've become conditioned to accept this material world as our home. We've become conditioned to accept birth, death, disease and old age as inevitable, harsh realities.

Repetition creates reinforcement. It's like scratching the surface of a wooden table with a needle. If you keep scratching, scratching, scratching eventually the scratch becomes very deep and embedded into the wood grain. It becomes very difficult to remove the scratch. In the same way, our material conditioning is so deep rooted that it's difficult to erase all of these illusions and negative impressions. Even devotees that have been strictly following the process for years and years still find themselves haunted by material desires or still attached to their false ego.

Just as material conditioning is taking place at every moment, we have to begin a process of spiritual conditioning. This is obviously what sadhana or daily, devotional practice is all about. It's trying to create these new, positive impressions and erase the old, negative ones. It's the process of cleansing the mirror of the heart. A difficult process indeed, but definitely possible. We just have to do it! Sometimes (more often than not) I find myself lacking the motivation to engage in the devotional practices. Obviously this is due to conditioning. If you go years without strictly chanting your rounds it becomes habitual. Habit and conditioning are practically synonymous.

So it becomes about habit, about daily patterns. It becomes about what we're repeating in our minds at every moment. We have the power to change ourselves, to transform our hearts and consciousness. That is the nature of free will. Obviously in kali-yuga great mercy is needed to make spiritual advancement, but the fact remains that we have to make the effort. Srila Prabhupada has mercifully given us everything we need to succeed, yet we still have to do our part to follow the process. And therein lies the conundrum of the living entity.