Conditioning – In Gita Verse 15.7 The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts. Due to conditioned life, they are struggling very hard with the six senses, which include the mind.
The Unconditioned Self: A Journey Beyond Thoughts
In the timeless wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita verse 15.7, Krishna imparts a revelation: each individual is an innate piece of divinity, a spark of the eternal. Yet, this spark flickers within the gale of maya, ensnared within the mind’s confines and the sensory labyrinth. Such confinement can obscure our true, eternal nature and dim the luminous connection we share with the Divine.
Krishna elucidates in those poetic verses that every soul bears the indelible mark of Divine Consciousness. Yet this fragment – pure and potent – often drifts amidst the illusions of matter, becoming entwined in the cyclical dance of birth and rebirth known as Samsara. Vulnerable to the imprints of the world’s manifold institutions, our fundamental nature is veiled, shrouded beneath a dense fabric of constructed identities, tales, and societal constructs.
This conditioning has been with us for lifetimes, subtly imposed by institutions and entities that have prefabricated molds ready for us to fill. A Hindu or a Christian, a Communist or a Capitalist – each claiming their truth to be absolute, each an intricate lattice of thoughts and paradigms weaved into us since we were at an age of innocence, unaware of these samskaras being etched into our being.
Meditation is the ever-flowing river that purifies, the flame that burns away these impositions until there is nothing left but the essence of who we are. In that profound silence of meditation, thoughts dissolve – a drop of water on a hot stone, evaporating without a trace. It is only in such profound chambers of silence that we discard the layers of conditioning. Here, we find ourselves devoid of imposed identities.
We have witnessed histories and societies upend themselves, seeking liberation through revolution. Yet revolution in the external world has often led to a mere change of guardians at the gates of our conditioning. Russia, once entwined in the vestiges of the Orthodox Church, swiftly adopted the dialectics of dialectical materialism. The churches might have closed, the icons might have been replaced, but the essence of the human spirit remained fettered, now to a different ism. The soul’s journey was left unattended, unpurified.
From the moment of birth, the cycle of conditioning is an inevitability. Like wildflowers that take on the hue and fragrance of their surroundings, we, too, imbibe the nuances of our immediate environment. This is nature’s programming – linguistics, gestures, beliefs – a tapestry woven out of the very fabric of existence surrounding the nascent souls. The mother’s tongue, the father’s worldview, the society’s expectations – each layer upon layer creating a vibrant but conditioned montage of who we ‘should’ be.
So then does the quest arise: Can we truly decondition, and how? The methods that purport to decondition often subtly recondition under a different guise. The key is not to replace content but to empty it, not to reprogram but to unlearn, to strip away what we have gathered to reveal what has always been there – a pure, unblemished consciousness.
Meditation does not stand as a technique but rather as a state of being – a homecoming to our essential nature. It’s the art of being absolutely present, untethered by the anchors of past imprints and future anticipations. In this meditative space, the mind’s chatter fades into oblivion and the elixir of pure consciousness emerges unmasked.
Krishna’s profound suggestion for an individual’s metamorphosis unveils the potential of a ‘no-mind’ state. Thoughtlessness is not an absence but a presence of an all-encompassing awareness. Unconditioned, free, and wholly alive, you become the cosmos itself – dancing in its vastness, an integral part of the whole, finally understanding Krishna’s promise that all living beings are, indeed, His eternal, indivisible fragments.
So, let us embark on this journey inward, not to seek, not to attain, but to unbecome all that we are not, and in that powerful space of nothingness, to discover that in our essence, we are everything. Let us dissolve in the ocean of meditation to emerge as the wave that knows it is the ocean itself.
Tags: Conditioning
