“One thing that enables servants to love others is their appreciation that the personality is not the person” -- Erie Chapman (from: “Radical Loving Care: Building the Healing Hospital in America”)
Social conditioning creates us; molds our reactions, our dreams, our moods, our responses, our fears and our desires – it creates our personalities. We are each a product of the myriad of ways that parents, peers, religion, rules, politics, beliefs and such have chiseled us through our lives. The fascinating thing, for me, is that all this social conditioning does not touch the core of who we are. It can cloud it, illuminate it, color it, mask it, but it does not change the fundamental spiritual/magical/mystical nature of what burns underneath.
I don’t think that many of us actually ever really get to live from the place of our souls. How can we? Conditioning is set up to stop us from living from this place (Think about it - what would happen to our social systems/structures if we all lived from the core of who we really are?). It is a battle for many of us to step out of the conditioning, the social expectations, the written and unwritten rules to become who we truly are.
Some people get it, they see the conditioning and they can disidentify. They can sit down and watch the movie, knowing that the conditioning is not them, rather what they have been told to be. These people are from all kinds of places, they might be spiritual, they might be religious, they might be old, they might be young, they might be anything. See, awareness does not discriminate. Those that get the gift of this kind of sight are blessed indeed.
I’m not so lucky. I am one of those that struggle, but I’m beginning to have the upper hand. I have moments where I see the conditioning, where I can actually choose to do something completely different than I have been “taught” to do.
It is a freeing feeling, but unsettling indeed.
