WE ARE CONDITIONED

Let me start with a small trick. I want you to imagine any number between one and ten. Now multiply that number by nine. Next, only if your product is a double digit number than do a summation of those digits and use that as your current number. Now multiply your current number by five. Good!!! now store this last number in your memory.

Next task is to imagine digit one as a letter "A", two as a letter "B", three as a letter "C", four as a letter "D" and so on.

Now pull out that number which you have parked earlier and replace it's digits with letters as we have mapped them in our earlier step. At this point you have your number converted to a string of letters.

Next, think about the name of a country which starts with first letter and name of an animal which starts with second latter.

There are every chances of you thinking about "Denmark" and "Elephant". If not, one possibility is that you are from the country "Djibouti" or "Dominica". But believe me, majority of us would think of "Denmark" and "Elephant".  

The point which I want to make is very simple, "We all are conditioned". And that's why in many ways we are predictable. The trick I played is a proof of that.

We are conditioned to think the way we think, we are conditioned to behave the way we behave and we are conditioned to react the way we react. We are being conditioned since the day one on this planet. Starting from our parents we have been conditioned by each and every person and institute which came in our contact. We are conditioned by our relatives; by our neighbors; by our friends; by the school where we studied, by the society, by universities; by our loves, by our spouses and list will go on and on.

All these influences make us what we are today. These influences govern our thinking patterns, our selection patterns, factors we consider for making decisions and more than anything else they decide how we perceive our own self.

Interestingly all of us are implicitly aware of this phenomenon of human personality development and generations of us have effectively used it to their purpose; purpose of creating predictable creatures. In fact I would go to an extent to say that we are robots who in many ways think similarly, act similarly and react similarly. Though many of us have found ways to celebrate their uniqueness but in nutshell that uniqueness is nothing but a variation in conditioning.

Being predictable isn't wrong; in fact it is very much required for the order of our daily life. But worry is that many of us have started believing our conditioning as our reality. We have forged rigid ideas of good and bad. And because of which we refuse to accommodate new ideas; new perspectives and new paradigms. I call it "A for Apple" syndrome.

All of us must strive to break free of this illusion. On occasions it is nice to imagine "A" as "Another World" which has "Ten Moons" and "A Sun" which melts by evening to cause a flood of light.