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institutions may be branches of the conditioning process.
This information is neither new nor necessarily exciting. But it
is essential. What is new about it is that it has been concisely and
effectively revealed in studies made in the West, notably since the
end of the Korean war. If you do not know or believe the fore-
going, you will either have to accept it as a working hypothesis, or
else leave all attempts at studying other matters aside until you
have caught up with this information in the generally available
sources on the subject. In such a case your basic information is
incomplete, and your prospects of progress are as limited in a
higher sense as if you were trying to become an academic but
were not yet literate.
Certain traditional teaching-systems have continuously main-
tained the knowledge of this 'conditioning by environment' factor.
The essence of their systems has been twofold: (1) to stress the
fact of conditioning, in order to redress the imbalance produced
by it; and (2) to provide study-formats and human groupings in
which the conditioning cannot easily operate.
No such systems deny the value of conditioning for certain pur-
poses: but they themselves do not use it. They are not trying to
destroy the conditioning mechanism, upon which, indeed, so much
of life depends.
This is the first lesson: People who are shown for the first time
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how their views are the product of conditioning tend to assume, in
the crudest possible manner, that whoever told them this is him-
self opposed to conditioning, or proposes to do something about it.
What any legitimate system will do, however, is to point out that
conditioning is a part of the social scene and is confused with
'higher' things only at the point when a teaching has become
deteriorated and has to 'train' its members.
The second lesson is that the majority of any group of people
can be conditioned, if the group is in effect a random one: non-
contitioning-prone groups can only be developed by selecting
people who harmonise in such a manner as to help defeat this
tendency.
People who hear this may tend automatically to assume that this
is a doctrine of the elite. But this assumption is only accepted
by them because they are ignorant of the process and the
bases. The primary object is to associate people together who
can avoid conditioning, so that a development can take place
among these people which in turn can be passed on to larger
numbers. It can never be applied to large numbers of people
directly.
Many people who hear for the first time that conditioning is
a powerful, unrecognised and spiritually ineffective development
react in another manner which is equally useless. They assume
that since conditioning is present in all the institutions known to
them (including any which they themselves esteem highly) that it
must always be essential. This is only due to the fact that they are
not willing to face the fact that any institution may become in-
vaded by a tendency which is dangerous to it. This is not the same
as saying that the institution is based upon it.
When people are collected together to be exposed to materials
which will defy or avoid conditioning, they will always tend to
become uncomfortable. This discomfort is due to the fact that they
are not receiving from these materials the stimuli to which they
have become accustomed as conditioned people. But, since they
generally lack the full perception of what is in the materials, (and
since it is a characteristic of conditioning materials that they may
masquerade as independently arrived-at facts), such people do not
know what to do. The solution to this problem which they will
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tend to adopt is some kind of rationalisation. If they receive no
accustomed stimulus of an emotional sort, they will regard the
new or carefully selected materials as 'insipid'.
This is a further lesson. Everyone should realise that the vicious
circle must be broken somewhere and somehow. To substitute
one conditioning for another is sometimes ridiculous. To provide
people with a stimulus of a kind to which they have become
accustomed may be a public or social service: it is not teaching
activity of a higher sort.
Unfortunately people have been so trained as to imagine that
something which is hard to understand or hard to do, in a crude
sense, is a true exercise. Hence, people are often willing to sacrifice
money, physical effort, time, comfort. But if they are asked (say)
not to meet, or to sacrifice the attention of a teacher, this they find
nearly impossible to bear, simply because their training is such that
they are behaving as addicts. They may want sacrifice or effort,
but only the kind which they have been trained to believe is sacrifice
or effort. 'Stylised effort', though, is no effort at all.
Most unfortunately, they do not know that the system to which
they have been trained has always (if they have developed such a
taste for it as we have just described) fulfilled its optimum possible
developmental function at a point long before we are likely to have
encountered them. It has now become a vice, ritual or habit which
they are unable to recognise as such.
The prerequisite of an advanced form of teaching is that the
participants shall be prepared to expose themselves to it, and not
only to some travesty which gives them a lower nutrition to which
they have become accustomed. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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