Becoming Aware of Our Formative Conditioning and Transcending Our Lower Nature in Becoming a Sovereign Being

Posted On September 27, 2023 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

Very few people understand the true nature and power of our initial conditioning because it occurs through what we can call a ‘hypnotic state’. The process of hypnosis works by subduing the conscious aspect of our mind, which is the ‘gatekeeper’, so to speak, that decides what to let into our mind and what to keep out, and then giving the subconscious suggestions that it takes in without resistance and uses to build an imaginary reality out of that serves as the basis for producing an equivalent outer experience. As a child, we’re born into the world with only our subconscious mind active, while our conscious mind is in a dormant, seed state. Our conscious mind, which is also called our higher mind, is the part of us that thinks, judges, discriminates, discerns, reasons, forms internal concepts of ideas in order to understand them, and makes decisions that we then willfully act out to produce an experience. This part of our mind is initially inactive and undeveloped, and systematically develops in four, seven years stages.

The initial stage of development begins around the age of 6 or 7, when we first start developing the ability to think for ourselves in a rational and logical manner as the means of problem solving and figuring out how things work. Before this age, we’re completely within the group mind of our subconscious, which is passive and receptive in nature, where the only thing we know is what we’re told and taught by others. This subconscious stage of development is the same trance-like state used in hypnosis, where we take in a suggestion being given to us by another and build it into a reality in our mind’s eye, where it serves to provide us with a form of life-pattern and behavioral dynamic that operates in an automatic manner through ‘reactive behaviors’ set in motion through emotional triggers.

As a child we’re trained to the dynamic being acted out by our family group that we’re a part of and begin playing a distinct role in as we grow and begin maturing. Our subconscious is symbolic, metaphorical, experiential, habitual, and emotional in nature, and learns or develops patterns through experience. It learns by watching, imitating what’s being demonstrated, and doing something in a repetitive manner. It’s not literal in nature, and isn’t programmed based on what we’re being told, but rather based on what we’re observing being demonstrated around us, and what we experience through the unconscious programming and behaviors of our family dynamic. In this manner we acquire, so to speak, through a natural process of imitation and participation, the same mental model as our parents and key figures in our life. This mental model is formed out of the attitudes, values, behaviors, beliefs, and dynamics being conducted by the entire group, of which we are a member and begin gradually taking on a particular role in co-creating.  The mental model we form from an unconscious state is what you can think of as our initial programming which is built into our nature and becomes the means through which we process everything as a means of creating how we experience life.

The Polarized Aspects of Our Mind

We all have two aspects of our mind, one unconscious and instinctual, that acts out of memory inherent in our species, the other conscious and self-aware, that has the ability to create our own personal memories, which we ultimately begin using in place of natural memory. One is objective and common to everyone in a similar fashion, and the other is subjective and created by how we personalize our experiences by giving them meaning. As an adult, if you think back on your childhood, you’ll realize that you can’t really remember anything before the age of 5 or 6, and even these memories are vague and sketchy, and often formed out of pictures you’ve seen or what you heard others saying about what happened. Somewhere around 6 or 7 we start forming our own memories of the events in our life, while our conscious mind is only beginning to develop. This is where we start giving things meaning based on the emotions we’re experiencing at the time, without having the ability to reason or think rationally about things, and so the meaning we initially give things is based on how we felt.

As we begin giving events and different experiences in our life meaning, we begin developing a ‘story’ out of the meaning, and this story becomes a kind of mental filter we use as the means of shaping how we experience things. Before the age of 6 or 7, our experiences are more objective and non-personal in nature and don’t have a dialogue built around them. As we begin maturing and start exercising our ability to think and create, we begin forming how we experience things based on what we tell ourselves about what’s happening. Out of our self-produced experiences, we begin shaping an ‘image of ourselves’ based on how we ‘sense ourselves’ through and as the main character in our own story.

The meaning we give our experiences that forms our story about things, is threefold in nature, and means something about us, about the other people involved, and about how the world is in general, and this is how we initially begin telling ourselves a story that’s completely cohesive and harmonious. Where the parts fit perfectly into the greater whole, and they play out together in any situation or set of circumstances in a completely logical and harmonious way. We do this initially in a completely natural and automatic way, without being aware of the fact that we’re the one creating it through our thoughts and internal processes. We honestly feel as though everything is being done to us by others and an outside force, beyond our ability to influence or control it, because we haven’t developed a strong sense of ourselves as an ‘individual’ and independent of everything else, and are still functioning primarily out of our subconscious as a part of the group we live with. At this point in our development, we’re shaped and determined by others through our own unconscious reactions.

The story that we continue to develop as we get older is shaped out of the feelings and emotions we experienced as a child before we had the ability to think about what was happening in a rational manner. Our story takes shape and begins evolving through an internal dialogue we form with ourselves (notice this is always plural), where ‘one part of us’ is always talking to ‘another part of us’ explaining and describing things, while telling a story about them that make them mean something. We start developing a narrative around everything as a way of thinking about them. The same group of emotions and behaviors are consistently produced and maintained through our family dynamic, and this is what gives our story continuity.

When we’re a child we don’t have a sense of ourselves as being separate from the people around us, and so we start off giving things meaning by making everything about us. If our parents are unhappy or upset a lot, we imagine it to be our fault somehow. We look for a reason without having the rational capacity of our mind developed to the point where we can see our parents and other family members as separate from us, and individuals in their own life. Our higher mind of thought and reason, which is what creates our reality out of our thoughts, is being controlled and utilized by our lower, subconscious mind to create the reality of our emotions, and that reality keeps us steeped in the same emotional cocktail and telling the same type of story over and over.

Because this process is initially formed while we’re in a primarily unconscious and receptive state, completely unaware of ourselves as an individual with the will to create and therefore lacking the capacities of our higher mind to think in a rational and reasonable manner, we’re literally ‘programmed’ with it as a fundamental part of our inner nature and character. This means that all our internal processes act to consistently tell the same type of story, no matter what our outer situation or circumstances are. We do it automatically without awareness of what we’re doing, or that we’re the one creating it by how we internalize everything to make them mean the same thing. The story we form becomes our life theme that we continue to play out in a natural, automatic, and unaware manner throughout our adult life.

We’re unconscious in the most basic sense of not being aware of what we’re doing or realizing that we’re the one who created it initially and continue to play it out internally through how we think about things. It seems real to us because it’s how we process everything internally to create our experiences, and our higher mind works to produce the outer reality (perception) of our inner thoughts and feelings. It comes natural to us because it acts early on to form our mental model as a dynamic set of mental filters that form our ‘perceptual lens’ and determines what we ‘see’ and ‘don’t see’ in any situation. As we grow older and our conscious mind continues to develop, and as we reach puberty around 12 to 13 years of age, we start forming our ‘identity’ as a natural outgrowth of our personality.

Our identity is our ‘sense of self’ as an individual formed out of our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences that locks us into a mental prison of our own making, usually without us ever realizing its our own creation and that we have the ability to change it. When we do realize it and decide to change it by using our will, we come face to face with the realization that we don’t know ‘how’ to be different, we don’t know how to feel different or create a different way of experiencing ourselves. Change feels unnatural and awkward to us because it requires us to move out of habitual patterns and automated tendencies, and step willingly into unknown territory.

Emotions are powerful and addictive, and once they start running how we think and perceive the world around us, they can be gripping and controlling. Many people are completely run by their emotions and continue to live out of the dramas they create as if they’re real (to everyone) and objective in nature. They don’t realize that their illusions they made up as a means of expressing how they felt. We lose site of the fact that we’re actually the one creating how we perceive the world around us through how we process things internally and adapt them to our mental model, where they play out in what seems like a completely natural way in our environment and through different types of relationships.

We conform any situation, person, or group of people to fit into and play a role in our own story about things. Our mental model and perceptual lens acts to form everything around us into the same thematic configuration based on what we go into a situation ‘expecting’ to find. Our expectations form a mental filter that determines what we notice and don’t notice, what stands out as a correlation to our expectation and can be used to form the reality we expect to see, allowing us to continue telling the same story about things. Our expectations form the basis for our experiences and are what gives them continuity. They form what you can call a ‘vibratory frequency’ that orders (separates and filters out) and calls forth (activates) in everything around us what matches and can be used to tell more of the same story. This is a form of natural selection that functions automatically through resonance.  

Karmic Patterns Established through Our Initial Conditioning

As we’re growing up, we take on a particular perspective and role in our family dynamic, and whatever other dynamics we live in and become a natural part of. We’re born into this world with a ‘predisposition’ as inherent character traits that are in a latent state, and the parts of our character become active is based on how we’re stimulated by the world around us. As certain characteristics are activated and brought out in us, they’re then developed through the dynamic that ensues as a behavioral pattern and way of being. Some parts of our character are brought out constantly, others only occasionally, while others remain dormant in us and form what we tend to call our latent potential. Our intrinsic character is developed into what you can think of as a unique formula or pattern of characteristics that form our attitude, temperament, perspective, and all the natural behaviors associated with our personality.

Life patterns are dynamic in nature because we not only play a single role in that dynamic, but play ‘every role’ in it, some with awareness and intention, others in a semi-conscious way, and others in a completely unconscious way as ‘natural behavior’ we display without thinking about them or forming an awareness of what we’re doing, and more importantly, what they’re ‘causing’. Our pattern as a dynamic correlates with everyone else’s pattern because they play out as ‘themes’ that act to stimulate, facilitate, and feed each other. Each person plays out a correlating pattern as a part of a greater pattern that forms a universal theme.

When we form a belief, for example, of not being wanted or chosen over others, where we feel others aren’t there for us or turn their back on us and abandon us in times of need, we continue to display and play out the behaviors that cause us to be shun or rejected by others without being ‘aware of it’ or owning it. We also take an attitude of not being there for others, turning our back on them, and ultimately abandoning them, the only difference is we have a different reason for what we’re doing that makes it seem different.  We not only facilitate and cause our own abandonment, but cause others to feel abandoned by us, where they react in a like manner. We play both and active and passive role in creating the same pattern as a group experience over and over as we go through life. We’re always giving out and doing to others what we in turn imagine is being done to us by them. We play out the same pattern both consciously through a thought process and intentional actions, and unconsciously through feelings and natural behaviors, that are reciprocating. We’re always causing the same patterns through a ’cause and effect relationship’ that’s reciprocal (polar) in nature.

We tend to think that we’re subject to and always playing out one role and perspective in a group dynamic, but upon closer examination we can realize that we’re actually programmed with a ‘whole pattern’, that we both ’cause’ through unconscious emotional activities, and then experience as being done to us by others. This becomes slippery and elusive, because we’re rejected and abandoned by others in a faithful and consistent manner, we simply don’t realize or own our own part in causing or producing it. In order to consistently experience being abandoned and not good enough, or not chosen and wanted, we display the same behaviors and actions towards others while telling ourselves a different reason for why we’re doing it, causing them to feel as if they’re not good enough or wanted by us, or we let them down and screw them over with a subliminal vendetta, and they react by abandoning us. Once they abandon us, it validates us and empowers our story about being abandoned.

The Vibratory Frequency of Our Mental Paradigm

Because our mental paradigm is largely unconscious in nature and forms how we perceive and experience the world around us, the pattern inherent in it’s structure vibrates at a particular frequency that causes us to naturally attract and be attracted to those who are conditioned with the same dynamics and tendencies. We’re always engaging naturally with those who can play a complementary role in acting out the same type of experience with us through a natural interaction and way of being. All attractions, in the most basic sense, are unconscious and natural and come in an automatic way. This is what causes us to always end up in the same type of relationship with the same type of people, which leaves us ultimately feeling the same way. People who vibrate at a different frequency than we do, which means they’ve been conditioned to a different dynamic and way of being, don’t interest us. There’s no chemistry or stimulation and we don’t feel compelled by or drawn to them. They form a part of the background and we don’t pay much attention to them. We don’t relate to them because they don’t serve to validate or participate in our story about things.

When we have an immediate attraction to someone it’s because unconsciously we’re resonating with them (energetically) and they act to stimulate us subliminally and draw our attention to them as a result. If we realize we’re attracted to the wrong type of people and we try to consciously change who we’re attracted to, it doesn’t work because we have to change our own mental paradigm in order to have a natural chemistry with a different type of person. If we’re living out of an emotional drama of not being good enough, not loved, wanted, betrayed, and so on, we continue to be attracted to those who will play a complementary role in co-creating that type of experience. We’re always subject to our own thoughts and feelings, and as long as we continue to think and feel the same way, we continue to play out the same dynamics that give us more of that same feeling, and we attract the same type of people and situations as a result.

 Giving up our story once we realize what we’re doing and why, can be more difficult than it sounds, because our story forms the basis for our identity and how we’ve come to experience, and therefore ‘know ourselves’. To change our story means to change our identity, and this can send us into an identity crisis that most aren’t equipped to undergo properly. When we let go of our story about things, we come face to face with the realization that we no longer ‘know who we are’ or what to do in the general sense, and we’re faced with stepping into the unknown with a heightened sense of awareness.  

When we move out of being created by others through habitual perceptions and tendencies born out of our conditioning, and step consciously into forming a brand-new story about our life, we can often feel lost in the most basic sense of the idea, and not know what to do or how to be. This is because when we wake up from our own unconscious stupor, where everything came automatically and we didn’t have to think about anything or make rational decisions about who and how we were going to be, we realize we don’t know who we want to be instead. We step into being empowered in our own life creation through the ability to direct our own thoughts and actions, and wiping the slate clean we stand before a blank canvas, only to realize we don’t have a vision for ourselves or our life. We can only act to consciously create what we have first developed into a detailed idea on the inner planes of our imagination. In order to create in an intentional and deliberate way, we have to form an idea of how we want to be instead and what kind of experiences we want to have as a result.

We then have to discipline ourselves by refraining from natural impulses and reactions, while remaining self-aware, analyzing our situation and deciding what we want to in place of an automatic reaction. We have to become aware of our own patterns and attitude, knowing these will form our initial reaction to any form of stimulus, and refrain from reacting while turning our attention inward and observing our own internal processes. As we become aware of our own automatic processes, we can begin utilizing our rational mind to intentionally form a new way of perceiving it and decide with a clear mind how we’re going to respond or act in relation to what’s going on. If we decide, for example, that we’re not going to be a victim to other people’s attitude and behavior towards us, and we realize that we have a tendency to perceive and interpret things in a way that causes us to feel like we’re a victim, we can act on ourselves to correct our own way of thinking and perceiving. In doing so, we’re faced with the immediate question, if I’m not a victim to how I’m feeling and being treated right now, and to my own thoughts about it, and I am empowered instead, how would I see this and what would my response be?

Someone who feels like they’re a victim within their own life not only attract and are attracted to those who will ‘victimize them’, while also producing the behaviors that cause them to be victimized, but are also victimized by their own thoughts about things. They present things to themselves in a way that causes them to feel like a victim, without realizing its their own thoughts about things that’s causing them to feel that way. They feel helpless by how to set things up in their own mind. They frame an event in a way that creates an experience of being helpless in relation to what’s going on around them. They act vulnerable and afraid, bringing out the contrasting, complementary, predatory and dominating behavior in others. They cause themselves to be preyed upon by others, without realizing that’s what they’re doing. Even when others are considerate and accommodating they’ll still interpret it in a way that makes them feel like a victim, and then blame the other person for how they made themselves feel. This is what being ‘unconscious’ or ‘asleep’ in your own life means. It means you’re unaware of the fact that you’re actually the one creating how you experience your own life.

The ultimate secret that eludes us in the most basic sense comes in realizing that no one is ever really doing anything to us, in terms of how we feel and experience things, they only act to stimulate us in a way that causes us to do it to ourselves. It’s not what happens to us that traumatizes us, but how we form our experience of what happens by what we tell ourselves about what it means about us and the way life is. Nothing has meaning outside of the meaning we give it. All activities and what’s happening around us have nothing to do with us until we make it about us by how we interpret it to shape our experience of it. Experience, in the most basic sense, is always ‘subjective in nature’, because we first act to shape how we experience things, and then shape ourselves by how we identify with our experiences.

Someone else’s behavior comes from their model and inner nature and only acts to express who they are and how they perceive the world, and has nothing to do with us until we internalize it. We interpret their actions in a way that makes it say something about us based on the emotions triggered in us due to their actions and what psychological complex as an internal process is set in motion as a result. This can be understood through simple self-observation. The next time you feel triggered by what someone says or does, refrain from immediately going unconscious and reacting, and instead turn your attention inward and become aware of where you’re stimulated by it in your body, and what thought process is activated and set in motion in response to it. Notice what it appeals to and brings out in you that forms the basis for the automatic reaction that ensues. Notice that your experience comes through your own internal process and how you feel and think about it, rather than what acted to set it in motion. All emotional charges are directly connected to the memory you formed while in the same emotional state, and your reaction comes as the same behavioral pattern inherent in the memory. The emotion you experience causes you to immediately reference a memory formed out of the same emotion, where you say to yourself this means the same thing as that, and you act in the same manner to play out the same attitude and behavioral dynamic.

Healing through Compassion

The most basic way we heal ourselves psychologically of the unconscious patterns formed through our conditioning, comes through compassion, which is where we momentarily let go of our attachment to our own story about things, and we begin self-reflecting on what our part was in creating what happened. We use our higher mind, which is the ‘witnessing faculty’ of our mind, to observe the patterns formed out of our lower, subconscious mind, with an attitude of understanding rather than condemning. We step out of the experience and take on a third person perspective, where we’re detached from what’s happening emotionally, and watch it from above or outside of it, where we can see the whole pattern playing out. We don’t experience it from within it where we’re apart of it, but rather as if we’re another person watching it from a distance. As we watch it from a detached perspective, we can see what our own part is in co-creating it as a joint experience. What role did we play in the greater pattern playing out as a group dynamic? Just as others act to set our reactions in motion, we act to set theirs in motion, and what results is a joint venture.

Everything transpires and occurs through a natural process of action-reaction, stimulus-response, cause which produces an equivalent effect, where we play complementary roles in acting out the same thematic pattern together as a co-creation and shared experience. As long as we can’t see our own part in things we blame the other person or people involved and experience everything as being done to us and beyond our ability to control or stop it. Yet, upon closer observation and moving outside of our own feelings and attachment to what happened, we can see clearly what role we played in creating and maintaining the situation in a consistent fashion. Once we’re able to see the situation in an objective manner, we can then take responsibility for our own behavior, no matter what our reason was for doing it.

For example, a person who’s in an abusive relationship, can not only recognize what they do or don’t do that causes them to be abused, but can also realize that the first time the abuse took place they didn’t leave the relationship, or plainly state they weren’t going to put up with it, and stayed instead, making themselves available for it to happen again. They sent the message in staying that even though I don’t like this and it hurts me, I’ll allow it, and stay in the relationship allowing you to continue to treat me this way. And sure enough, the abuse continues and usually escalates. While you can imagine it’s happening to you undeservingly, where you’re a victim to your own partners abuse and toxic behavior, the fact is your condoning it because somewhere deep inside you feel you somehow deserve it and its warranted, or you’ve been treated that way before by people who ‘loved you’, and so it seems normal. Many times, the person being abused fails to recognize what they do, or how they interact that brings out or causes them to be abused and see themselves instead as being an innocent victim.

When we realize and own our own part in things, it not only gives us great insight into our own psychological makeup, much of which is hidden from our awareness, but also provides us with the means for working with our own tendencies in a self-aware manner. If we then extend this to understanding the other person’s perspective on the same thing, and view the situation from their point of view in terms of how they perceived our behavior, detached from our need to make it about what we need it to be about in order to justify our own behavior, we not only come to understand them better, but also understand ourselves better in relation with them. We can see how they perceived what we did and how we made them feel as a result, causing them to respond the way they did. We always have a reason for what we do that results from our own interpretation of things, while the person on the receiving end of what we do interprets our actions through their own model to make it mean something different. In a similar manner, how we interpret someones actions may not be at all the way they intended or meant it. Once we can look at the same dynamic being played out from different perspectives, it brings a much clearer understanding of the larger dynamic being played out and how it is everyone experiences the same thing in a different way that’s unique to them.

I can remember when I started looking at all the issues I had developed around my mother from her point of view as a person, rather than from my point of view as a child, it completely changed how I felt about things. As I became an adult myself, I started seeing my mom more as a person who was dealing with her own problems and challenges in the best way she knew how, while also being a mom to five kids, and it helped me to feel compassion for her instead of harboring hard feelings towards her. As I started taking an attitude of understanding by relating to my own situation in being a mom while also trying to manage a relationship, job, financial stability, and household, it helped me to understand what she was going through and why she ended up doing some of the things she did. I also started realizing how I acted in a way, unknowingly as a child, to cause her to react and treat me the way she did. I realized that when I detached emotionally from my point of view and my story about what happened and what it meant, and I took an attitude of relating to how everyone else felt in the same situation, a whole new world opened up, and I was able to realize how it was that I was repeating the same type of patterns I grew up in my own life by how I perceived things. It was the same type of activity, patterns, and relationships, the only thing that made them seem different was the reason each one of us had for doing what we did.

Summary

The most basic task we all face spiritually in life is to wake up from our own dream and self-made illusion, realize our psychological conditioning as a child in forming the thematic patterns we continue to play out unconsciously as an adult, and transcend our conditioned self by taking over the process of creating ourselves in a more self-aware and deliberate manner. To utilize our emotional reactions as the means of recognizing the unconscious dramas we’re playing out in an automated fashion, so we can become more aware and act ‘on ourselves’ to form new ways of perceiving and experiencing things. To rise above who we are naturally as our personality and programmed mindset, and decide who we’re going to be instead, and then exercise our will in becoming it. To become self-aware and self-directed in all we do.

As we wake up to the unconscious dramas we’re always playing out in our life in various ways, we’re provided with the opportunity to transform them into new and more productive ones. In order to become sovereign and self-directed, we have to form an idea of ourselves as we’d like to be, rather than as we ended up. All artists have to have a vision of what it is they’re creating in order to make it into a tangible reality. We have to form an ‘ideal’ of ourselves, where we no longer act to create our life from a reactive state of automated patterns and begin creating in a well thought-out and deliberate manner. Where we form new realizations that open the door to new possibilities, where we can make new decisions for ourselves and exercise our will in creating them. As we make a conscious decision about who we are, and we take action on that decision to turn it into a reality that we use to experience ourselves, we begin shaping ourselves in a disciplined manner and with a true sense of responsibility.

Dr. Linda Gadbois  

Personal Transformation Coach and Spiritual Mentor