Condition-Ing

"I just stopped by
To see what condition my condition was in..."

--Pop song performed by
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, 1971

According to my teacher's translation of Patanjali's third aphorism, Yoga Sutra 1.3, our minds will be able to perceive clearly only after we have overcome our conditioning. But what is this conditioning of which she speaks?

Her teacher, Gary Kraftsow writes in his book "Yoga for Wellness" that conditioning is "the result of our particular relation to our interpersonal and social environments; the result, in fact, of all our past actions." (Page XVI)

Kraftsow sees as conditioning as the primary influence on our every behavior, as we memorize and recall those techniques that seem to work for us (while avoiding those that don't) through the "twin processes of neuromuscular organization and socialization. Meanwhile, those particular patterns we each acquire and develop are always imperfect in some way, in relation to wellness: even though they allow us to function -- in fact, because they allow us to function and are therefore reinforced -- they inhibit our optimal development. The consequence of this conditioning is imbalance at various levels of our system, accumulation of stress, ultimately, dis-ease."

Now, consider the Hollywood movies produced and marketed during a fifty-year window of, say, 1920 to 1970. These wildly popular commercial vehicles traded on the fantasies of average and unremarkable people by depicting the kinds of protagonists and heroines the public wanted to see. As such, the paradigm of masculinity cultivated by Hollywood served not just as a fantasy, but as an agent of socialization, and as an ideal for boys and young men to emulate.

The classic Hollywood cowboy or soldier hero was always an idealist who revered women in general and his mother in particular, and because he believed in justice, was quick to risk his own life and fortune on behalf of the powerless and downtrodden. At the same time he was notably violence prone, never shrinking from demonstrating his superior mettle with his fists and, when the occasion arose, firearms, artillery, airplanes, or other explosive devices. He was brave to a fault, and despite his supposed virtues seemed to relish the violence which was inevitably the most important test of his character and the main pretext for these mass-appeal dramas. Always emphatically heterosexual, he nevertheless rode into sunset rather than settle into domesticity with the fair maiden, who was usually left standing by the road with her bosoms heaving, tearfully watching this unattainable apex of masculinity depart. "Love 'em and leave 'em," along with "Fight 'em and kill 'em" seemed to be his twin mottoes.

I would suggest that much of the trouble we're now experiencing as a people is traceable to this ideal of masculinity, which has conditioned American men to to behave in ways that are, as military planners like to say, "counter-productive." The violence on our urban streets now mirrors that in our entertainments, and the collapse of our consumer-oriented society at the hands of the Pirates of Wall Street reflects the "winner-take-all," "It's-a-jungle-out-there" world of predation and counter-predation depicted in our most popular dramas and stories over the last century.

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and will be as long as we continue to think of ourselves as dogs. A healthy dose of insight for everybody, one which dares to question our national conditioning, might ameliorate the situation. Fewer heroes would be called upon to stick up for the downtrodden in a society which treads more lightly than ours. As William Blake said, "Mercy would be no more / If there was nobody poor; / And pity would no more be / If all were as happy as we."