A Thought on Conditioning

After being related a story by a friend just back from a rather intense family Thanksgiving visit, I loaned her a favorite book of mine, What Do You Say After You Say Hello?, by Eric Berne, MD. If you’ve ever wondered why people do the things they do, check out this book. It’s a pretty easy read, given it’s a text for psychoanalysts.

So, what is it that you say after you say hello? It depends on what you’re trying to get from any given interaction. Berne outlines the scripts people live, and shows how we’re conditioned by our early home environments to perform certain roles.

SO, then, again: conditioning. The roles we play aren’t indicative of our true natures. An astrological birth chart is a map of possibilities, and two major factors determine which sets of realities we create from those possibilities: conditioning and free will.

Our free will is often, by our beliefs of what’s possible, shaped by that conditioning. Okay, so I’m really saying that it’s often not even two factors that determine what reality we’ll create; there are times when it’s all about conditioning.

Last week I gave a talk on a new view of spirituality in the birth chart. When dealing with any issue, including spirituality, key is a client’s conditioning. Regarding matters of spirit, we have to look not only at Neptune/Pisces/12th house, but also Jupiter/Sagittarius/9th house to understand the conditioning surrounding belief. We have to look at the asteroid Lucifer (1930) to understand the conditioning around a person’s relationship with the idea of and the reality of the existence of a higher power. We have to look at the asteriod Arjunsuri (20300) to understand the person’s relationship with his or her own conscience (whose voice/authority is considered the ultimate authority?). The picture is pretty complex when you get deeply into any individual chart, but it all comes down to conditioning.

As long as we’re on the subject, I’ll note that every interaction you have with your family and those with whom you’ve been close for a long time, offer the opportunity to see your conditioning. If you’re someone who has difficulty dealing on some level dealing with family/where you came from and yet are going back for upcoming holiday festivities of some sort or other, see if you can catch yourself in however you want to react to any stressful situations and hold up a second. Wait a minute, and instead of reacting how you perhaps always have, make a different choice. That’s how you start breaking conditioning!

Brought to you by the “Down With Outmoded Conditioning” Committee, with additional support from the “Pluto in Libra ‘Can’t We All Get Along?’” Cabal.

Tom is available for spirit-guided karmic astrology readings. Contact him via his website.

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November 25, 2007 By Tom Jacobs