Unrecognised Conditioning

Q&A with Idries Shah, from Learning How To Learn (1978)


Q: According to the Sufis, is there any knowledge of the difference
between teaching and conditioning; and do people know what
they want when they set out to learn?


A: People are conditioned not only by deliberate indoctrination,
but also by systems whose proponents themselves are ignorant of
the need for safeguards to prevent conditioning. People are also
conditioned by a constellation of experiences. In most human
societies, unanimity of thought has been arrived at by an unrecognised
conditioning process in which virtually all the society's
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 foregoing,
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 maintained
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 purposes, 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 how their views are the product of conditioning tend to assume, in the crudest possible manner, that whoever told them this is himself 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: nonconditioning-
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 invaded
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
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.



This is in itself a higher stage than any repetition or drilling or
rehashing of words or exercises or theories. And, in its way, it is a
challenge. Can the participants, or can they not, really enter an
area where their effectively cruder desires and automatic responses
are not pandered to?



If they cannot, they have excluded themselves from the Teaching.
In order to become eligible, it is the would-be students who have
to 'sort themselves out". They have to examine themselves and see
whether they have merely been using their studies to fulfill social
desires, or personal psychological aims, or to condition themselves.



They should also be told the simple fact that, for instance, if you
shout 'I must wake up!' often enough, it will put you to sleep. If
their sense of power, for instance, is being fed by means of the
suggestion that they are studying something that others do not
know, they will get no further. If they are deriving any personal
pleasure or other benefit from 'teaching' others, they will not learn
any more. If they depend upon their study-community alone or
mainly for friends or somewhere to go once or twice a week or
month, they will get no further.



There has been a confusion between teaching and the social or
human function. To help or to entertain someone else is a social,
not an esoteric, duty. As a human being you always have the
social and humanitarian duty. But you do not necessarily have the
therapeutic duty; indeed, you may be much less well qualified for it
than almost any conventional professional therapist.



It is impossible to spend time with virtually any religious,
philosophical and esotericist group, or even to read its literature,
without seeing that a large number of the people involved, perhaps
through no fault of their own, and because of ignorance of the
problems, are using these formats for sociological or psychological
purposes of a narrow kind. It is not that their spiritual life is right
in these groups. It is that their social life is inadequate.



'As above, so below'. Just as in ordinary worldly considerations
there can be inefficiency or confusion as to aims, so there may be
in approaching higher knowledge. You may be able, initially, to
pursue higher aims through lower mechanisms and theories, but
you cannot pursue them by indulging short-term personal interests.



You must follow your personality interests somewhere else. In an
advanced society there are more institutions catering for such outlets
than anyone could possibly need. Make sure that your professional,
commercial, social, psychological and family needs are fulfilled
in the society to which you belong. The rest of you is the
part which can be communicated with by means of the specialised
techniques available to those who have a comprehensive and
legitimate traditional learning: and who have the means of safeguarding
it.



This is what you have to study first of all. Most people are
trying to effect something else, no matter what they imagine that
they are doing. Fortunately, it is not hard to recognise this if
enough sincere effort is expended.



In ordinary life, if you think that your family is largely a
commercial proposition, people will point out that you are misguided.
If you thought that your profession was mainly for social
purposes, people would soon put you right. It is time that you
were correctly informed in this field as well. You must know, or
find out, the difference between meeting to learn and experience
something, and meeting in order to be emotionally stimulated or
intellectually tested or socially reassured.



There is no harm at all in a social ingredient in a human
relationship: far from it. But when this gets out of balance, and a
human contact becomes an excuse for a social contact, you are
not going to learn, no matter what materials you are working with.
'Due proportion' is a secret skill of the teacher.



The repeated upsurge of apparently different schools of higher
study in various epochs and cultures is due in large part to the
need to rescue genuine traditional teachings from the automatism
and social-psychological-entertainment functions which regularly
and deeply invade and, for the most part, eventually possess them.



Certain physical and mental exercises, as an example, are of
extremely significant importance for the furthering of higher
human functions. If these are practised by people who use things
for emotional, social or callisthenic purposes, they will not operate
on a higher level with such people. They become merely a means
of getting rid of surplus energy, or of assuaging a sense of frustration.



The practitioners, however, regularly and almost invariably
mistake their subjective experiences of them for 'something higher'.
It is for this reason that legitimate traditional higher teachings
are parsimonious with their materials and exercises. Nobody with
a task to perform can possibly (if he knows about his task) do so in
a manner which is not benefiting people on the level required.



The foregoing information should be read and studied and
understood as widely as possible. Without it there is little possibility
of serving any group of people, anywhere, otherwise than
socially or with shallow psychology, no matter what theories,
systems or exercises are employed.



Where there is ideology, conditioning and indoctrination, a
mechanical element is introduced which drives out the factor of
extradimensional reality perception which connects the higher
functions of the mind with the higher reality.



Sufi experiences are designed to maintain a harmony with and
nearness to this Reality, while mechanical systems effectively distance people from it.



WHO GUARDS THE COAT



Attar, in his Recitals of the Saints, tells a story of the great Sufi
Habib Ajami, when he went to a river to wash, leaving his coat
lying on the ground. Hasan of Basra was passing and saw it.
Thinking that someone should look after this property, he stood
guard over it until Habib returned.

Hasan then asked Habib whom he had left looking after the
coat.

'In the care' said Habib, 'of him who gave you the task of
looking after it!'



This anecdote, intended to indicate the way in which affairs
work out for Sufis, is often taken by raw imitators as something to
copy, so that they test 'destiny' by abandoning things and neglecting
duties: with results which correspond with their stage of
ignorance.




--from "Teaching Methods and Prerequisites" in Learning How to Learn (1978), pgs. 257-262