Hold your hand at arm's length from your head. Make that quacking duck motion with your hand pointed at your head. Say to yourself, "yip! yip! yip! yip! yip!"
THAT is what my favorite zen teacher calls conditioned mind.
Conditioned mind, or egocentric karmic conditioning, is out there yammering away all the time. Conditioned mind doesn't really want you to be happy (though it will frequently claim to be acting in your best interests). Conditioned mind is all of the *stuff* that we learned as children, whether we knew it or not, that we have so internalized that we don't even recognize it as conditioning anymore.
For instance, last week, Conditioned Mind spoke to me LOUD and CLEAR, and I actually believed and acted based on what CM said to me:
I went to a reception that was being hosted by Naropa University in Boulder CO. They have a contemplative education program, and a Master's program. I am thinking about pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Naropa meets so many of my needs in so many ways:
a) Contemplative education -- the university was founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the main guys who brought Buddhism to the West. By definition, it's not like other cutthroat master's programs.
b) Their writing program is called The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. That alone should be enough.
c) It is in Boulder, Colorado. Look, if someone came up to me on the street tomorrow and said, "I will take you back to Colorado, but the only condition is you have to marry me," I'd ask which subway goes to City Hall. The fact that there is this amazing Buddhist thing going on there is enough for me to take myself there.
Okay, so I'm not going now, or even probably next year, but my promise to my heart -- to my heart, people -- has been that I will go back to Colorado by the end of the decade. Yes, I am homesick. That's a story for another entry
So I go to this reception, and it's fine, and you may not believe it, but I'm feeling kind of shy. Hang around the fringes and listen politely shy. Everything is fine while the good people of Naropa are talking about the University. Suddenly, they start breaking the room up into groups -- "people interested in grad programs over here," and "undergrads over there."
Listen: here's where CM kicked in, and here's what it said, "What the hell are you doing here? You don't belong in this room! Those other people -- they're the writers and artists! What makes you think you're any kind of writer!"
Needless to say, I am well-conditioned. Working on it, but still prone to occasionally listening to CM. So at that moment, I got up and fled the room in an agony of UN-confidence.
The upside of this is that instead of going into "Oh, well, it really wasn't for me, anyway," rationalization that I do, I realized and recognized what had happened right away. The downside? I was already on a downtown 6 train headed home.
Then I very, very gently and as lovingly as possible reminded myself that I am a writer. I just forgot how to nourish my writer. And I am just learning how to do that -- by writing. And I also reminded myself that Naropa will be back, and in fact isn't going anywhere, and that just because I left this reception, it doesn't mean I won't go to another one.
We're back at conscious, compassionate awareness.
Now, think about all these things CM was telling me. I couldn't possibly imagine saying any of these terrible things to a friend. One of the things I'm slowly absorbing is how to treat myself in the way a loving friend would treat me.
Annie & I were talking about this last night when I got home from meditation class, and she quoted Cheri thus:
"Never leave the loving conversation with the person who is in pain."
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