One of the most difficult aspects of conditioning is the idea of time/scheduling: We are so conditioned to equate life to a schedule that we get blasted with massive and complex guilt if we ever veer outside of it; the underlying thought is “I shouldn’t trust my natural desires to guide my days. Horrible things will happen if I let go to myself”.
But why do we believe that?
Because our parents, our teachers and our society taught us that. We weren’t supported to trust our inner authority, our inner guidance, constantly being forced to go where we didn’t want to go and do what we protested we didn’t want to do.
We learned that to be “a good boy/good girl” we needed to obey, to discard our own wants and that “the right thing to do” came from outside sources.
We are comfortable with the idea of the weekend and the vacation, only because they are allowed by someone else.
Yet, all of us dream of free time/energy to do the things we want, the blissful permission to “play” in life and to trust in our instinctual rhythms (and also to sleep when we want and eat what and when we want), assured that we will be taken care of in the process.
We imagine that it’s time, money or any other external restriction that disallows us, but it’s not.
It’s only that we don’t feel we have permission to live this way, to trust that our being will naturally want to do what it’s really supposed to- what it came here to do, not what we learned it must- and that everything that it does not want to do, it SHOULD NOT actually do.
We do not see that it was our parents, teachers, society that created the perception that we wouldn’t be supported and protected in life by following ourselves, that we got taught it by how they acted towards us.
They chose to withdraw their approval or even punish us whenever we tried to follow ourselves.
They fabricated this style of living with no proof whatsoever that if we were allowed to let go and trust in ourselves that we would become a negative influence on the world or ourselves.
All they knew was that the child had no knowledge of the practical aspects of the world that pertained to survival. It just didn’t know how to protect itself.
So they used the fact that the child depended on the parent/society to survive to deny ALL of its inner knowledge.
And so we have had generations upon generations of people who have been supported in survival only by adhering to the whole paradigm of their parents’ way of life: “Throw yourself out or fend for yourself as a child”.
Obviously, children aren’t meant to survive on their own.
But they are meant to follow themselves when it comes to building their lives from the get-go.
No-one should ever have the right to control their child just because its survival is dependent. Parents are not supposed to mould their children.
They are not supposed to teach their children who to be. Just how life practically works (“this burns”, “that’s not edible”, “this is what this word means” etc).
This schedules-instead-of-life system is slavery and it is inherited, not natural, loving or effective.