“De-conditioning habit patterns” merits re-thinking. So does “letting go of reactivity.” So does “eliminating the underlying tendencies.” Understood categorically (or hazily), such phrases depend on and reinforce the view that we should somehow eliminate all unconscious, automatic mental and emotional processes, as such. That instead, we should learn to live entirely in and by the light of consciousness, fully aware of everything – every last thing that moves us in any given moment. That learning to do this would be tantamount to enlightenment.
When such phrases come up — and they circulate freely in dharma circles — it’s usually the more complex, emotional “habit patterns” that we have in mind for “de-conditioning.” In particular, the painful ones. Typically we’re talking about patterns of emotional reaction entrained by trauma — by childhood family dysfunction, by pernicious social conditioning, or by other harmful life experiences. We’re talking about disproportionate reactions like lashing out in excessive anger or recoiling in fear or panic for little cause; dissociating in the face of challenges; or shutting down when intimacy is offered. Or milder ones like being habitually late, or oppositional, or self-demeaning, or self-defeating. The appeal of eliminating such “habit patterns” is clear: they’re not good for us or those around us. We don’t want them.
Bringing them into consciousness – whether through meditation, therapy, or otherwise – can certainly play a helpful role. Becoming aware of such patterns lets us recognize and work with them. Consciousness, mindfulness, awareness (understood synonymously) helps reveal their inner workings, allows us to re-frame them, to loosen and sometimes break their grip. The simple act of recognizing and sustaining attention on an emotional response as it unfolds draws us out of it, gives us perspective on it, attenuates it, and may, in a sense, eliminate it. (But only in a sense. Emotional patterns are less things to be eliminated than configurations to be reconfigured.)
Yet it’s a mistake to see the problem with unwanted emotional responses – “habit-patterns” – as their automaticity, their unconsciousness. This can’t be the problem, because all conscious experience depends upon and is built up out of unconscious content and processes. We can’t live without unconscious mental and emotional processing. The faculty of attention, the directing of consciousness, necessarily filters out a great deal of what we perceive and cognize in the course of functioning. As it makes conscious whatever content it selects in a given moment, attention stands ready to re-focus on other, unconscious (or pre-conscious) content when it becomes more relevant.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience, while driving, of hitting the brakes before you’re even conscious that the brake lights of the car ahead have lit up. Your unconscious knowledge of that red light informs your response even before you consciously see the red light. Blindsight offers a dramatic demonstration of unconscious mental processing. Would you really want to eliminate your capacity for such processing, to break habits like breaking automatically? You wouldn’t be around to enjoy your resulting enlightenment for long.
It’s the same with automatically-triggered emotional patterns, and not only the negative ones. Consider the sense of aversion that comes up – for reasons you can’t put your finger on – when you sense that someone is lying to you. Or the sense of caution that warns you off some foolhardy decision well before you understand why it’s a bad idea. Or the sense of heart or steadfastness that leads you to be faithful, or diligent, or trustworthy when challenges to those values come up. Such responses – conditioned, pre-conscious, automatic – aren’t problems. They’re supports for our well-being.
So the problem with unwanted “habit patterns” isn’t that they’re habitual – unconscious, automatic, or conditioned. It’s that they’re bad. It’s that the’re unwholesome, detrimental, harmful to ourselves and/or others. They constitute or engender suffering. They’re dysfunctional, in contrast to the countless “habit patterns” – unconscious processes – that enable us to function well. As is true in most areas of the dharma, the ethical significance of emotional patterns lies in whether they are harmful or beneficial. It’s not about whether they are conscious or unconscious (or for that matter, pleasant or unpleasant, as emotional reasoning might prompt).
Bringing consciousness to “habit patterns” is a means, not an end. Where negative “habit patterns” are concerned, it’s a means to learning more wholesome ones. In the course of meditation, one practices “letting go” of negative “habit patterns” as they come up. (One practices letting go of other mental and emotional content too, but this isn’t my subject here.) This is to say, one brings consciousness to them, investigating and understanding them as I’ve described. This opens up the necessary mental and emotional space – by substituting calmer, more creative states; by integrating unprocessed trauma; by soothing our general emotional twitchiness – to develop other, better responses than the unwholesome ones we’re freeing ourselves from.
On or off the meditation cushion, we can then develop more wholesome responses. In the calmer states we’ve accessed, we can imagine better responses, understand what they would be like, and in time, with practice, we can deliberately, intentionally perform them. If we practice them sufficiently, we can learn them more deeply, which means, learn to perform them intuitively, naturally, without effort. In other words, we can make new “habit patterns” out of them. Enacting skillful responses consciously is good – a necessary step in moving past unwholesome ones – but internalizing them is better, and this means developing automaticity in performing them.
Nonetheless, many of us get sidetracked into imagining (I’ve spent countless hours at it) some ideal state of complete de-conditioning – a state independent of any and all conditions (in some circles capitalized as “the Unconditioned”). In this state, we would know with full awareness what we should do, say, think, or feel. Every moment of our lives would proceed harmoniously and well. Yet somehow, despite the complete consciousness with which we understand and respond in this state to everything, we imagine that it will all happen spontaneously — easily, effortlessly. But this just means (setting aside any negative connotations of the words) automatically, unconsciously. Thus, “de-conditioning” is an incoherent ideal, one not in accordance with how things are or what we are.
In short, not “de-conditioning” but rather “re-conditioning” describes what we’re trying to do, and what we do better to aim for. Let’s not aim for a state of exalted blankness – a mysterious, impersonal, non-specific identity that somehow constitutes being no one while somehow continuing to live and function (a common misconstrual of anatta, “no self”). Let’s reject as any kind of ideal the thousand-yard stare of the modern spiritual teacher purported to signify “no-one home.”
Instead, aim to recondition suffering into goodness: peaceful, wholesome states of mind, understanding, and the benefits to oneself and others that accompany them.
Jargon-check:
Anusaya (“underlying tendencies”). In the traditional understanding, this Pali term refers to our tendency towards greed, hatred, and delusion. As employed in the Pali canon, it can reasonably be interpreted in various ways, including both the orthodox Theravada understanding and the way I’m approaching it. In contemporary dharma circles — in line with Theravada orthodoxy — it’s understood to refer to our general propensity, shared by all who are unenlightened, to see things from the viewpoint of self, and the task of uprooting the anusaya goes hand-in-hand with eradicating self-view. However, I find it more useful, and truer to the dharma, to understand anusaya to refer to our specific tendencies as individuals, our trauma-entrained or otherwise neurotic responses — in short, our personal array of detrimental “habit patterns.” Note that my interpretation doesn’t contradict the orthodox view.
De-conditioning. See above. Note how in dharma circles, “de-conditioning habit patterns” links the ordinary English meaning of the term, “unlearning an entrained behavior,” to the religious ideal of the Unconditioned (the state that lies beyond all conditions, AKA the Imperturbable, the Extinguished, Nirvana). It furthermore subtly affirms the sectarian view of Nirvana as equivalent to some absolute, trans-personal consciousness.
Habit pattern. A habit is, of course, a pattern, as we use these terms in ordinary English. But whereas a habit in ordinary English can be either good or bad, a habit pattern is understood in dharma circles to be bad.
Reaction vs. Response. In dharma circles, these two words are sometimes deployed as an opposition, with “reaction” understood to be reflexive and automatic (and worse), and “response” as conscious and deliberate (and better). In ordinary English, both words are used in both ways, but more neutrally. Degree of volition is indicated explicitly or by context, if relevant.