To initiate this discussion let us share a great quote from Liu I-ming, an alchemical Taoist of the early 19th century, to illustrate a Taoist attitude towards the conditioning of the past.
“The word battle has a deep meaning. Once people’s primal yang culminates and mixes with temporal conditioning, the senses and their objects as they have been conditioned through history become active and feelings and emotions run amok; add to this the acquired energies of habits accumulated in this life, and inside and outside are all yin, which cannot easily be stripped away. Without intense effort to strip away this conditioning acquired through cultural and personal history, how can it be extinguished? Properly speaking, battle means vigorous and intense refinement, which effort is not to be relaxed until yin is exhausted and yang is pure.” Taoism Liu I-ming, p 27
Yin in this case represents these internal programs, which run our life. The Taoist idea is to vigorously battle these tendencies in order that they not control our lives, dissipating our vital energies.
There are three levels of conditioning that we humans are battling: temporal, cultural, and genetic. In the context of the quote, the conditioning is the pollution that we need to battle to make sure that pure yang can manifest itself fully without distortion. Of the three levels, temporal conditioning is easiest to deal with because it only occurred in this lifetime. This is primarily the level that modern psychiatry deals with.
The second level is cultural conditioning. Psychiatry is frequently a tool of cultural conditioning. They attempt to be ‘normal’ culturally and to help the patient to be ‘normal’. Hence modern therapy usually is so linked to culture that it acts as an agent of culture rather than as an agent of differentiation. If the patient complains about not being able to fit in, the therapist generally attempts to help the patient fit in, rather than counsel anti-cultural behavior. Because of this tendency, people attempt to choose therapists that encourage cultural standards which they identify with. As a rule therapists don’t tend to ‘battle’ cultural conditioning but instead tend to be its agent, as they themselves are unconscious cultural participants – ‘well-adjusted’ & ‘normal’ people that are to be emulated. The apparent level of wealth and success of therapists is an indication that they are dealing well with the present culture.
The third level of conditioning that Taoists battle is genetic conditioning. This level of battle is usually totally ignored by all levels of society. Indeed genetic and cultural conditioning are so merged as to be identical in most people’s minds. Being so immersed in their temporal culture, it is hard to be aware that there is anything else. Even if we are aware of different cultures, we tend to focus on differences rather than genetic commonalties. We’ve seen that cultural developments in humans have affected genetics in a major way, as witnessed by hand-eye coordination and the development of the brain and hands. While this level of genetic-cultural conditioning is deep, (another fractalized boundary, between cultural and genetic conditioning, I love it,) deeper still is the genetic conditioning that we came into being a hominid with. This is pre-cultural genetic conditioning. This is the deepest level of conditioning and hence the most difficult to deal with.
Of course pre-cultural genetic conditioning is further differentiated into recent and early, (and of course many levels in-between). Recent pre-cultural conditioning would have to do with our genetic history as pack animals, or a little further back as mammals. Early pre-cultural genetic conditioning would have to do with the conditioning that existed before we broke off into genus mammalian.
To identify the different levels of primal conditioning that pollute the clear manifestation of our pure yang see Cultural Ages – Section I of the Tao of China.