You escape conditioning by not collecting ideas with your head and instead listening with love and emptiness, like enjoying a sunrise that leaves no trace.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
I am a professor of psychology. I have studied and taught conditioning. Can anybody avoid conditioning? Aren't we being conditioned by you?
IT DEPENDS on you. You can be conditioned by me -- but am not conditioning you. Let that be absolutely clear! You can be conditioned by me. If you are listening only through the mind you will be conditioned, because the mind goes on gathering knowledge. The mind is very suggestible, corruptible, vulnerable. If you are listening to me through your mind, through your reason, through your argumentative faculty, through your intellect, you will be conditioned. Even if you are not convinced by me, even if you go thinking that you are not convinced by me, still you will be conditioned. Maybe against me, but that too will condition you. For or against does not matter: if you listen through the mind you will be conditioned -- because mind is the faculty of conditioning. But there is another way to listen also -- and it is not of the mind,…
But Osho, as I understand, communication means direct communication. As I see it, that is a very difficult problem, because human beings have been conditioned, as you said, for millions of years. That is, a person carries all those impressions, and whatever he communicates will also be the imprints of the past. How should we see through our conditioning so that we can have direct communication?
Understand it this way: what has been conditioned is the mind. What is conditioned is the mind; in fact, mind means the total conditioning. But behind the mind there is an awareness, a consciousness that cannot be conditioned—it is impossible to condition it. It is necessary to point toward that consciousness. That is why I put such emphasis on meditation. Because I hold that the moment one descends into meditation one goes behind the mind. Meditation means going behind the mind. And the very first time one steps behind the mind—leaving all thoughts, all emotions, all conditionings—at once it becomes clear: I am something entirely different from what I took myself to be—not a Hindu, not a Muslim, not the body. What I thought I was, I am not; I am something else. The deeper this realization goes, the more direct communication becomes possible with that person—because then we are…
Beloved master is there any state of mind which has never been programmed at all? Or are there any techniques to de-condition our brain?
There has never been any consciousness which has not been programmed. In the very upbringing comes the programming. Even if the child is brought up not by you but by wolves in the wild, the wolves will program the child. There have been cases... Just a few years ago a child twelve years old was found who had been brought up by the wolves in the forest in north India. He could not stand even on his two feet. He ran like a wolf; even the best runner could not manage to keep pace with him. He had been programmed by the wolves. The problem is, you have to bring the child up, and somebody has to take care, and whoever is going to take care is going to, knowingly or unknowingly, condition the mind of the child. It is not a question that you have to program consciously. But…
Beloved Osho, is it possible that while sannyasins might be cleaned of society's conditioning, they can adopt certain facets of your teaching as another kind of conditioning -- such as the need to be total, to doubt unless we know something from our own experience, not to be jealous, and so on? Could you explain how your way of working with us is not simply the exchanging of one set of values -- and thus conditionings -- for another?
In the first place, what I am teaching are not new values, not a new set of values in place of old values. For example, there are people who believe in God -- that is one set. There are people who do not believe in God -- that is another set. I am saying to people that there is no question of believing. Changing from one belief to another belief is changing the conditioning, but you remain conditioned. I am saying you have to remain without any belief system, and you yourself enquire into reality -- and whatever you find is your own truth. There is no need to believe in it because once you know it, the question of belief does not arise. You believe only in things which you do not know. When you know them, you know: belief is irrelevant. So I am not giving you another…
There are social needs and there are existential needs that are to be fulfilled. I will not say, "Do not condition children." If you leave them totally unconditioned, they will be barbaric. They will not be able to exist. Survival needs conditioning but survival is not the end, so you must be able to put your conditioning on and take it off--just like clothes. You can put them on, go out and do your business, and then come home and take them off. Then you are. If you are not identified with your clothes, with your conditioning, if you do not say, for example, "I am my mind," it is not difficult; then you can change easily. But you become identified with your conditioning. You say, "My conditioning is me," and all that is not your conditioning is denied.