What are the levels of conditioning that keep us from knowing, feeling, sensing, and living our higher destiny path? There are many levels of conditioning. Here, we speak about four, each of which contains many layers. The four primary levels of conditioning are cultural conditioning, early childhood conditioning, our ancestral lineage, and our past lives.
Within these four layers of conditioning, we are, for the most part, unconscious of the conditioning itself. For instance, in our ancestral lineages, if our ancestors lived through certain traumas, repeated certain patterns, held particular ideas, concepts, belief systems, and prejudices, or had very fixed ideas about how life “ought” to be—how a man or woman ought to be, what they ought to do, have, or tolerate, how a child ought to be treated, what the rights of different races, individuals, or creeds should be—if they held hatreds and long‑standing resentments against different types of people, all of this translates on a subconscious level. It impacts what we call our DNA, which, fortunately, is malleable. It impacts our cells, our thinking patterns, and our internal structures, creating what I call samskaric residue.
This samskaric residue is what modern scientists would describe as neural pathways in the brain that arise from entrenched thinking. These patterns create little rivulets, literally imprinted in the brain, which make certain thought forms much easier to think than others. That is why, when there is conditioning—such as ancestral lineage conditioning—it tends to be passed on in various ways, depending on the personality of each being, to your parents, to your grandparents, and then to you. As we come in as little children, born into a family, we are wide open for imprinting.
In fact, we are designed to be open to imprinting, because this is how a person learns about their culture, learns about the world they are in, and learns how to navigate and find their place in their family. When the family is dysfunctional, or when there is a lot of samskaric residue from eons past, and from the surrounding culture, this residue gets delivered to the child in that tender, open, receptive state. Now you have what some scientists call “hardwiring” for certain tendencies, certain beliefs, and even certain diseases or eating habits. Some of those eating habits, in turn, can lead to disease. So when we say we are “genetically predisposed” to a certain disease, it may have more to do with the way our parents and grandparents were living and eating than with an unchangeable hardwired defect.
Whatever the degree of so‑called hardwiring, what we know in this work is that it is changeable. It is all changeable—if you know what you are doing and you take the time to do it. This understanding aligns with the concept of past lives as well.
If, in a past life or multiple past lives, you experienced recurring patterns, your template—your body–mind–spirit complex—carries those patterns forward. The mind and spirit aspects move into the next body and imprint that body once again with the same types of patterns, unless you consciously intervene to change them. Likewise, the culture around you is constantly running certain thought forms, belief systems, and energetics. Your tender, young self, coming into the world, will pick up on all of that subconsciously. You may or may not be consciously aware as a tiny child, but at a certain point, children who are very aware often begin to shut down, because it is overwhelming—especially given the level of trauma, negative beliefs, and negative patterns that live within the culture.
So, on some level, we say, “Okay, I’m here, I have to deal with this. I’m just going to go to sleep a bit, because otherwise I can’t handle it.” There are those rare ones who manage to stay more awake during that time. But for most of us, as we unfurl and begin to unpack these levels of conditioning that we were imprinted with at various stages of life, we slowly come to reckon with the truth of who we are and what we actually want life to be like. That true desire may be vastly different from how life has turned out thus far because of the conditioning.
We talk about this because the knowledge alone can collapse at least half of the guilt and trauma around what your life experience has been so far. We are not suggesting that your life has been only full of trauma, guilt, shame, fear, grief, envy, rage, disease, or destructive habits. We know there have been many positive experiences, many beautiful aspects of the world, and many shared belief systems that truly support the lifestreams of countless beings. And yet, there have also been situations that repeated themselves through all these layers of conditioning, became locked in, and were repeated and passed on by those who did not know any better. They did not have the tools. They did not receive the healing. Many were taught to fear alternative forms of healing and inner work, sometimes by religious or cultural systems.
The irony is that the deepest truths found in the scriptures and religions often point back to the very truths we are exploring here. This is where misinformation and disinformation entered so many religious tribes and sects. My early teacher used to say, “Look for the needle in the haystack,” because regardless of which religion you study, or what line of thought or school of philosophy you explore in trying to piece together the real history of Earth and discover who you are and what is really going on here, there will be needles in those haystacks.
For my part, I have a deep love of ancient history and study, and I often find those needles that link together. When you begin to see the patterns, you can start to piece together what has actually been happening. That, however, is a whole other wormhole that I do not usually go into. The important thing for our purposes is that this exploration helps us calibrate back to who we really are and what we are truly meant to be doing on this planet.
So what do you do when you realize, “My trunk is full of junk from all this conditioning and all these layers”? No wonder you have been having the experiences you’ve been having in life—frustration, repeated patterns, difficulty getting ahead in certain areas, persistent blockages. The first thing that must arise is compassion for the self. Deep compassion.
From that compassion, unconditional love begins to flow. We say, “All that is, is as it is because it is.” It simply is the way it is. This reality has been created by multitudes of beings over long stretches of time, and we are the inheritors of those patterns. When we accept that truth and stop resisting it, there is a profound relief.
We are no longer pushing against reality or making it wrong. We are not harming ourselves or beating ourselves up or judging ourselves for being the recipients of these patterns. If we have done that in the past, we begin to unwind the habit of judging ourselves for where we are.
We come to see that everything actually has been perfect in a certain sense. The law has been chugging along—what goes out, comes back. The law has been working perfectly; it has simply been operating on the samskaric residue left to us by our ancestors, by ourselves in past lives, by our culture, and by our early childhood experiences. We come to peace with that—or we grieve it, depending on what arises for each person.
We accept reality as it is. We love it as it is. And from that place of loving acceptance, true healing can begin. If we encounter resistance, we bring love to the resistance itself. We gently fold back the layers until we reach a point of total self‑love and unconditional acceptance of how we have been conditioned. From that place, genuine change becomes possible, because where there is resistance, judgment, and pushing against, it is very difficult to unpack and peel away the layers.
We must first meet the judgment and resistance in the same loving, non‑judgmental way. As the layers peel back, the light within us—the true essence, the spark of spirit that never left Source consciousness and has only ever been itself, the pure essence of the Divine—becomes more visible. We can begin to communicate with that part.
We can hear its still, small voice. We can feel into it, receive information, guidance, intelligence, wisdom, and vision from that original spark‑essence point of view. Then we can begin to utilize those inner “codes” to craft a life here, even amid all the conditioned aspects and dysfunction around us, amid the conditioning others are still living out and that we are beginning to break through. We can do this because of the nature of our creatorship, our endowment from the Prime Creator—the Source before all sources, the Creator before all creators, the Essence before all essences, from which everything arises and to which everything returns—the Great Mystery.
We learn to rely upon this Source. We learn to tune in to it and be blessed by this all‑good, ineffable Mystery—this suchness, this “tathagata,” that which is. As we rest upon, rely on, and fling ourselves into this Source, becoming at one with it—atoned, “at‑one‑d”—we begin to experience what has been called redemption, and what we, in this work, call recalibration.
Recalibration is a reorganization and a redistribution of knowledge, wealth, and wisdom within the essence of the self. This inner reordering can begin to out‑picture as the life of your dreams, the life of your truth—which may seem miraculous or like a distant hope at certain junctures, but truly is the promise of that Source‑Creator within us, from which we come and to which we return. The codes that arise from that brilliant inner star—the spark of the Original Creator that is our essence—are unique and creative. They can be expressed in countless ways throughout any given lifesteam.
That spark knows you across different timelines and planets, across many lifetimes. It knows all of your ancestors. It knows how you arrived exactly where you are. It knows everything about your current state of conditioning. It knows what is happening in your world. It knows all of your skills, interests, abilities, resistances, and traumas over all these timelines and experiences.
In its purity, it simply holds you in a state of unconditional love—toward which we strive as we begin this healing journey. What we do, then, is consciously join with what we call our High Self: this spark of light, this field of love around us and within us. We join it in celebrating ourselves as we are and loving ourselves as we are, so that we can begin dismantling the old constructs without self‑hate.
This is a dissolution process. There is, within each of us, a destroyer–creator energy (you might call it the Shiva within) that can dissolve what needs to be dissolved and create what needs to be created, without remorse and with full awareness of what is being transformed. What are we destroying? We are dissolving the old thought forms that no longer serve us.
We are dismantling belief systems and mental constructs from an age gone by that are no longer relevant. As long as Source energy continues to pour through those old patterns in us, nothing new can out‑picture, because that energy must flow through the existing template of our being. If we want to change any outer experience—or even an inner experience—the conditioning and patterning formed over eons must be what changes first.
Human histories, in their various forms, extend far further back than most people would dare to imagine. Some of our science fiction—stories like Star Wars and Star Trek—hint at histories much vaster than what we commonly acknowledge on Earth. We call it “fiction,” yet it still pings a sense within us that perhaps there is far more to life than we’ve been told.
When you contemplate hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of lineage—of what is in your DNA, in your body–mind–spirit complex—you begin to understand why some karmic cycles take a very long time to fully rectify. When we talk about enlightenment, this is why the masters know that their disciples will return to them lifetime after lifetime, until these layers are unpacked. It is rarely a one‑lifetime project.
As we recognize this, we make peace with the length of the journey and return to doing the work. In this particular lifetime, those of us on what we might call a spiritual path—who are seeking to know the truth of ourselves, to realize enlightenment, to discover our true divine purpose, to reunite with our essential essence—can rest assured that all is well. We are on the right track. We are healing timelines. We are collapsing old energetics. We are dissolving belief systems at quite a pace.
I can feel the truth of this in my own body as I say it—sometimes even to the point of chills or tears—because the guides and masters affirm that we are indeed “onto it.” We have accumulated enough knowledge and wisdom. We have encountered enough healing practices, spiritual tools, and techniques. Most importantly, we have cultivated a sincere desire to surrender to the Divine within us. Because of this, we can rest assured that victory is at hand—whatever that means for each individual soul.
My teacher in my twenties told me, “Never give up on yourself. Never give up on yourself.” At the time, I sensed what he meant, but I did not understand it as fully as I do now. He was pointing to this very conditioning: that we and our ancestors have been conditioned for so long.
He was saying, “Don’t stop. You are going to get through this. You are going to get back to the truth of you. You are going to return to that essence within you—that spiritual essence that liberates you from all constructs and simultaneously gives you the wisdom to navigate this particular Earth‑plane timeline.”
You landed in this family, this culture, this civilization, because of what was in your body–mind–spirit complex as you left the last life: your desires, hopes, wishes, concerns, traumas, sadnesses, griefs; the blend of light and darkness, hope and attachment, you were carrying. That inner “quotient” brought you into resonance with a certain arena of thought and experience in this timeline. You matched it—consciously or unconsciously.
We do not need to beat ourselves up or decide we were “bad people” because we incarnated into a very difficult family or situation. It has to do with what we had lived before. And the same principle applies to those with extraordinary abilities—like a three‑year‑old child who can play Mozart’s music perfectly by ear. Any skill, knowledge, or ability we have, we have earned and refined over lifetimes.
This compounded momentum and the law that governs it are neutral. What we call “good,” “bad,” or “ugly” is, from the law’s perspective, simply content. It is “the stuff” that happens to be within us, informing our current experience. As we adopt that neutral stance, stepping back from human judgment (which is charged with emotion and often further feeds the patterns we are judging), we begin to enter what the masters call unconditional love, non‑judgment, and non‑attachment.
From there, we gradually dismantle the hold that these old energetics have on our consciousness.
