Choney The CatThe process of socialization and conditioning are different processes that are often misunderstood. However, when you understand what drives you at deep layers of awareness, you are able to find creative ways to solve problems in your everyday life. Thus, when working with clients, I often mention the benefits of reviewing their stories. You may find this process particularly useful now with the strong planetary configurations impacting the planet. In addition, with a context that facilitates how you think about how external forces affect you, you gain new insights about your self and your world.

When I work with individuals and with groups, great breakthroughs in awareness open up. From my perspective, individual personality describes a highly fluid process stemming from predisposing configurations of energy within each of us. It calls for expression in interactive dynamics, both personal and environmental.

How you orient your Self derives from your genetics along with ways you learned to relate through life experiences, i.e., through your personal and cultural socialization process. Nevertheless, part of your human gift is that you have a unique capacity to use cognition for changing your view of your Self, of others, and of the world.

With this in mind, it is a good time to review the differences between socialization and conditioning.

Differences Between Socialization and Conditioning

The process of socialization and the process of conditioning operate differently. They both teach and influence how to behave in your culture. Socialization involves the process through which you learned, as a child, to become aware of the rules of your society; you learned behavioral expectations so you could fit in or form cooperative, interdependent relationships with those around you.

Conditioning, on the other hand, is a method through which control or influence of your thinking and/or behavior occurred. It modifies actions and/or responses so new association patterns in you conform to your culture or to a situation. You are likely to be susceptible to conditioning in certain areas more than others. And there are many different ways that conditioning occurs.

Notice the significant difference in the root motivation of the two processes. In socialization, the process began when you started learning about your culture within a range of possible options so you could relate to others in your life. In conditioning, the root of the process modified your responses and thus, it put limits on your response possibilities in your situation so you would be accepted.

This distinction is very important to recognize. Socialization arises from your natural desire to belong to your group and to express yourself in a way comfortable for belonging. Conditioning imposes ways of being upon you so you feel accepted or rewarded. Thus, the difference has to do with the imposition of control. Conditioning modifies you while socialization allows you a wide range of choices freely within the structure of your culture.

Distinctions in nuances of these two processes may be hard to discern unless you are trained psychologically to recognize their subtle differences and their ramifications. However, as a professional psychologist/social scientist, this area has long been one of the areas of my expertise.

Other Influences on You

Please understand that although planetary influences are a large part of reports and charts/maps used with Noble Sciences materials, they are just that, influences. Planets never compel you to be a certain way or condition you to behave in a certain manner. Life is about choices; you always have choices to make, some easy, some, not so easy.

Planets do, however, play an important role in determining how you filter information. Your body energy charts/maps show you how these filters come into play in your life. How you choose to respond to those filters is your personal choice. You always remain free, within certain limits of your own unique chemistry. The key is to understand your own unique process.

First and foremost, you are a transmitter of energy. How you think, influences how you live. Your thoughts create your reality. One of our goals at Noble Sciences is to guide you towards transcending the artificial limits created by your filtering system. Learn to move beyond the boundaries of ‘no choice’ and discover a new world for your self.

Socialization and Conditioning Two Examples – Choney

Choney- n WildTo help you understand a little bit about the differences between socialization and conditioning, I have a story to tell you. On February 21, 2007 Marvin and I had the good fortune to adopt a special Himalayan Siamese Cat when he was about 8 months old; he had taken up residence in my daughter Dyan’s yard. When he first appeared, Dyan could not even approach him. Choney was quite unaccustomed to human contact and ran when any eye contact was made. Dyan began feeding him, talking to him, making eye contact, and reassuring him. Slowly, over a month period, she gained his trust.

Over time, Choney became more trusting. He showed increasing affection and responsiveness to Dyan and to her family. It became increasingly clear that leaving him outside with the dangers of the city environment would be unsafe for him. Moreover, he stood at the back glass door looking longingly into the house at the activities inside.

On February 21, 2007 Choney moved in with Marvin, me, and our family of three Siamese cats. This was Choney’s first experience as an indoor cat relating to the human social world. As I sat with Choney, making eye contact and experiencing his process with him, I recognized many new and subtle differences in the socialization and conditioning process. My personal experiences with cats date back to some very profound experiences with my first cat, Noble, a blue point Siamese who taught me a great deal about consciousness transcending species boundaries.

Although in a cat body, Noble changed the lives of everyone he touched. Cats opened many doors in awareness for me, including the documentation of certain Noble Sciences’ calculations. Through Choney, it is apparent that the soul of a being shines through both the socialization and the conditioning process.

2 Processes

Choney 2008Socialization and conditioning are two processes that are ideally to be mastered and transcended even if you don’t fully understand them. You live through both processes even though you don’t know specifically or theoretically what they are. As long as you are in a relationship in your culture, you experience both processes.

One example of the difference between the two processes appeared as Choney heard footsteps overhead from the second story of my home. His eyes widened, his ears alerted to possible danger, his eyes sought mine for information (deferring to the social rather than to a pure conditioning response). I looked at him directly, blinked a love kiss, spoke reassuringly, and waited. He relaxed. His early conditioning clearly alerted him to danger from sounds around him and his initial conditioned response was to run and hide. As he recognized that he was safe, he opened to new responses and chose them.

The difference between socialization and conditioning showed in the social interaction between Choney and me. Because of the relationship and the trust we had built, Choney learned that sounds around him in the social environment could filter out his need to respond to them as danger. If I were not there, he might have had a different response; he could have run each time the sound occurred, as he did initially when Dyan made contact with him in her yard. The next time Choney heard a step overhead, he recognized it as an environmental sound, and without any alarm, he looked toward me to see my response; he used the social context, and his growing trust of me, rather than pure instinct on which to base his reaction.

Choney learned that the social setting in which he lives now has sounds, occurrences, people coming and going; they are all part of his new world with their own characteristics. At first, when Choney navigated our staircase he did not know how to walk up or down to get where he wanted to go. In the first two days of his socialization, he jumped from the top of the landing through the railing nine-feet to the marble floor below, quite a dangerous practice even for a cat. I showed him several times how to go up and down the staircase and since that time, he has become quite adept at bounding up and down stairs agilely.

As in humans, Choney learned to put patterns of behavior and practices into their social context in order to expand beyond pure instinctive responses. I encouraged Choney rather than exercised any control or influence over his response. He was able to express his own natural pattern in relationship to me, as well as to his environment rather than through any imposed attempt to pattern him.

Choney completely integrated into our home. He greets us when we awake in the morning along with our three Siamese cats; yet, Choney has his own greeting. He jumps on our bed and rolls onto his back stretching to be petted. He greets us when we open the door if we’ve been out. He follows us around from room to room during the day. He beautifully perches on countertops piled on top of his brothers as they lounge licking each other and while they watch us.

Choney sits on my desk daily while I work. He asks me to brush him since he is a longhaired cat; he purrs throughout this process knowing exactly how he wants to be groomed and he easily communicates and guides my hand so I comply with his desires. He even rolls on his back to show me he wants me to pet his tummy and he periodically rolls repeatedly until he falls off my desk with embarrassment.

Choney climbs onto my lap in the evenings without prodding. Who conditions whom? We are definitely in a deep respectful relationship. He is also now fairly definitive about his tastes in food. He shows no desire to go outside, and, in fact, he avoids the doors. He also no longer reacts to environmental sounds since he has become accustomed to the routines of a very busy household.

Three years have now passed since Choney first arrived at our home. Just this week, as I prepared to reissue this paper, I realized just how far Choney has come in his social process – moving beyond basic conditioning and socialization processes and into a more advance internalization of human interaction. It is this change that happens between humans and animals that shifts both species in ways not possible without close interaction.

CHoney 2010Choney now approaches me, rolls over, meows, and “asks” for his special food treat. He knows where the treats are stored, and he follows me around

when he wants to ask for a special treat, at a time when I am in another room of the house. He “leads” me to the room he wants me to go to so I can give him what he wants. This imagining and knowing, albeit an anthropomorphic projection on my part, seems to reflect the process involved in my relationship with Choney. He seems to know what he wants and can communicate with me. He has learned to “speak” a language I can understand. It is this kind of process that blurs some of the distinctions between conditioning and socialization.

Evolution has occurred. From a distrustful cat afraid of humans, Choney has transformed his consciousness into one of trust and ability to communicate with his closest human and animal companions. He knows his name; he comes when called; he knows how to communicate and “call” us, setting up a mutual and supportive relationship.

This kind of relationship is born out of a synthesis of awareness within each of us along with recognition of the depth of responses that we interpret in order to relate. Communication is always a reciprocal process in which one participant reflects their perception of the other participant in an acknowledging way, either verbally or nonverbally.

A Personal Example

So much of our natural way of being resists conditioning, i.e., being controlled by others or by any situations that go against our own inclinations. Even as a young child, I resisted any modification of my diet in any way. My appetite and specific tastes dictated my preferences and no attempts to “condition” certain tastes ever affected me. Many of the foods I loved then, I love now.

I began drinking one cup of coffee daily when I was four years old. I remember smelling it being made and asking to taste it. From that time on, I insisted on having a cup of coffee every day in the morning. I also remember how distressed the adults were and how the family doctor was horrified that I was “allowed to drink a cup of coffee.” My parents tried in every which way to stop me, but I would not take “no” for an answer and I enjoyed the cup so much that they surrendered to my tastes. There was no way I could or would be stopped.

In fact, I have eaten according to my body needs my whole life. Through the years I experimented with new ways and patterns of eating but I could always trust my body to tell me its needs despite attempts to condition it. In my case, conditioning my tastes never worked. I still drink one cup of coffee in the morning every day. It is very rare for me to drink coffee at any other time, and there is no consequence on me physically if for some reason I go without my coffee as a test. I just love my morning coffee and the ritual for myself.

Conclusion

In my work, I find the most profound gratification when someone with whom I work, tells me that I’ve recognized a truth about them that they have wished others had perceived and indeed longed to communicate to others. My dear friend, Katherine de Jersey, my mentor astrologer, always said, “it is there in black and white,” as she would point out aspects or components in an astrological chart that she was reading.

I find myself feeling the same way with insights about the Noble Sciences Charts/Maps that I read for people. The information is in the maps when one knows how to decode it. You are a unique individual. You have the dominion to attain your highest potential and to live in a context with your individuality imprinted on the world. You are a receiver and a transmitter of energy to and from the cosmos and from your world around you.

As you can see from the examples of Choney and myself, conditioning occurs within the limits of each individual, who they are, along and the choices they make. Choney could have remained a wild, feral, outdoor cat with no human contact. Instead by his own “choice” he became a “rich” cat living with the best of care and integrated into a family of humans as well as other cat friends.

I resisted being conditioned away from my body needs and desires and did the unconventional from a social context, i.e., I drank coffee beginning when I was four years old. Fortunately, my parents honored my process, but only after I stood up for my body and showed them how important doing so was. And, I have continued to honor that process in myself, often against social conventions and attempts to “condition” me otherwise.

Understand your freedom to live your highest potential. You live in a context that gives you freedom that you define. Use it as you wish. Identify yourself as a transmitter of energy and allow your choices to empower you fully.

In Memory of Choney & Dedicated With Gratitude To Dyan, Noah

Pacific Palisades, California

July 8, 2008
July 20, 2010
January 3, 2017