Learning and change processes

This is a very important topic that spiritual students and everyone else need to understand. The whole spiritual training is about learning and changing. And so, it is useful to spread some light on these processes.

Learning means basically to make a new experience. This new experience is memorized and anchored in your subconsciousness. In future situation which are similar to this experience, your mind will check and decide how to behave according to the experience you have made.

Let´s take a simple example. Let´s imagine that you are in Africa and for the first time in your life, you see a Papaya fruit. Immediately your mind checks your memory for similar experiences. So you might think about a melon and its taste or a different exotic fruit and if it was good or not. Now you taste the Papaya and with this you make a new experience. Now you decide individually if a Papaya tastes good or bad or neutral. This experience is memorized and when you are offered a Papaya or a similar fruit in the future, your experience will help you make a decision if you want to taste it or not. You have learned, and you are now conditioned by your experience.

In a second step, your intellect probably likes to “talk” about your new experience in the mind discussing how the taste could be classified, if it worth for another try, if you know a similar taste and so on.

Besides something simple like tasting a Papaya, we often have to face complex processes or ways of behavior which we need to learn. This can be riding a bike, dancing, sports, martial arts or driving a car.

Here we have to ways of approach. The first one is simply “trying to do it” and trying as long as it needs to be successful. And the second one is to use the intellect to find an approach. “Trying” works more with intuition and feeling. The intellect tries to figure out how things probably work or tries to memorize the different aspects of a process.

In this regard, we find also these two types of students in the Bardon training. The first type just does the exercises and learns from the results. And the second type studies all kinds of books and commentaries long before even starting the first exercise. The conclusions can be drawn by yourself.

When we have complex processes to learn like in martial arts, then we can simply cut the process into single parts like the right standing, the right movement of hands, the right movement of feet, etc. to learn them and to put them later together. It is a general key in life to simplify complex problems by cutting them into pieces which are easier to manage. Bardon follows the same idea by separating single aspects of an ability and putting them later together. For example, the imagination training should be done first with the single senses and then with all senses together.

Now, let´s examine the process of learning something complex like driving a car. When you sit the first time on the driver´s seat, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed with all the things you are asked to take care of like checking all mirrors, checking for the street, for other cars, people walking by, bikes and certainly all traffic signs while you are operating throttle, accelerator and gear change. In the first time your intellect tries to take care of everything which is quite hard. By time, you learn, you get used to the different functions and operations and this means that your intellect needs to work less while your subconsciousness takes more control. One day, you have learned everything and then your mind is free to think about meeting friends while your subconsciousness is driving the car. You have learned and integrated “driving a car” in your personality. This is the natural way of learning. Something new and external gets processed and then integrated to be an internal part of you. Then it is automatic like walking, eating, etc.

In regard of the spiritual training, all new abilities become a natural part of you. Then it feels natural to work with energies, to shift your consciousness or even to speak quabbalistic letters in the four-dimensional way without extra effort. It has been processed and integrated into your subconsciousness.

So far, so good.

Now, let us imagine that you meet a dog and you think that it is a sweet dog which needs some petting. The dog has a different opinion and bites you instead of letting you caress him. Now you have made a bad experience. When you are a child, you probably will conclude that all dogs are dangerous and so you have learned that it makes sense to fear all dogs. When you are an adult, you conclude that the dog was not in the right mood for caressing and that it was stupid to do so. But you do not generalize your bad experience. This is very important to understand that children often draw unhealthy conclusions because they simply lack of understanding the situation. In this example, the child will fear all dogs also in the future when it is an adult. It needs a new, positive experience to change the pattern of behavior. And it needs the will, the trust and the intellectual understanding to be ready for a new and belief changing experience. The fear is on the level of the subconsciousness. So, the intellect has no real access to it. The fear appears simply when a dog is in sight. Here is real extra effort needed to go beyond the fear, the subconscious pattern. This must be understood. It is not a conscious decision to have no fear. It is a subconscious, automatic reaction. Now, let´s imagine that there is a nice dog owner, a friend of the person with the fears, and that he has a very kind dog. The person has thought about her reactions and that they need to be reconsidered and that it is high time to release the subconscious fears and to find peace with dogs. And so, with the help of the dog owner, the person is brave and starts to talk with the dog, petting the dog and the dog is happy. With this new, positive experience the person can now release the pattern of fear and replace it with a pattern of joy. In conclusion, when the person meets a good dog, then it brings both happiness when she can caress the dog.

The conclusion for us is, that both have been learning processes, a bad one and a good one. We can replace a bad lesson, a bad experience by conscious learning in a good way. This is very important for self-healing and it is important for the spiritual path of personal development, for growing and unfolding.

In fact, we all make so many bad experiences in life that there is a very big need for replacing bad experiences with positive ones by learning consciously. It is the dog which was not nice. It was the child which bullied you. It was the man or woman which mistreated you. It was the boss which was misusing you. It was the priest who was bad. It was the relationship which did not work. It was the accident. It was the dentist. It was this or that which caused bad experiences. But we are here to heal from bad experiences and we must open ourselves for progress, for new experiences. Life is good and bad. But life goes on and we cannot stay in the pit of bad experiences forever. It also does not help to generalize. This is childish behavior. “My girl-friend was bad, so all girls are evil!” This does not help. We need to find solutions instead of finding someone to blame.

One big problem with hurts, traumas, bad experiences is that they work like a movie. It is like sitting in a cinema and watching your horror movie with all bad emotions. As soon as a similar situation occurs, you are directly again in the horror movie. Old memories come up with the bad emotions and pains. Together with all factors and all patterns of reaction, this simply needs a deep healing and a new learning process. “Being in a movie” says that you have not processed what has happened in the past and that you are not liberated and healed from it. This phenomenon is well known from soldiers who were traumatized in wars and brought these “movies” with them back home. But it is true for all kinds of traumas which weren´t healed so far. It is also true for traumas of past lives. There are so many people which are in the same movie like some hundred years ago in a different life. For example, imagine France some hundred years ago and imagine that you were a protestant being hunted by the Catholics, losing everything, in need to escape and to go into a foreign country. Imagine all the suffering, the fears, the pain, the problems. And now you are incarnated again and you still have the impression that people observe you, that they do not accept you, that you need to escape to save your life, that you have lost everything. You are today in the same psychic movie like for some hundred years. These are the seeds of karma. There are a lot of people who suffer in this way. It needs a high awareness to question the own patterns of behavior and to undergo a deep healing, to learn and to make new experiences.

The movies of traumas, of torture, of war, of disappointments, of loss are psychic prisons where people can stay decades and several incarnations if not something is going to happen.

Another aspect of learning is the development of personality. In every incarnation we take a certain role in society and life. And this has major impacts on us, on our patterns of behavior. For example, you are a warrior your whole life time. You have learned to fight, to live the hard way, to cope with all kinds of sacrifices, you have killed many people and maybe in the end you were killed too in a war. These experiences over decades have powerful impacts on your way of thinking, on your emotions and your behavior. It has also impacts on your self-perception, on your goals in life and your values. Now, let´s imagine that you incarnate again in a peaceful time. Even if you have now a normal “job”, a family, etc. the old warrior will still be there. You will manage things in this life in parts like the warrior you have been in the former incarnation. There are patterns which are still good and useful, while there are other patterns which do not work anymore. For example, you cannot use violence if a problem occurs although you might have the drive for this. And these things require again a learning process. Respecting your old warrior nature and at the same time growing beyond it.

In fact, it is something of great fascination when you imagine how many different roles and personalities you integrate from all your incarnations. You are the sum of all these roles which you have played on the stage of life in so many various places, cultures, religions, times.

In the overall conclusion, – we need to release all the darkness, the dark experiences to heal and to grow, to learn by new experiences. And especially the spiritual path requires a lot of new experiences and changes, transformation and growing beyond your “old self”. Understand that you have the power to change yourself and with this the situation of your life. Start learning, start making new and better experiences. Create yourself!