Okay Richard, I may agree with this. More important however is how the word “conditioned” falls upon us. Our reaction to the word is itself conditioned and it really depends on the emotion that hearing that word sets off. So I ask, can we get behind that conditioned response to the word ‘conditioned’ and try to understand the process it is describing, without any emotional positioning?
What are we referring to when using the word ‘conditioning?’
Rather than counting angels on pins, let us see how we ourselves are using the word. What are we pointing to?
I use ‘mind’ interchangeably with ‘consciousness.’ I use it to describe not only cognition (the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses) but also that which underlies cognition and the actions that flow from it, which then give rise to further cognition.
Mind, it seems to me, can be looked at topologically, which is to say the relationship of its nonvariant aspects such as enervation, sensation, motorisation, instinct, feeling/emoting, intellect etc. But it can also be regarded in evolutionary terms, from the lower to the higher. In the latter case, grass has consciousness of its own type, but at a range of responsiveness far lower than that of the earthworm.
‘Thought’ is then a specialised region of development within the evolutionary history of mind. The physical capacity for it has to be realised before it takes place. And, since humankind constitutes the realisation of that development, humans ‘think.’ But thinking is only one aspect of the human mind. All the other aspects, from enervation up, still pertain, not merely as vestiges but as functional essentials of the whole. However, the base levels of mind develop as mind develops. At every stage they have to play a useful part in the new whole.
In humankind, as in any species, all the preceding stages are affected by the development of the subsequent ones. Thus, feeling/emotion is reconditioned by thought. Evolution achieves sophistication. The negotiation of relationship between the less and the more sophisticated levels of mind is part of the strange internal movement of mind.
There is no area of the human mind that is not influenced by thought and thinking. The very way we walk, for example.
With regard K giving an alleged “strange meaning” to the term ‘mind,’ I am guessing you mean his ‘metaphysical’ or perhaps ‘non-material’ usage. K agreed with Bohm that the mind is a material process, but he also proposed that there was something beyond that material process and on occasion he also used the term ‘mind’ for that. He was clearly referring to a quite different thing (‘thing’ is not the word).
A material process can not cease to be what it is and become its opposite, a non-material process. Were it proposed that it could become its opposite, one would love to see some evidence or even a convincing argument.
We are left in limbo however. Either the mind, as a material process, becomes its opposite or else K was speaking of a duality, material and non-material. In any case, the indication is that one cannot solve the riddle through analysis and one neither can one resolve the matter through experience. Speculation is useless and belief is poison. So, isn’t this just another precipice we should stand back from?
Ignorance is happy to entertain itself on a Sunday afternoon by barbecuing the truth 
That would simply indicate that we remain dependent on K and not his anointed successor. Surely it is up to us to renounce all following, including that of K himself. That does not seem to me to be dependent on who ‘got it’ or who didn’t or any sort of knowledge K may have given us about it. I think K was simply telling his truth, as he saw it, that nobody seemed to him to have been transformed, either by his presence or by his teaching.
As I see, that’s the same way K used it. And at any level of mind/consciousness, it’s essence is same as it’s content. As long as it operates as a material movement, there is this dichotomy of the image of the reality and reality itself, necessitating the insight of the observer is the observed for a breakthrough.
As I see, he proposed that with no movement it is free[empty/still] to receive whatever it meets in perception. The present being the unknown.
My comment on that: I don’t see how mind cannot be a material movement. The ‘as long’ suggests otherwise but you do not explain it.
The dichotomy is between the actual (which also includes the dichotomy) and the image we construct from our limited impressions of the actual. We can always refine the image but so insofar as we mistake the image for for the actual we will fall into epistemological error. The ‘breakthrough’ you mention seems to indicate a realisation that the actual is more than the constructed image and may differ from it.
But in real life we are constantly faced with imperatives to act and action is based upon the image. We do not all have the luxury that K enjoyed, of being able to step back from imperatives and have others take care of them. 
I explained it in the second part, it exists even in it’s stillness, held in abeyance until the next perceptive event that could trigger it as material movement.
Yes and more than that is a precondition for authentic relationship, i.e. in acknowledging something’s existence and relating to it other than from a utilitarian and self centered perspective.
My comment would be that we are constantly faced with events of relationships and genuine action has to be from seeing past the image we construe. Yes, there needs be a lot of simplifications to be made in the living to see that as an actuality, not necessarily demanding the luxury K had, but something when extrapolated would resemble an ascetic way of life in weeding out the excesses.
Is it not our response, reaction to challenge conditioned by what have been accumulate in the brain or the mind? Is it not , as K. say ( I know I am refering to K. for the moment but I can’t say better ), the way or direction in which thought has been set going ? Is it not observable and obvious ?
Well, perhaps it is, and this makes it very interesting.
You emphasized “all thinking is conditioned” by putting it in bold Richard and in doing so quoted K, though you gave no citation:
I get from this that all thinking is conditioned, that conditioning breeds confusion and misery and that “This way of thinking must wholly cease” Which I can only understand, in the context, as meaning that all thinking must cease, since K says conditioned thinking is the only thinking.
Do you accept that all thinking must cease, Richard?
I will put another point to you: Are not animals conditioned? Animals rely on instinct and conditioning. That is to say, experience teaches the animal to react in certain ways to certain conditions that it is presented with. Suppose that all conditioned knowledge ceases in the animal. What would be left?
Cognition was brought up earlier in this discussion. Cognition is the accumulation of knowledge by any means. But knowledge implies conditioning. So, lacking both cognition and conditioning, how would the animal survive?
I’ve put the citation at the end of the quote: Commentary on Living, serie III, the end of chapter 12
No. And yes 
. All thinking is conditioned, yes. But not all thinking breeds confusion and misery, no. We need to think to survive, for daily life, of course. So when he say : this way of thinking must wholly cease, what is he pointing at ? Isn’t he pointing exactly to a certain aspect of thinking which breeds confusion and misery ? So, a certain aspect of thinking is necessary; and another aspect breeds confusion and misery.
Still, all thinking is conditioned, have a background , if I may say.
I had to go see my girlfriend for supper tonight. I did not forget that she like red wine .
Another aspect of what he is saying is about the fact that there is no thinker, only conditioned thinking. The thinker and his thought being a unitary process.
Haven’t we been conditioned to this pattern that there is a thinker and his thoughts ? Is it another aspect of the conditioning ?
K.: There must be an actual experiencing of the thinker and his thought as one, an integration of the two. Then there’s only the process of thinking.
Ah, sex and alcohol . . . confusion and misery 
Now, put that together with . . .
. . . and you have the conclusion that a certain aspect of conditioning is necessary
What I am getting at is our reaction to the word ‘conditioning.’
Conditioning implies that we have learned something from the conditions we have faced and that we apply that learning in terms of our reactions to similar conditions.
As we are always facing conditions (or challenges) and as those conditions are often verisimilar our reactions in the present tend to be patterned by the past. That is the whole nature of knowledge and its application. The animal kingdom (and very possibly the plant kingdom) is based upon it.
In the same way, any crude application of K’s teaching would also be part of the cycle. The moment ‘conditioning’ is mentioned we recoil from the word ‘as one would a poisonous snake.’ That is also conditioning. And then we miss the fact that conditioning is life and life is conditioning. They are not two separate things.
Could we make a distinction between instinct and conditioning in these cases? As in, one is inherent and other learned. For example, a dog could be conditioned to obey our commands to stay still but at the same time it instinctively overrides it when it sees a cat or stranger within it’s territory. Instinct being action without needing to know exactly why, yes conditioning is also that but not as binding enough.
One being biologically inherited, the other culturally imprinted - both becoming manifested materially in the brain and body.
Macdoug has made the distinction clear. In fact, both are conditioning. One being inherited, the other being learned: One arising from the conditions under which evolution took place and the other arising from the conditions under which we live. Each can override the other, depending on their powers in relation to each other with regard specific challenges. Instinct can override learning and learning can override instinct. The instinct to freeze when faced with danger, for example. It can go either way. There is contention between two conditionings.
Neither are ultimately binding. Your example of the cat demonstrates the flexibility of mind, the fact that our responses are variable, largely unpredictable. If we understand evolution to be, in general, the development of responsiveness, we can say that the human displays a greater range of responses than the cat. The human has a sort of feedback system, a quality control system, a reflective ability, which is the system of thought and thinking, and this can allow the human to ‘consciously’ override not only instinct but also reflex. Have you tried overriding reflex? Think of examples.
The cat cannot do this. For the cat it is only one way, the instinct or reflex overriding knowledge. But we humans have two-way control. This gives rise to the naive impression of duality, that there is a thinker who controls his/her thought. Thought appears hegemonic in this relationship, and it largely is. But faced with a mountain lion, we still freeze. Faced with a mountain, we stand in awe. The former we call instinct, the latter we dress up as a religious experience. Such is the hubris of thought.
Yes of course. But have we verified the truth or the falsity of it ?
I don’t dispute that . But that all thinking is conditioned. And there is also a mechanical aspect to it,
Are we examining , observing the way thinking has been oriented, conditioned ? Not only in ourselves but all around ? You’ve said earlier that nazi thought had certainly had an impact on the Jews.
And Wim said:
I would rather consider it as intellect with it’s repositories of knowledge and know how for action counter posed against instinct. Yes, it appears that for our species one is largely hegemonic in comparison to the other.
Here, I am assuming that you are pointing out the entanglement of thought with elements of feeling and thereby corrupting it. Do you see something as pure thought as an antidote? or that thought needs to have the quality control and feed back mechanism from concrete reality in transforming it to action? In any case, the contention that the absence of genuine thought (without the hubris so to speak) corresponds to an experience of unjustifiable awe in relating with nature is stretching a bit too much to justify thinking.