Almost everybody is a victim of indoctrination in some way; it is rare to come across anyone who is not brainwashed. Even the most educated parents do the same kind of brainwashing that an illiterate person does — sometimes knowingly.
Why children are vulnerable
In childhood you lacked all the qualities of a seeker. You had no discrimination, you were not given the valid means of knowledge, you had no logical ability, you were not sceptical. All you knew was your parents and your community, and that your bread came from them. You had to believe them.This is a survival mechanism: if a child does not follow the parents or tribe, it is almost guaranteed not to live long. So every child follows whatever the grown-ups say, mindlessly. The mind of a child is like wet clay — green, soft, and capable of being shaped in any way.
Uses and abuses
Indoctrination is not always done with bad intentions; mostly it is ignorance passed on knowingly, with good intentions, from people who are themselves conditioned. Because of this goodness and your sincerity, you never question it.But it is also used deliberately. To produce religious fundamentalists or slaves, a tribe that has colonized another country will indoctrinate for hundreds of years, telling the slaves you are inferior, you do not deserve a human life, your culture is lowly, your language is lowly — because they want to keep them enslaved. Even good indoctrination makes a child limited, because everybody is limited in some way.
The mental prison
The mental prison is the only bondage you have; there is no other bondage. Your mind is stuffed with garbage of all kinds, which you think is knowledge, and you do not even want to look at it. You will not criticize your own upbringing: how can my parents be wrong, how can my religion be wrong, how can my university be wrong — I am a doctor, a PhD, an expert. It is all indoctrination, all garbage, because you have never looked, never been sceptical of your own conditioning.You can probably see someone else's indoctrination very easily — look, that fellow was brought up in the slums and now he is a criminal. The same thing is present in you, in a different form. Just like everybody else, you are also a slave. It is the blind leading the blind.
Getting rid of indoctrination
You will spend your lifetime fighting your indoctrination, because the knowledge itself is very simple — it is right in front of your nose, here and now. The difficult part is getting rid of the blind beliefs.Examine critically what your conditioning is, and throw it away. There is no harm in this: if your beliefs are really based on knowledge and direct experience, they will not be destroyed, and you can take them back after verification. Knowledge is very simple; the difficult part is unlearning.
Most people want to know everything in the universe, but nobody wants to know what is inside them — probably because it is crap, probably garbage, and that is why everyone is afraid of looking inside. It is not your fault: you were a child, you were innocent, your mental instruments were blunt, and you collected blind beliefs from here and there. That is all most of your ignorance is.
See also: ignorance, means of ignorance, information, qualities, bondage, surrender, path of knowledge.