A LIST OF ITEMS ON LEARNING

1. Learning is constantly going on.
2. Learning involves change in behaviour: the replacement or modification of past behaviour by a new set.
3. A behavioral pattern becomes a habit by repetition, by practice. It may get broken by non-repetition.
4. Behaviour has components: here are a few obvious ones:

1. Verbal: thought/spoken or written speech. (Try thinking without words!)
2. Autonomic or visceral behaviour.
3. Muscular behaviour. Including mime, gesture and other expressive behaviour.
4. All behaviour may be seen to require a stimulus (obvious or implied), a response, an effect of some kind or other on the stimulus; and wider or deeper eradication of the zone of this behaviour.
5. Behaviour may be good, bad, purposeful or useless; creative or destructive - depending on the reporter. For the self-realisation aspirant the evaluation rests with himself.
6. Behaviour may be within one’s own full awareness, sometimes only parts of it; sometimes parts may come to other’s awareness. Of course, such awareness by oneself or others are all subject to the processes of awareness learnt by the person.
7. A unit of behaviour is really not a single unit, but a chain of many links; a sort of  chain of switches in time or space. Awareness of the link can give greater control in the manipulation of behaviour. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. Thus a troublesome pattern of behaviour may be tackled at its weakest link, thus breaking its hold. Charting out the series of small and big links that ultimately lead to an outburst of anger or depression may give us the handle to break up the chain reaction.

5. In the process of learning the following items may play a part:

1. Imitation
2. Identification
3. A behaviour that meets with some satisfaction tends to repeat itself and get strengthened: the item of reward.
4. Behaviour once established tends to seek and create the conditions necessary for its display. Child badly beaten for a fault my find itself creating the conditions necessary for getting beaten.
5. Behaviour may not be changed; but the effects of the behaviour may be altered by changing the ‘object’ of the behaviour. A shrewd and aggressive antisocial person whose object is attention and ‘heroics’ may become a useful commando. A need to love something very strongly may express itself differently if the object of love - money, power, sex, humanity country or God - were to be changed.
6. All behaviour involves energy exchanges, which can be experienced at different levels.
7. In behavioural change, a person or a situation can act as the stimulus.
8. Behavioral changes involve both quantity and quality. Changes that are not very obvious, might suddenly lead to a dramatic, qualitative change in a large pattern of behaviour. The student of self-awareness might also find that his prolonged attempts to change himself in one set of behaviour results in a change in a set of behaviour that he did not directly tackle.
9. Since man is not an isolated unit, but part of a collective communicating system called the others and everything else, his behaviour influences others and vice-versa.
10. Each component of one person's behaviour may act as an independent stimulus for another. A gentle speech of one may provoke fear or anger in another, merely because of some little gesture accompanying the speech.
11. Within one's own self, one component of one behaviour may trigger off another set. For example, do my thoughts have effect on others? It is a good starting point to know how your thoughts affect you. If your depressive thoughts upset your digestion or appetite, is it difficult to see that your depressive face does something to the others?
12. If I am a victim of other’s behaviour, it is obvious to me that I should take some responsibility for my own behaviour.

This very incomplete set of items has been set down to show the vast richness of response possibilities within us; and not to hopelessly complicate the issues.

Behavioral changes not a mystery, but a subject of study and practice.

This aspiration for changing one’s behaviour to fit a higher type of behaviour is the theme of all YOGA or should be.

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