Awareness - Another Perspective

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In our efforts to train for self-fense we coin the word ‘awareness’ and that term or word carries a variety of meaning dependent on certain factors of intent. In karate and martial disciplines awareness becomes something else entirely but in truth there are two kinds of awareness that, for me until this very moment, are divided into two distinct concepts. We have a “Primary Awareness” and we have a “Secondary Awareness.” If you are thinking to yourself, the conscious mind and the unconscious mind you are heading down the right path. 

Primary Awareness:

• Consists of your current present moment awareness of your conscious mind.
• Our minds use primary awareness to focus on the content of the spoken words, etc., but when content, stimulus, exceeds the processing ability of our primary awareness our minds pass it along to the secondary awareness where everything becomes possible. 

Secondary Awareness:

• Consists of all the other information you have gathered throughout your life, but do not presently realize in your primary awareness, i.e., the storehouse of information residing in your unconscious mind. 
• Our gut feeling, the spidey sense that tingles telling you something is amiss and take attention to that stimulus to identify the issue, event or action, etc., that is causing you unconscious concern. 
• Represents everything, awareness, other that your awareness, it is knowledge of the complete resource inventory within your conscious and unconscious mind. 

One great issue for both primary and secondary awareness, it is and must be comprised of accumulated information, knowledge, understanding and experiences along with our cultural belief system all who affect how both work at any given moment. If you have no knowledge of and/or experience with (through real-life experiences or experiences through training and practice, etc.) such things then both your primary and secondary awareness have nothing to use in our minds to be of use in that given situational moment. Such as being attacked by a predator by surprise and heavy damage, if you have not experience it or trained for it you will succumb and if you are lucky you will just freeze, take damage and then spend some time at the ER. 

Training, practice and experiences are about feeding and developing and making use of the yin-yang of awareness, our primary and secondary awareness abilities of the human mind. Educate that awareness and then consider the content of that training where the other categories of awareness are involved, i.e., “Situational, Physical (both self and adversary), Dynamics (pre-assault indicators, etc.), Duty-beliefs-place in life, Criminal, Danger, Environmental, Mindful and Self.”

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“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)