Awareness and Environment

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Lets begin by addressing our environment often, in martial arts, thought of directly as our location when we are attacked or facing some sort of conflict regardless of whether it leads to avoidance of physical violence. I have a slightly different way of perceiving my environment, i.e., I see it as a virtual environment similar to what the IT industry uses today called “Virtual Machines.” 

Yes, we are a sort of machine that we can say is not man-made mechanical but nature-made moist meat and energy-signals that create a matrix like environment. Whhhaaat? 

Our virtual environment is not based on the idea of our location but a virtual environment that we take with us wherever our brains, our minds, are at any given moment. Yes, it is matrix like because its existence depends solely and exclusively on our I/O processes, i.e., those devices or systems nature provided us that extend from our minds/brains and outward to a certain limited distance. The I/O processes are the input of signals and output of signals through the sensory systems of our minds and bodies. The sense of sight, touch, sound, taste and touch, i.e., the only means that our brains, our minds, can gather data for brain/mind processing and also how we express in a variety of ways our output signals through one or more of those same I/O processes, our senses. 

Our entire existence comes from how our brains take in data, process that data in the brain by analysis, the process of hypothesis when assessed by other senses along with experiences through the memory dump within the brains/minds processing system and finally through a synthesis process where the brain/mind makes decisions that can result in actions either physical or psychological or both. 

Our virtual environment changes according to perceptions and stored experiences in memories so we literally create our environment in each moment of experience of our bodies in relation to our location in space and time. The virtual environment as a whole consists of signals translated, assessed and created according to all the senses because no one sense does the entire job.

One of our obstacles in the martial arts and karate world for self-fense comes from the social conditioning of society such as our human reliance on a dominant sense thus putting the other four either out of contributing to the overall virtual environment or at least putting it out in last place on a conscious level. Society today has come to rely heavily on sight sense, what we see we assume is our virtual creation of our environment and in most cases that is ok. 

But, in the case of self-fense be it with martial arts, karate or some other tool sight alone is not enough. What we see is sometimes not what we see or what we should see. Take the effects of the adrenal stress-conditions effects that can create exclusion and/or tunnel vision that can be dangerous to our success especially in violent encounters. Even normal vision is a tunnel of direct vision with assistance of a wider span of peripheral vision but does that truly take in all the signals of our virtual environment? 

No, it dose not and when adding in the adrenal stress-conditions of danger, emotional effects along with the physical effects of the adrenal chemical dump all of our senses are effected reducing our virtual environment to one that may not even be true, accurate or even exists in reality. 

In our realty based adrenal stress-conditioned model our goal is to train and practice within our limitations of the virtual environment we create with our minds along with training our minds to resist the chemical dump effects so we can widen the depth and breadth of our I/O sense system to take in as much of reality that is possible to create a virtual environment that will detect - more, then process that more before leaving the decision loop to the action process. Remember, the OODA exists but solely in our minds/brains. It is how our computer brains, if you will, process all that I/O data of the sense systems.

Back to the work, we train or at least we are supposed to train our bodies and minds to process not just our sight senses but all of them where sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste contribute to the whole rather then merely a part of data input so critical to the abilities necessary for conflict and violence. 

Sight is only good if the danger enters the span of both direct and peripheral vision. Tactile or touch is only good if our skin detects pressure directly on our bodies. Sound is only good if a noise is made and it is detected by our ears. Smells is only as good as the type of smell we detect and relate to danger vs. no danger and that often depends on the smell and the relation of another person as to proximity to you. Taste is only good to back up smell because humans do have the ability to taste odors in the air and there may be other benefits to taste that I can’t think of at the moment. 

Alone, each sense in its best state of input all have their own limits such as sight. We can see on the best of days clear to the horizon so that view is our visual virtual environment. But, unless we are scanning with that perfect vision and we couple that with appropriate knowledge and hopefully experience it may or may not be effective in avoidance and fense. Even sound has its blind spot meaning that if we scan with sight our sound senses should also, in a perfect world, detect sounds that might trigger our spidey senses toward actions, etc. 

So, you can see that we do live in a virtual world we create with our minds. What we perceive, distinguish and believe as to what is in that environment is not written in proverbial stone because of a lot of other factors all that should be a part of training and practice. Due to things like beliefs, perceptions as driven by things like cognizant dissonance as well as confirmation bias creates our world of perceptions that can literally blind us to any reality in our virtual environment. Sometimes I wonder to myself that with all this static how we actually exist, live and survive even in our virtual worlds/environments.

So, as I allude to, our environment exists in this chaotic fluid perceived existence of a reality/world we create in each moment accordingly to the sensei I/O data/information. Oh, and I forget that even when sense data signals come in as they truly exist out there often our minds, through cognizant dissonance and/or confirmation biases, change and reprogram those tapes/films to project a virtual environment to suit certain needs of each individual. 

Now, just think about this for a while and let you mind mull and meander on that bit of information for a while to see how you can use it to improve upon your already considerable abilities, proficiencies and mastery. 

So far I have not spoken of awareness because it too is virtual in nature according to all the stuff I have provided so far. It doesn’t take much to insert awareness for environment and come to the same conclusions except that our natural tendency toward cognizant dissonance and confirmation biases has a lot more effect on awareness for it is an awareness coupled with the knowledge, understanding and experiences that program our minds/brains so we can asses, analyze, hypothesize and then synthesize decisions to trigger appropriate actions to get-r-done. 

Puts a whole new spin on what I thought of as awareness and environment!

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