Choosing awareness

Last Saturday's outdoor class gave me opportunities to notice what degree of awareness was available. I learned many times that I was choosing to ignore information available to me from my senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

I am still sorting this out. I am not used to even trying to be fully aware. I am a bit intimidated.

At the same time, I am intrigued at what is available and I did have some unusual and compelling experiences. Trying to stretch my willingness to sense distant sounds, to carefully notice and describe unfamiliar – and even familiar - smells and tastes, to navigate relying on senses other than sight, etcetera, were all strangely exciting and liberating. Maybe the word empowering fits.

When I re-opened my eyes after a considerable period of voluntarily not relying on sight, for example, colors and shapes rushed in with a vividness and pleasure I do not usually experience. I had a powerful sense that the world is a beautiful place and that I enjoy being here.

I also experienced how I shut so much out and how often I focus with tunnel “vision” on tasks and thoughts. That realization was a bit disturbing.

We do tend to tune out a lot from our usual routine and environment. We'd overload quick if we didn't. I was sitting in a seminar a long time ago taught by Eugene Albright (one of those psych gurus). We were discussing heightened awareness, and as the conversation went, I voiced an assumption that a hostile combat environment would likely induce the highest awareness level presently available, to which he concurred.

If you want to simulate such awareness enlightenment, paintball competition and various other indulgences are a good way to subliminally train the mind to achieve heightened awareness. I would not normally suggest anyone enter into real combat conditions as the risk generally exceeds the benefit, but a decent simulation will suffice most of the time.

I note that the practice of hunting can have a similar effect.

Maintaining a heightened awareness of our surroundings can be a very stressful effort. That's why our tendency is to tune out most of the time.

I had posted something before regarding awareness, not sure if it was here or not.
Being constantly switched on will burn you out quick. However, you CAN achieve a fairly constant state of awareness, and maintain it almost indefinitely. Its just a matter of being a little more aware of your surroundings. Most people do it every day-they just dont know it.
An exercise I do with my nephew is to go for a walk, and talk about whatever-then quiz him on people we have passed, or the color of houses, or how many people were in a car that drove by-simple things. The idea is that, no matter what you see, you CAN retain it-and once its retained, you start to become more situationally aware.
Of course, there are other ways to accomplish this too. Little brain teasers you can find online, simply observing the outdoors, its just a matter of being more aware.
Me, I am sometimes hyper aware (according to the GF)-moreso when driving or in crowded areas than elsewhere. She says I am the safest worst driver she knows...I am just always aware of whats around me-cars, pedestrians, sidestreets, etc. It isnt a trick-its just doing what your supposed to be doing-paying attention while driving. I am TRYING to teach her...

the trick is the ability to switch from one awareness to the other as things demand.

I'm reminded of two things.

The first is an account I've read of Thoreau walking in the woods with a friend, the friend comments that he always wished he could find an Indian arrow head as he'd heard that they were plentiful in that area, Thoreau responded by leaning over and picking one up an handing it to his friend with with some sort of pithy comment about observing vs seeing.

The 2nd was a personal experience that occurred when I was down in Panama working, post invasion. I was with 2 writers and a local "guide", we came upon an apartment building that had been shelled pretty severely, occupants had fled and it was slowly being torn apart for it's contents of copper wire, pipe and whatever else had been left behind. The writers wanted to go up a couple of floors and talk to some of the scavengers, I had what I can only call a "hinky" feeling and picked up a piece of steel pipe, I told them that I wasn't knowingly going to go into a building where guys were tearing apart walls to scavenge. Upon reflection, they decided that it probably wasn't a very good idea. They had simply gotten caught up in the moment and had forgotten that while most of the people we'd met had been very gracious to us, there were more than a few who were a bit pissed off at Americans for having destroyed their homes.

And about that driving thing, yes, yes, yes. Most people are simply unaware of their surroundings when driving. It's easy to get distracted by the ipod, the cell phone, the dvd player, the espresso machine, etc. I'm constantly scanning and making alternate escape plans, the best part is when someone does something really stupid and we know it is coming for quite a while before it occurs.

Good Thoughts Benjammin,

Makes me think of Colonel Jeff Coopers "Color Codes of Awareness". Most Law Enforcement Officers and Military have heard of this Color Code.

White - No perception of danger (e.g. sleeping, relaxing at home).
Yellow - Relaxed awareness (e.g. on the job or in the field in a normal situation).
Orange - Alerted to an unknown danger/threat (e.g. strange noise outside your house/tent/car).
Red - Aggressive action or confrontation to address the threat (e.g. defensive or offensive actions against a threat).
Black - Metal Shutdown (e.g. Brain sensor overload, frozen in fear).

You try to live your life in the outside world in Yellow, prepared to escalate and de-escalate as needed.

If you are living in White (not situational aware), when confronted with a threat you flash directly to Black (frozen).

The plan is that you want to build-up from Yellow, through Orange to Red and avoid going into Black. Functional realistic, repeative training helps keep you out of Black.

Mike

I am familiar with the Colonel's color code system. From a real world perspective, I don't do white anymore. Yellow is when I am in my office or my house, where I know there is a hard barrier between me and the outside and risk of confrontation is as low as possible (I sleep so lightly now, white is practically unachievable).

Orange is when I am in general public and under uncontrolled conditions, such as the commute to work, or shopping, or eating at a restaurant. Red is when I am out hunting, or detecting an alarm or distress in my vicinity.

Black occurs sometimes if I hear a noise that reminds me of a mortar attack, or if I get confronted abruptly while not in the red zone. It doesn't last, but it catches me unaware, and I have to stop and think about my situation before I can decide what to do. It is paralyzing. I have yet to experience a direct red to black transition, though I suspect such an event is possible. One example might be to expect a confrontation from a few and end up abruptly facing hordes while woefully underequipped for such a melee.

I remember when Darth Vader came to my primary school to tell everyone in my primary class about the Green Cross Code.

I now have to constantly shout ' dopey ' to so many pedestrians who step out into the road in front of my bicycle as I pedal down the road. I think a it has a lot to do with prescribed medications such as Valium and its derivatives

Danger is one dimension of the information patterns presented by the world. It is important but far from all there is. It is closely related to fear, which causes "tunnel vision."

The lesson available from awareness classes is that there are sights, smells, sounds, textures, temperatures, and tastes all around us that we can choose to experience rather than staying narrowly focused on one feeling, task, or thought. Further, that there may well be information readily available to wider awareness that is a resource for dealing more effectively with whatever feeling, task, or thought we are experiencing - including dealing with danger and fear.

For example, there may be places, materials, or people readily at hand that could help us deal with or avoid danger which we might not even notice unless we have chosen to habitually open our awareness. There may also be aspects of a perceived threat that may reveal it is not a threat at all, arises only because of unintended action on our part which we can reverse, or is more easily dealt with, which only more open awareness will detect.

I can see that a preconception that violence or the threat of violence is the only response available to perceived danger might prevent us from becoming aware that other more effective and preferable options are available.

But I am only a beginning student.

The Col described Orange as "I may need to stop/shoot/kill that person right now" and red as "I NEED to stop/shoot/kill that person RIGHT NOW" - aka you are ONLY in RED if you are actively engaging your target.

What you are calling RED, he called Orange, and what you call Orange, he called Yellow - and no matter how lightly you sleep, he'd call that white

So true. Add knowledge. Take knowledge of geology - someone describes to you what a drop stone is, and suddenly you can be looking at an exposed landscape and see hundreds of them. Before that, all you see is the landscape.

Add the fact that we're social animals, and that creates a filter that can be difficult to ignore. People will ignore safety advice if they think its socially expected. Take for example the recent nightclub fire in Russia - crowded nightclub, obviously not enough fire exits: an informed person's first impulse should be to leave the nightclub, miss the music, another day perhaps. Instead people want to stay and experience the music with the crowd. 113+ died.

I have a friend who relates it all back to the amygdala, an old, old part of our brains which I confess I still don't understand very well, but it pretty well controls how we deal with stress, conflict and challenges in life. But it can be summed up in the survival response, never underestimate the power of denial. A part of our consciousness constantly filters for what is important and what is perceived as not, and you can sometimes teach or trick it to filter differently, though acquisition of knowledge or occasional denial of our social instincts.

I think what's important here is having some sort of awareness in the first place, rather than just wandering through things.

To switch this from a gunfight to a dogfight analogy, it matters a whole lot less what airplane you're flying than it does whether or not you realize somebody is on your six. Once you realize somebody is on your six, it matters a whole lot more what your training is, than what your airplane is.

So maybe it's risk avoidance, risk awareness, and training...and training is preparing for situations that you're smart enough not to get yourself into in the first place.

While driving, I constantly scan the road at least a quarter mile to a half mile ahead to see what other drivers are doing. I also look in my rear view mirror for about 2 seconds and register what other drivers are doing behind me....mainly looking for drivers that are doing 10-15 mph over the limit, or more.
i remeber an incident where I was drivinga work van in Miami on I-95, and a large panel truck was in front of me. A door was up against the concrete barrier to my left. and as the panel truck sped past the door, the wind created by the truck picked the door up, which promptly hit the concrete barrier, the bounced right into my path. Luckily it was a hollow core door, and I hit it. Thankfully it wasn't edge on. I had less than a second to respond.
Since then, I don't drive against the barriers. I take the middle lane when possible. That way, there's a lane on either side if I need to take evasive action.

I don't know about alert level colour codes. I do understand that our senses are usually just monitoring changes.
Most sounds that are constant we blank out, if our eyes didn't move in small jumps constantly our vision would fade right out and there are optical illusions that demonstrate this.
http://www.planetperplex.com/en/color_illusions.html

I have no doubt you would get a rush of colours after being blindfolded for a while Dwest. It would probably last until your optical nerves got used to the colours again and renormalized them.
I will have to check this out and see if it is a real effect or just imaginary.

Awareness is not limited to risk or danger, of course. We can train to increase our awareness of resources and opportunities for better survival: water, food, shelter, first aid, signaling, navigation, etcetera.

I believe my alert conditions, as I stated, reflect the Col's scale okay. My application was in a much broader sense, in that I apply the threat conditions to more routine aspects than simply combat engagement as is his application. However, the intensity of the response is consistent with his.

For instance, out hunting, I can engage the target at range and move from an orange level to a red level with an advance warning, if I have the chance. If the point of contact with the target is abrupt, it takes a considerable effort NOT to shoot the target prior to positive identification. My instinct at that point is to sight and pull, much as I would be if I were to encounter an enemy under anticipated combat conditions but from an unknown source. Even under red conditions, I always thought the Col was adamant about target identification, so even though I am combat ready at any given point in the red zone, I must still exercise due diligence before committing to the attack; the point of no return as it were.

At least that's how I always considered the Col's scale to apply. It didn't make sense for a definition of the red zone to be as fleeting as just releasing the sear once you had sight picture acquired. That just seemed too transitory to be of practical use. It also doesn't quite seem to fit the mindset approach that the Col preferred, rather than to describe a given course of action.

So from a real world application in a general sense, I believe I tend towards the "ready for action, everyone around is a potential threat" when out in the open public, and relax to yellow under more controlled environments, but never ever in an unaware and unprepared mode, not even while sleeping. I'd have to be under the influence of sedatives or psychotropics to be in a condition white. My wife has learned that there are acceptable ways to rouse me from slumber, and those which she and others would not be advised to undertake. I have drawn down on someone coming through my front door while I was napping in my recliner before. Fortunately, they never repeated that method of entry. Most people who know me know better.

It is a bit inappropriate perhaps to try and apply the combat mindset color code of Col. Cooper's from a general purpose daily venue where the incidence of combat risk is relatively insignificant. However, lacking any other generally accepted "risk" level upon which to relate, this is at least marginally understandable.