P T S D Omnibus to date

The early drafts particularly of the first part; P T S Dharma are so freshly teased from my thoughts that they appear practically as code. as I have decompressed these thoughts they have expanded to more intelligible language, but I feel it is key to note that those early code like drafts still communicated its meaning in some fashion to hundreds of persons, if not more. I’m putting this up now still rough in places, but I think I am close to resolving the issues I have yet with this propositional equation.

P T S Dharma      

1/8

(12/7/2014) (1,001)  revised 8/2/2015  (total 6,193 words)    

A person who serves in the military is trained to function and to endure to the maximum extent of her training, I suppose. The process of assimilating the various components of training is in fact medicinal; to ones’ mind, and shall we say the ‘spirit.’  This goes far to account for the countless service men and women and veterans who daily demonstrate excellent and honorable military service, and then enter back into our much changed communities at home to sink or swim as they are able.

In combat we become rapacious in our drive to survive it, we and our comrades in arms contain the womb of safety that makes our passage, and to allow a discharge of each one’s own duty and thus return then back home as a unit, return to a now perhaps distantly recalled life that each decided to leave behind to honorably serve it, each one devoted with all her heart to defend it. Post trauma stress disorder is a sweet, crazy description of a need that others have to describe us as we seem in common. But it is up to us, only up to each person to disarm at last, one by one, the traps that her right defenses have left in her, after these are no longer needed. Because these defenses are completely individual, but yet had served each warrior well enough; the same desired goal of moment to moment, day to day survival. For as long as these defense mechanisms are needed. So it is natural that individual differences lead those we return to, to recognize that the sufferings many warriors experience appear so to share similar that a label P T S D has palliative effect and meaning for them, but in fact many of the ones who have served and who are labeled as dysfunctional thus are deprived by that label of the device to learn at last that the problem is truly only individual, and personal to each one. And can only be overcome by this perspective and in time.

This placebo relief is real for loved ones, but is distinct from the sufferers treatment in practical terms.  Relief of the disjunction of considered symptoms, each a risk of stress and bad behavior verses the perceived benefits any parent and child will encounter with all decisions going forward. Micro family health issues are granted the widest prerogative in every one but in a few key aspects, as violence or mental and emotional abuse. In exchange under the law we accept controversial propositions for the greater good as may prevail, or indeed how we may promote or detract from a given consideration of any type or any class. I refer for example to just two social disputes , fluoride in water supplies or of relative risks to a child from vaccination: expressed as a ratio, compared to risk to all others suffered by exposure to a society experiencing reduced vaccination, or without fluoridation benefits, that certainly result concurrently in retrospect.

When we are young and are powerful; and wanting to defend our country, protect our heritage, or just to get out of Dodge, it is an age old impulse to step up to duty as we see it. But war, politics and carnage today is at last so immediate, and so visibly ghastly, not just suffering our own private hell in silence, as so many have in past wars and conflicts. Today our warriors are suffering a peril and danger that is laid out graphically to be viewed everywhere, and knowing that loved ones at home are affected in that way adds weight to the pack each warrior carries in and then home from battle. When we reach out beyond our past limitations the results can have a great, sometimes a horrible, unintended effect; by the consequences that may be triggered inside our head at the whim of fate, or a moments’ inattention to duty. We focus on our nation’s interests, our company’s interests, and our own in turns, as human beings do. In general we are reaching out to the unknown, trusting it holds fortune, but demanding in return: all that we feel we are due.

In harm’s way we build up our own individual and constant defensive equations. We believe that it will best protect us; and so it must shift to fit each need, or each occasion of danger. Maintaining this crisis condition, even over only weeks or months can cause us actual physical changes in our human brain. Of course I am not, nor do I claim to be completely current in all technical neurological research, but by observation with an artist’s continuous diverse perspective, and confirmed perhaps by your own life’s experience. If this is indicated by changes remarked in a loved one’s behavior, and complaints in tandem upon return, and reflected largely sadly in the passage of time, sometimes it is very evident in the difficulty the warrior feels adjusting to the obvious, and also uncertain aspects they typically see, forward movement changed family and friends as it has ourselves; can these be reconciled?

In fact P T S D strongly resembles the non-physical, non-medical indications arrived at similarly to a similar diagnosis of any mental condition; that indicates both the P T S D and bipolar disorder diagnoses only describe broad spectrums of symptoms that have been observed in people who may share similar descriptions of behaviors that were diagnosed from differing individual but on each one labeled called P T S D alike. Each one of us who have develop important capacities and processes that, under threat were, or seemed to be vital to our survival, but as circumstances changed, becoming more static and perhaps safer, s that they no longer serve us usefully. Alas, now that a person is ‘safe’ at home but suffering with these same defenses that have been hardwired into her. They do not just fade away.

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P T S D: Lost in the bi-cognizance    

2/8

                                                                                                                                      12/14/2014 (453)

In dominant society where I exist day to day; me and it operate in a bi-cognitive parallel,that for this discussion I will term ‘polite.’   In contrast however; my own cognitive system is unique and the object of a lifetimes crafting.  My aim in every action and word is impeccability. That means simply, that I take responsibility for my own words and actions, for even the smallest thing.

It flows from this that I consider my world closely and from infinite perspectives; and the words I speak or write are the result of this process, and those are always only the thing that I feel must be said, and that thing be stated plainly. This is of course the very opposite of being polite; but has the two-fold advantage of saying my point clearly, but in fact the other may not be so clear on my intention, plus also doing it in the smallest possible part of time, but so often the time I meant to be saved is multiply lost by that anyway.

As a result nearly everyone I have encountered in dominant culture will gladly trade away the time they spend in polite fashion in hopes of a little civility for themselves, and some peace. But my own experience with that polite process is that the communication always shifts at last into old and worn channels of capitulation and hurt feelings anyway. I saw how my returned G.I. father made his own path in going along with my mother’s wishes, and that he perceived that as his sole refuge, and really his best hope to maximize his chances of having some peace and quiet.

This perception that I developed growing up is always the first pin prick of my own p t s d; it equates having intimacy, a loving family, as taking on my own ball and chain; and that is always a given each time I look into a woman’s eyes. But now, looking back I’m not sure this should have been so important to my decision to exclude certain [any] women from my consideration, especially when they had signaled an interest. As an additional, layered defense I despise signals and signs in this context, although I understand they are polite. Perversely it is of the backwards nature of me that I do not allow myself to interpret these honest signs, leading me over and over always to social disaster by a desire that is seen by all as powerfully, general expressed; but difficult to express personally. Thus today I remain unencumbered by a wife or close friends, but free to remain without their charms, comforting attention and human touch.

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There and Back, to and from P T S D   

3/8

12/15/2014    (815)

The only way I can live my life as I have done is with the supposition that I am invisible, and so it is I reckon, that when I leave her presence she forgets that I was ever there, and practically immediately too. Also I simply accept anything she tells me at face value, shrugging off any ambiguity. Of course this one system aspect started out as wishful thinking and evolved into what, in dominant culture is seen as a sort of psychosis, and with reason. Looking back I can now understand that I will certainly never ever hook up with anyone believing  just so, the things she tells me, only those things that she tells me with words. Because I give out only love, and thus direct communicative language in my own words, I hope so too in all conversations in which love is appended, and may immediately indicate itself clearly to a child; my own delayed focus of intent, ‘this so that’ prevents my immediate focus in too many sad cases of love lost or misconstrued in chicks past.

 

My perception of polite rejoinders is that they always constitute a clear disjunction [maybe/maybe not], that feels deeply ill advised to consider at all, or that at least not without a real understanding of the speaker. This because whether they prove to be right or in error, a decision in either case can be, at best uncertain. Keeping with this view of all disjunctions is vital in logical, philosophical and artistic fields of study, because one cannot build reliable equations on untested hypotheses, for down the line these may collapse due to having been built on an unstable foundation. So when a person does not trouble to distinguish her own mental obsession for keeping clean data she and it may soon become corrupted, made useless as a stable basis for building a romantic, or any other human relationship. So with this one may remain suspicious of all persons in dominant culture, for that mere fact. See always instead that those other persons too have each their own fractured and conflicting intentions from infinite sufferings. This is reason enough to always speak plainly, and to wish that others could grant similar temerity, in turn, if only for the sake of brevity. I do not overlook the seeming dumbass contradictions of this paragraph, because of course we each are at our core, all suffering very similarly rooted in in a person’s life lived without recapitulation. Still some persons are going one way on the money path, while others choose the warpath backward to that former time when money was unknown on the North American continent.

There are numerous P T S D pin-prick stress sticks that I feel in me frequently, to change my attention each time I catch a woman’s eye and she returns my tiny smile. They make me turn and walk away so to prevent a relationship from flaring with any woman that I have met thus in my monastic role. In two decades of Buddhist practice and service I have heard so many young women each recapitulate to me all the sufferings of her life, and  in turn heard each one of them say why she came to the terrible unhappy place that I met them, out on the night streets. They spoke to me when they saw I would hear them, and I heard each one say that she was suffering from a painful and undeserved betrayal. So numbingly often, the abuse they received was from their own Father, or from another man who should have loved her instead, and listened to her, and treated her better. Rightly or foolishly I decided way back to gather power in becoming  just one man in each apprentices’ life that loved and respected her; and that too, without fucking her in the bargain, because I saw that if a girl cannot ever trust a man, she is defeated by that, all through her future adult life. I don’t know whether or not I was in error with this thought; but for the hell of it, that felt right to me then.

It is these gestures of helping others just so, that accumulated power within me, and with that power I reached for intellectual goals of spirit that may come to a man who steps on the path that I have chosen, and surely that has come to define me. By this the unknown aspects of life are plain to see reveled. From childhood I have understood that the things that I could feel only viscerally, were against the flow of the intentions and purposes of everyone around me.  Still the more I fell into conventional channels to gain acceptance in social situations and financial success, the more disoriented and unhappy I became.

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Neither Either if you please okay? 

4/8 

12/15/2014  (827)

The form I have chosen to couch this dharma on has struck me as odd, and perhaps it is. The most telling P T S D symptom that so many share in common suffering post trauma, is the inability to give and to receive love or to trust ourself and/or trust our lover. It is valuable to see infinite connections to our own suffering, by seeing another person’s at first seemingly disconnected complaints; and learning to recognize solutions useful to heal ourself in them. There is so much more to learn and express about this subject, and few are more important for healing of us than our own capacity to find our own healing path.

Even those who served us in military adventures overseas, suffer neither more or less debilitating symptoms, as those who have suffered traumatic violence or sexual assault at home, or away at school too, and from infinite other causes, oblique suffering, and debilitating ennui from countless internal, individual symptoms we suffer in common. Thus too equally so do persons in every nation suffer from the after effects of the traumas each one has also endured. These mental formations do not dissipate without time, effort and continued personal consideration and attention to each one our own healing.

Rejection burns me instantly, I admit that is true, but that is over in a moment, and my life of practice has given me tools to process and release negative feeling quickly so that they do not linger. I am fifty something years old and never married, and though there is nothing stopping me from asking any woman for a ‘date,’ as we called them in the day, still I feel a reluctance to be absurd and that to me is more difficult than rejection. I am concerned about how my own nature will effect and distress her too; for as Motley Crue sings it: I’m a ‘live wire.’ I am liable to go off in infinite directions at the slighted incentive as my artwork leads me.

So the more I come to care for a woman the greater becomes the terror that wells up in me. Not fear of love, or of commitment, or losing my perceived freedom; nothing of that nature, for I am now beyond being hurt in that way by any other person as every person must be. Still this is not the end, but it shall be an accepted (even if not kindly accepted) new beginning for every person and all of their loved ones.

This aspect is important and distinct from obsession; for trauma brings one to an altered state that may change, and perhaps redirect a person’s focus away from the world of dominant cultural social norms, out infinitely into any direction. The distinction between the two is just this, obsession is intentionally pursued for a purpose like money or power or control or sexual or any other desires; while infinity is directed by spirit; and carried outside of the norm at last only for the hell of it.

Don’t think that only military warriors suffer from their personal p t s d. Each person has their own recurring points that have been affected by trauma in life, and those defenses persist in her own day to day life. Just so, as my own monastic  vows cannot be swept away by a simple decision that they do not well serve me any longer; so much worse and more difficult it may become to face the defenses inside each service man and woman in harm’s way, when the time comes to go back home after a long continued service in perilous duty . Remember that those described traumatic aspects were very likely instrumental in each person’s survival in combat. Understanding this point alone is a key to each person finding her own way back to a ‘normal’ life at last. I have struggled with my own problems, twisting, testing whatever I can think of changing myself; for a full year now as I have blogged about them and my struggle, painfully, honestly, even numbingly, for my work has no value otherwise. The solutions are never cut and dried; no two person’s suffering are exactly alike and so even knowing what hurts us does not effect a cure right away. Please believe that if you can isolate what the heck they are, I am confident any one’s own symptomology now thought to be adequately described as p t s d, may be overcome at last if we do not give up on ourself or forsake our loved ones by removing our self from them. Isolation seems to relieve the worst immediate causes we suffer from those clear sore spots that one feels; but there we step into an array of worse problems that will never recede from us until we take a stand, and battle now for our own life.

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P T S Does It: First Attention-Second Attention

5/8

(3149 words)

[We Come Now With Instructions] rev.

In looking for common ground, with everyone really,

 but particularly with a young woman;

 I find that I must enter with a

narrow scope on our acquaintance.

an unnatural contrived bi-cognitive mental state of reference

that requires translation from her conversation

to my own perception of her feelings

without deviating too radically from them.

For example I may see clear connections

affecting a random topic of discussion,

but am restrained in speaking these

connections for a variety of reasons.

Chief among these are time, confusion and interest.

Compounded between me and the company addressed;

is complicated, to the second power.

In my animal perception I see

a person’s intent; but in her first attention

I have no idea what priorities separate her

immediately from perceiving that she feels

as I can see in her animal nature.

Still, as we become acquainted,

these narrow confined connections

may flesh out and reach common perception.

I share this dichotomy with every person in common,

yourself included. 

The intent, and the yes/no is viscerally felt

and transmitted in common easily enough

for any two bodies in the first or

second attention in agreement. 

Confusion arises between the two

if their attention numbers are not in agreement,

or if the bi-cognitive frame

is pushed out of fascination into discomfort.

These may alter, change, affect or be effected

by the slightest word or circumstance. change

into any of infinite aspect outcomes.

Obviously every person operates their

own personality;

and attempts to organize that one life

with her own cognitive reasoning.

They are bolstered, and regulated by

the adaptive idioms they have evolved overtly,

or subconsciously as it happens.

Identity constitutes the core energy

of every human being because identity

is the key to our intent;

and to mastering each of whatever

true power we possess at the present moment.

Idioms have no rules, restrictions or boundaries;

idioms are unique expressions of power

suited to the attached personality.

Sometimes overt, often passive; or direct,

or misleading, these idioms allow us to best effect

a given situation with the actual power we possess;

regardless of how we are perceived.

Habitually for most persons

who follow dominant culture,

our idioms evolve naturally

without having to be contrived.

Typically dominant culture will always

be seen to exist in the first attention.

Thus the spectrum of each person’s intent and

perception in dominant culture forms with our own tonal ,

our system of understanding the hierarchy of values in life,

and so our preferences are all

directed from the first attention.

Any person employed by another

is nearly always required to maintain the first attention.

This simply means that we must focus exclusively

on certain specific directed aspects

at all hours that we are employed.

This leaves little or no time to notice and absorb

our natural human inclination towards our

excluded aspects in feeling, dreaming and seeing.

These aspects are often limited or subverted

from many person’s professional experience

so that they become them self trapped

by the very principles they claim will guide them;

only those satisfactions offered at finally in

the first attention, are power, money and sex;

and each is only real or implied.

When a person learns to see,

she can no longer be satisfied by

the same old incentives;

a paycheck, an edge over a competitor,

leverage in the market or attaining sexual favors.

It is more natural for human beings to exist

while thinking in a completely different cognizance;  

termed second attention,

where instead of first looking at life

with specific preconceived preferences

that have evolved for primarily abstract reasons.

We see everything as important,

and every person as luminous.

Neither first or second attention

is inherently better or worse than the other,

only they lead in differing paths to attainment.

For certain responsibilities

first attention works quite well

for persons of normal capacity,

with responsibilities; or ambitions

of a specific nature,

typically power, money and sex;

objects best had by a person’s reason.

The way of the second attention does not

differ greatly from the first attention,

except that it seems as

its opposite in some basic aspects.

With the second attention we become aware

of infinity as an unambiguous aspect of our

every moment, thought and intention.

The things we say and do as human beings

are always mere distortions of our thoughts and intentions.

Even when our plans work out well,

they still always differ in important ways from our intent,

but this is inevitable with human beings lives;

where satisfaction is found for most persons in the first attention,

and even such victories are rare and notable.

In contrast those in second attention become

aware of everything around them and so

because everything has equal weight

and potential relevance to everything else;

in seeing thus every moment, every instance,

every act of kindness is said to contain

a cubic centimeter of power that one may seize

and save or to use to further your intent.

With that comes the ability to change up mid-plan

with only a slight, distant consideration;

and thus human beings are capable of

accomplishing goals by that,

goals that others would not attempt, thinking they are impossible. 

The limits of first attention are that

in time it calcifies the tonal with a laundry list

of things one must-do, and must not do

that prevent us from reaching beyond  

our own perceived limitations.

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PTSD SOCIAL ATTENTION

6/8

In this analysis very little can effectively be accomplished socially by broad strokes of law, or morality in our present modern state of the human condition. This is to say money can be taxed and spent, laws can be passed, persons may suffer and criminals may be punished; but while all of these are real functions with real consequences; none can be pointed to as solving any real societal problems going forward. They can only affect narrow individual issues. The trickle down concept that helping a few will in turn benefit many, is not impossible tangentially, but no undefined result is predictable for all persons uniformly.

The truth of this is now, and for the whole century thus far has been fully recognized, and even so completely ignored by those tasked with passing and enforcing laws to keep the peace. By accepting the dysfunctional status quo as inevitable, it is assumed human temperaments and differences are so impenetrable, so irreconcilable that no effort is spent in trying to find equitability in civic life. All persons are affixed to a scale: rich-middle class-poor, good better best, yes-no-hell no! Thinking thus there is no chance to perceive their uniform luminous aspect, equality of ability and purpose; so that barriers are purposely, but unnecessarily attached to so many persons path of their own existence. 

There is no question that dominant culture is in a nosedive decline and the state has been prevented from the function of a healthy nation, and degenerated into a mere series of factions bidding for power and position to broker our collective wealth and productivity. New technology has made every measure of power shift downward; to the extent that every person has a multiplied opportunity for advancement over the previous generation, if they are able to break out of that old track.  As power shifts from one group to another, confusion naturally results. The greater part of this confusion is felt by the force in assent, for a number of reasons; but those losing the power are immediately aware of the loss at least, if unclear of its cause, or the result.

Power seems to run with money, but as circumstances part the two, it is never certain where the changes will fall to; nor certain who will pick up the power, or certain how it will all pan out. Money will inevitably distort the status quo, perhaps for a very long time as power levels its new recipients, whose intent must rise to power’s new capacity. The failure of political cell group candidate’s ability or capacity to come to grips with #BlackLivesMatter as a political concept rather than a platitude or a homily is indicative of the polarized confusion from the power draining away from the national political leadership with each passing election season. For a partisan office holder to state in a speech that black lives matter without a qualifying predicate is impossible in this crazy bipolar culture. That phrase uttered as a stand alone constant, implies that some unspecified (and probably white) lives must then matter less.

The terms of service for successful participation within dominant culture, particularly politically, demand a quid pro quo for every assignment of favor; one directly costs another by the system’s reckoning. So thus no person is seen as a person in dominant culture’s politics, but only as an extension of a specific interest or interests vying for power by portioning out money and favors. While the government and its attendant economy is in assent and normal persons are mainly harassed by poverty and injustice; money is a fine tool to persuade persons to work at some arbitrarily thing seen as their best interests. But now that power is flowing away from the past structures in torrents, the net value of that same money inversely diminishes in its influence. So today it does not have its past power to cause persons to work against their own collective interest as it once had in decades past. This trend will not change without radical change in governance in the United States. The evidence is in social media here, and in the leveling influence of the world wide web in developing the minds and opportunities of and for the next generation of children everywhere.

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P T S D Conceivable Equilibrium

7/8

All traumas arrive from outside of us. Self abuse, abuse of loved ones and even suicide in not conceived internally without strong exterior provocation. Any degree of trauma, from steady annoyance even to torture, is different only by degree; and the spectrum of the trauma we have absorbed is predicated by one’s prior life, experience or training. Each of us is a unique human equation in three parts:

1. past experience
2. present condition
3. future prospects

The first two parts are largely static, but if the past locked away in memory is still unresolved, issues in the past can prey upon one now and in the future. The present is our font of all progress, but then too also regression, inspiration and action. It is the events of one’s past combined with hopes for the future that determine what any person will make of any given now in a lifetime. We are all shuffled like a deck of cards, each with a unique trauma equation, a point on a scale within a spectrum containing the entire human condition.

Of course the scale resembles good-bad-indifferent while the spectrum may be read great-good-bad-awful. Clearly the two, spectrum and scale describe infinity in terms of possible human equations that describe the aggregated life experience of each person. For example one may be wealthy, living a privileged life but still be terribly unhappy; conversely one may be imprisoned, abused, tortured for years, but yet remain indifferent to the suffering; with intent on finding a means of escape. Also one may live in poverty, supporting a large family and working their fingers to the bone, and yet still be perfectly happy with that lot in life. In kind, and by degree every person fits into this spectrum in unique fashion. The effect of all of these graph points of the life of an individual determines their degree of post-traumatic stress. Some are little, or unaffected by the terrible stress they have experienced, even that resulting from war, abuse or disorder, while another may be deeply changed and affected by someone or some series of seemingly mild traumas that bring them to great dysfunction that in any given case these may be obvious, or may lay deeply submerged in the subconscious and cause us to do things, or not do things that effect ourself and others.

An affected person may help ease the suffering a dysfunctional other merely by a kind example; deliberately or serendipitously in just a moment. Conversely one who badly suffers may himself distress or frighten others by his behavior without even being aware of it, and without the least intention; or they may deliberately push loved ones away in feeling anger or distress rooted in fear, guilt or self loathing. These indicated seven variables described may combine to cement one into a jacket of such narrow constancy and inflict a false clarity of purpose in a rut of P T S D. Still another similarly troubled may escape obvious symptoms or ill effects. Both of these types of person to whatever degree they have been affected, exist in every part of the world; and daily, in every moment we trouble others around us in an unbroken chain of suffering that stretches around the world, affecting one another in every positive and negative manner imaginable. Some suffering constant distress or aggression; but most swinging back and forth across the whole spectrum of behavior as their energy and their mood maintains them. Living within this spectrum allows for a sometimes beautiful and inspirational life for many persons despite the pain experienced, perhaps for most persons. It is not far fetched to assert that with understanding and great compassionate effort, agreement among all persons of conscience may in short order attain a conceivable and preferable equilibrium.

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PTSD Pray For an Anomaly

8/8

The second attention contains what may be described as a sort of a glass ceiling of human attainment. Everyone in first attention has a capacity for knowledge that is not perceivable to themself, or comparable to another with any certainty. But the second attention levels all who attain it with a capacity to utilize knowledge gained by seeing, feeling and dreaming, so to perceive beyond reason and logic. Thus every person may be seen as luminous; with at least the potential, no matter how removed, of learning that about themselves or others.

Persons in the second attention are capable of shifting their assemblage point (of all perspectives) in an instant, so to correspond to the energy entering any given situation that they encounter. This contains the infinite variety of life available in the animal state of existence; where nothing is more important than anything else is. With that a person’s life is lived fully in every moment of awareness, and every decision and action is thus undertaken merely for the hell of it. The essence of the power of one such is to reduce herself; and to abandon her self-importance. Only in the moment can we see the amazing and wonderful world we are born into, and by that we amass enough power to hold to our arbitrary path of intent.

One chooses their path, any path they decide has merit. Although in a sense every path has equal possibility, in the second attention each has a unique relationship to the unknown present possibilities, and future fate, termed the nagual. The limits of life in the first attention are enforced by the tonal of labels and descriptions that define all person’s lives, and it is safe to say few such are aware or believe in the nagual, even though every human being is affected by its nagging feeling of incompleteness that is part of the human condition. This distraction makes us self-centered and self-satisfied; thus further distracting us from seeing the evident connectedness of all life here on the earth by arbitrary desires and feelings of distress caused by fear, ignorance, clarity and bliss. These are inevitably imposed by the tonal, locking one into the first attention and separating us from the broader harmony with all other life on our planet. The ability to adapt to each moment, each situation we exist in with every breath, in the perceived world of the second attention shows every aspect is unique and certain in its nature, so that its present ambiguity is reduced. Showing the world as it dictates how we in turn meet it daily.  When I say that nothing is more important than anything else, that does not imply that the world is monotonous, instead the assigning of labels as good, bad, important, dangerous etc. rapidly distances us from seeing infinite aspects offered everyday in people, places and things that we encounter in life, but that recede and become dull and two dimensional to us in our narrow first attention world of concerns.

In the second attention, things of first attention importance commonly fade and go unheeded. One sees strangers as their own animal aspect nature that we then integrate into our own perception, but these are not often the same as is common to dominant culture. Printed signs mostly go unread or minded In the second attention as do normal social norms that socially lubricate to make life even possible in the first attention. Thus a void of separation arises between persons of opposite numbers that is difficult to easily bridge. 

Do not take away from this any assertion of superiority for living in the second attention, particularly in the United States. We order our arbitrary desires and designs into spells of our personal intent, spells to order events, our actions and our interactions in unsuspected and/or unexpected ways in order to affect outcomes in a manner not typically obvious to others around us; and also just for the hell of it, but mainly with positive, or at least a benign intent. But we are still fully human in the second attention and certainly don’t mind seeming foolish in lacking the constraints of the first attention; wherein everything is seen only as good or bad, and summarily dealt with as such.

In the second attention we seek out anomalies in kind in our existence; and recognize them as energy flowing into the world; and they may contain wonder, beauty or power. Every situation offers such an anomaly in this amazing world we live in, if we are nimble enough to grasp onto this, that don Juan Matus termed a cubic centimeter of power, available only to a warrior in the second attention. These anomalies offer unseen solutions to challenges that persons in the first attention can rarely notice and exploit, or chances that they will not think even possible to attempt.

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