Academy:Attention

Attention

The world will distract you, sometimes to tell you something, sometimes to take something from you. Knowing how to use, maintain your awareness, and preserve your attention saves you the thousands of cuts into your time and personal power. When you don't, you get pushed into domains of power that want nothing more than the resources you have, your life itself. These could be shopping malls, back streets, a thug with a grudge, or even your family.

• Observing and interpretation of the world.
• Calming techniques, meditation, remediation
• Diet, food for strength, mental alertness, power and stability,
• Controlling your availability and non-availability to the world so that your attention isn't sapped.

There are four primary ways people deal with their complex society, two of which are pathological (named first below).

• escape (drugs, fantasy) -> staying attentive (retreating to Nature to maintain ability).
• berzerking (ranting, sports) -> leading (accepting responsibility to attune to the Divine).

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Secondary students:

Attention is the precursor to knowledge.

Two primary dynamics within humans:

• Power: the desire for power of various kinds. watching for stresses: machine-made stresses and flows, human power-dynamics and flows,
• Love: the need/desire for love. When this fails, recklessness (violence, crime, dangerous activities), and withdrawal (drugs, self-harm) are the norm.

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Apprentices:

• knowing the human condition: what drives a human?
• knowing the human condition: what are people trying to do to satisfy these drives?
• power stresses: machines amplify the power of a human. Either their will, in the case of fuel-power machines or their mind, in the case of data-powered machines. These create gradients of power which are stored or flow within the society.
• love stresses: the human need for esteem and physical affection.

With these four, the Jedi read the world around them, so they can flow elegantly in the world.

Jedi Academy