Read Online Warrior Philosophy in Game of Thrones by Francis Briers - Free Book Online

quite late at night.  As you pass a shop window you notice a beautifully carved chair which is just the thing you have been looking for as a reading chair.  The shop is closed as it's late, but you start looking to see if you can see a price on the chair, a phone number for the shop so you can call first thing in the morning to ask them to hold it, and an opening time so you can come back and buy it.
    All of a sudden you hear a loud bang!  It sounds like a gunshot.  Your heart races and you start looking for the source of the sound, listening to see if you can hear someone nearby, looking for different ways to head back home, your mind flashing through all the ways you might run to safety...Is that someone in the shadows across the street...?
    There is another bang.  This time the sky lights up and you realise that they are fireworks!  By the gold and green light of the 'rocket' you see that there is no-one across the street just a plant growing up the side of the building.  You feel relived and almost like laughing – how silly to be so scared!  Taking a breath of the night air you can smell a bonfire maybe a couple of streets over, and you can hear some faint cheers for the firework display.  You see another launch into the sky and decide to stand and watch a bit.  Blue and red falling stars scatter across the sky... It's a beautiful night...
     
    In each paragraph of this example your focus would be entirely different.  Once you notice the chair, everything else disappears and you tune out your environment.  With the perceived gunshot, the chair is forgotten and your environment is swiftly assessed based on the limited criteria of possible danger, and possible escape.  With the firework realisation the shop and even the streets are soon forgotten as you look to the skies.  We are constantly filtering the data we receive about our environment based on what seems important in the moment and much of the rest will be lost to our conscious awareness.  There is a famous experiment about this in which a video was made where 2 groups of people, one lot in white, one lot in black, are passing basket balls [13] .  For the experiment people were asked to count how many times the basketball is passed between the people in white.  Plenty of people get that right.  What the majority of people miss is the fact that a guy in a monkey suit walks through the group throwing basket balls, beats his chest and then walks out the other side of the shot.  The amazing thing is that the majority of people taking part in the experiment, when asked if they saw the gorilla, had missed it entirely!  The typical response was: “What Gorilla?!”  The participants in the study had got so focused on the task of counting the passes of the ball that they tuned out everything else.  We selectively filter, tune in to and tune out so much.  What we filter will be determined not only by our biology but by our psychological state (survival in the gun example, attention with the chair in the shop – or the gorilla!), our beliefs and our values.  If I believe the world to be a beautiful place then I will tend to notice that which is beautiful, if I believe it is ugly, I will notice the ugliness.  That doesn't mean that I am completely in control of my world and if I don't notice danger, then it can't harm me – that's delusional narcissism!  However, the world in our awareness is amazingly variable, and far less concrete than most people imagine.  If I am always on the lookout for danger, I am likely to find it.  Where one person sees a potential criminal hiding in his hooded sweatshirt, someone else might see a guy trying to keep his ears warm on a windy day.  What the truth is for the guy in the hood may be something else again.
    How this all applies in a martial environment is that if you don't have some awareness of what you tend to filter out, then you may be missing important information.  If I have an unconscious belief that