Scanning

To scan is to apply both conscious and unconscious awareness to the environment your body resides in at any one moment in time to achieve EWS capabilities which contribute immensely to our ability to perceive and determine when to "avoid" things that might put us into harms way.

Karate/karate-do + Ken-po Goku-i (yang + yin of martial systems) teaches us to use our body-mind to achieve something unique in our practice and life. A core teaching of both is the use of both "eyes and ears" to see and hear many things both literal and figurative as our minds interpret what is seen in scanning so we may act accordingly with out resorting to a somewhat ineffective, for our time, instinctive reaction to stimuli, etc.

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Take a look at the associated graphic. I use it to help "see" how both "eyes and ears" are used in scanning. These are useless if one has not attained adequate knowledge of what to encode in the brain so the mind can evaluate its perceptions and translate them to useful data to act on. As can be seen, the eyes have both direct and peripheral vision while the ears have a much larger area to hear sounds that would trigger the eyes and head to rotate in the right direction for gathering more pertinent data to evaluate. All this when trained properly; when educated properly provide almost instantaneous responses/reactions/actions necessary to "avoid; deescalate; remain aware."

Using your imagination and training to rotate the head to the left and right provide your eyes, both direct and peripheral + hearing, a full three hundred eighty degree area coverage. If something is detected to the absolute rear by hearing an peripheral vision the body can turn ninety degrees either way to verify data before acting, if time permits.

Give this some serious consideration. After all, in my view, this scanning is actually the first physical training fundamental that provides the art of avoidance its best chance of success.