Since your attention seems to be not entirely under your conscious control, and we are probably quite lucky this is true, this might suggest that a healthy sensitivity to those things that create that natural shift would be what amounts to real “common sense.” It’s common sense to look when you hear a honking car horn near by, or squealing breaks, or other things that may mean harm or death. Is this fair to say? Does this require anyone else’s agreement?

Yes, because I would have to agree with the person teaching me these signals as well as of those signalling. Someone taught you to hear things? Taught you to be afraid of pain? An infant has to learn to be startled?

No, but to pay attention to those. Fear brings the attention to those things and doesn’t need to be taught, but the cognitive memetic virus is very wide spread. We do attribute to it many powers that it does not in fact have and quite commonly.

I offer that we can sense the degree of nonsense in another person instinctively, which could also be called poor mental health. We sense to what degree a person has abandoned the sensitivity we innately rely on to preserve our own health and well being. A baby cries when it’s hungry. It doesn’t need to be taught to believe that hunger is of importance or concern, but in extreme cases the mentally ill ignore hunger potentially to the point of starvation.

We have an innate fear of immediate threat. Babies fear sudden movement of their own body or of those around them, and yet the mentally ill can lose a great deal of sensitivity to any natural indicators of threat.

Jack in the Box is a terrible toy for a baby then. At an early age, yes. When they are older and more acclimated in toddler years, it can be appropriate.

Then they learn to laugh at the sudden fear.

Funny, our cat could jump onto the baby bed of my little brother any time and he just played with it. Infant brother? Even when he was only 4 months old. There are other indicators. Infants can identify familiar presences like the cat or a family member, and even distinguish between a familiar person and an unfamiliar one, or fail to find it anywhere or in anything. The mentally ill often either read familiarity everywhere and in every thing, the cat I mean, thus they will insist that their dead grandmother is talking to them in every bit of noise making machinery they come across.

So the genuine nonsense is something we are not conscious of because we are too busy thinking about other things, but we still react to it. Those whose faculties are too far gone tend to give us the creeps, even without our conscious attention to them or their behaviour.

Faculties as in listening to car tires running and being able to say that’s this and that brand for instance? No. Faculties as in being able to recognize a rapidly approaching large object is a possible threat to their life. That falling off a roof will injure or kill them which we don’t have to be taught.

But babies don’t have that sense, usually. They do have the fear of falling, always, and of loud noises. They can be trained out of a fear of falling, in part, in the hands of a trusted care giver, but they never completely lose it.

So ‘common’ is instinctive? The common would be the instinctive. The body wants to survive.

Those who win the Darwin Award are full of nonsense? Indeed. The Darwin award is sort of a morbid joke. Someone who died engaging in activity that was so foolish that they say they did humanity a favour by eliminating themselves from the gene pool.

But perhaps we should explore nonsense from a different point of view…

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~