When the Unknown Strikes
How an Action Being thinks — and refuses the second arrow.
Out of nowhere
A man is working quietly at his desk. His day is calm, his tasks are going well. Then a colleague walks over and accuses him of something he did not do.
Nothing in his morning prepared him for this. It came from what Kirdomicism calls the Unknown: events we cannot predict and cannot control. In a few seconds, his peace is gone.
What happens next does not depend on the colleague. It depends on how he thinks.
The second arrow
The Buddha described two arrows. The first is the painful event itself, and we cannot always avoid it. The second is the one we shoot into ourselves: anger, worry, replaying the hurt again and again.
The mind is two sides of one coin. We do not want it to control us, yet if left untrained it becomes the source of our own suffering. And humans are generally weak. The second arrow does not strike once. It strikes repeatedly, long after the first has gone.
That is why Kirdomicism proposes self-forcing power. Good intentions are not enough when the mind keeps pulling us back into pain. We need a trained strength that acts on our behalf, a thinking shield.
The thinking shield
The shield filters unwanted subjects, lets them go, and keeps the mind open to meet what comes next. It rests on three ideas:
- Dexterience builds the shield. It is skill acquired through practice and self-forced action, repeated until it becomes second nature. No one is born with a shield; it is trained, like a muscle.
- Foreality is how the shield sees. It is the ability to see the facts, truth and reality in front of us, and from them the likely consequences ahead. With Foreality, we do not fall into attachment, emotion or the illusions of life. It echoes the Buddhist ideal of seeing things as they really are, with an added eye on the future.
- Kirdaxia is what the shield protects: the state of supreme human intelligence that foresees and knows how to respond to emerging situations without falling into the traps of suffering, pain and evil.
The test of Kirdaxia is simple. When we look back from the future, we should not regret what we did today, or how we did it.
Breaking the chain
The natural reaction to an attack is a counter-attack. But one-on-one counter-action never ends. Each response invites another, and the chain of reaction rolls on. As the Dhammapada says, hatred is never appeased by hatred; it is appeased only by non-hatred.
Kirdomicism proposes a different way: act without being governed by what is in the mind of the intruder. We cannot control why someone accuses us, fears us or harms us. We can control the quality of our next action.
This is not passivity. An Action Being may still clarify the facts, set a boundary or seek fairness. The difference is where the action comes from: from Foreality, not from fear or anger.
Back to the desk
Here is how an Action Being meets the accusation:
- The Unknown strikes. An ungrounded accusation arrives, out of nowhere.
- The shield holds. Through Dexterience, he feels the first arrow but does not shoot the second. No spiral of anger or self-doubt.
- Foreality sees. What are the facts? The accusation is not true. What happens if I explode? What happens if I answer calmly?
- Kirdaxia stays intact. His clear, foreseeing intelligence is protected.
- Self-forced action. He responds calmly with the facts, or lets it pass, and returns to his work.
Years from now, he will not regret how he handled that moment.
From one desk to the world
The same pattern plays out on a global scale. A leader fears losing trust or power, and that fear becomes destructive action. Peace is undermined, and millions of ordinary people are struck by an arrow they did nothing to deserve and cannot control.
The shield helps each of them keep living well: protecting their Kirdaxia, and acting well within their own reach, in their family, team and community.
But Kirdomicism also has a larger hope. Today, powerful people can take harmful actions as if they were a privilege, without accounting for them. Avalrem, the value of action, is built so that harm is always recorded beside good, and never erased by it. If such a system of action value is accepted around the world, even to some degree, negative actions become visible. No position would place anyone above that accounting.
An invitation
We cannot stop the Unknown from striking. We can train how we think when it does.
The first arrow is the world's. The second arrow is mine to refuse. I see what is real, I protect my clarity, and I act by self-force, so that tomorrow I will not regret today.
Think of the last time an arrow came out of nowhere for you. What helped you refuse the second one? I would value hearing your experience.
First published on LinkedIn, 11 October 2026. Read and comment on LinkedIn →