Attention/awareness

To understand the constructed system we call a state of consciousness, we begin with some theoretical postulates based on human experience. The first postulate is the existence of a basic awareness. Because some volitional control of the focus of awareness is possible, we generally refer to it as attention/awareness. we must also recognize the existence of self-awareness, the awareness of being aware. 

Further basic postulates deal with structures, those relatively permanent structures/functions/subsystems of the mind/brain that act on information to transform it in various ways. Arithmetical skills, for example, constitute a (set of related) structure(s). The structures of particular interest to us are those that require some amount of attention/awareness to activate them. Attention/awareness acts as psychological energy in this sense. Most techniques for controlling the mind are ways of deploying attention/awareness energy and other kinds of energies so as to activate desired structures (traits, skills, attitudes) and deactivate undesired structures. 

Psychological structures have individual characteristics that limit and shape the ways in which they can interact with one another. Thus the possibilities of any system built of psychological structures are shaped and limited both by the deployment of attention/awareness and other energies and by the characteristics of the structures comprising the system. The human biocomputer, in other words, has a large but limited number of possible modes of functioning. 

This basic attention/awareness is something we can both conceptualize and (to some extent) experience as distinct from the... 

A more radical view, common to the spiritual psychologies 128, is that basic awareness is not just a property of the brain, but is (at least partially) something from outside the workings of the brain, insofar as this is true, it is conceivable that most or all content associated with brain processes could potentially be stood back from so that the degree of separation between content and attention/awareness, the degree of self-awareness, is potentially much higher than in the conservative view. 

Stimuli and structures attract or capture attention/awareness. when you are walking down the street, the sound and sight of an accident and a crowd suddenly gathering attract your attention to the incident. This attractive pull of stimuli and activated structures may outweigh volitional attempts to deploy attention/awareness elsewhere. For example, you worry over and over about a particular problem and are told that you are wasting energy by going around in circles and should direct your attention elsewhere, but, in spite of your desire to do so, you may find it almost impossible. 

The ease with which particular kinds of structures and contents capture attention/awareness varies with the state of consciousness and the personality structure of the individual. For example, things that are highly valued or are highly threatening capture attention much more easily than things that bore us. indeed, we can partially define personality as those structures that habitually capture a person s attention/awareness. in some states of consciousness, attention/awareness is more forcibly captivated by stimuli than in others. 

Attention/awareness constitutes the major energy of the mind, as... 

Note that the total amount of attention/awareness energy available to a person varies from time to time, but there may be some fixed upper limit on it for a particular day or other time period. Some days, we simply cannot concentrate well no matter how much we desire... 

Note that while we have distinguished attention/awareness and... 

Since the mount of attention/awareness energy available at any particular time has a fixed upper limit, some decrement should be found when too many structures draw on this energy simultaneously. However, if the available attention/awareness energy is greater than the total being used, simultaneous activation of several structures incurs no decrement. 

Once a structure has been formed and is operating, either in isolation or in interaction with other structures, the attention/awareness energy required for its operation can be automatically drawn on either intermittently or continuously. The personality and normal state of consciousness are operating in such a... 

Although the interaction of one psychological structure with another structure depends on activation of both structures by attention/awareness energy, this interaction is modified by an important limitation that individual structures have various kinds of properties that limit and control their potential range of interaction with one another, structures are not equipotent with respect to interacting with one another, but have important individual characteristics. You cannot see with your ears. 

Thus while the interaction of structures is affected by the way attention/awareness energy is deployed, it is also affected by the properties of individual structures, in computer terms, we are not totally general-purpose computers, capable of being programmed in just any arbitrary fashion, we are specialized that is our strength, weakness, and humanness. 

For complex structures, we should probably also distinguish among (I) inputs and outputs that we can be consciously aware of with suitable deployment of attention/awareness, (2) inputs and outputs that we cannot be consciously aware of but that we can make inferences about, and (3) inputs and outputs that are part of feedback control interconnections between structures, which we cannot be directly aware of. Further, we must allow for energy exchanges, as well as informational exchanges, between structures.(back)... 

Psychologically, loading means keeping a person s consciousness busy with desired types of activities so that too little (attention/awareness) energy is left over to allow disruption of the system s operation. As Don Juan told Carlos Castaneda 10, people s ordinary, repeated, day-to-day activities keep their energies so bound within a certain pattern that they do not become aware of nonordinary reali ti es. 

This greatly restricts the variety of input to the system, inhibits thinking about various stimuli that come from scanning the environment, and in general takes attention/awareness energy away from and reduces the activity of the various subsystems of ordinary consciousness. 

Another important difference is that in hypnosis induction the hypnotist takes credit for these anomalous effects, thus helping to incorporate himself into the subject s own psyche we have given little attention to the role of the hypnotist as "outsider," for he only becomes effective as he becomes able to control the subject s own attention/awareness energy. The meditator in the Buddhist tradition is seeking to free himself from control by external events or persons, and so does not value particular phenomena (back)... 

Figure 8-1 sketches ten major subsystems, represented by the labeled ovals, and their major interaction routes. The solid arrows represent major routes of information flow not all known routes are shown, as this would clutter the diagram. The hatched arrows represent major, known feedback control routes whereby one subsystem has some control over the functioning of another subsystem. The dashed arrows represent information flow routes from the subconscious subsystem to other subsystems, routes that are inferential from the point of view of the ordinary d-SoC. Most of the subsystems are shown feeding information into, or deriving information from, awareness, which is here considered not a subsystem but the basic component of attention/awareness and attention/awareness energy that flows through various systems. 

Many other interoceptive signals not normally in our awareness can be put in our awareness by turning our attention/awareness to them. For example, you may not have been thinking of sensations in your belly a moment ago, but now that I mention them and your attention/awareness turns there, you can detect various signals, with practice you might become increasingly sensitive to signals from this area of your body. Thus, as with our exterocepters, we have some voluntary control over what we will attend to, but this control is limited. 

---