This is the latest installation of a 27-part series, featuring my book, Chasing Unicorns. To read the previous installation, CLICK THIS LINK. For the next post in this series, CLICK THIS LINK. To start at the beginning, CLICK THIS LINK. To read the entire book at once, tap the book cover. Thanks for reading!

RECAP: Yesterday we learned that focus occurs when awareness shifts back to the same stimulus over and over again. This can cause you to feel either pain or pleasure, similar to an experience with a dominatrix. But more clarification on focus may be needed, so let’s focus a little more on focus . . .

Dominatrix Theory, Part 3

The ABC’s of Focus

If you’re still confused, let me spell out the ABC’s of focus. Now this is gonna get real, real boring, so if you’ve already figured out what I’m talking about, you can go to work on your coloring book. I’ll be right back in a moment.

Suppose there are 10 different stimuli in your environment (actually there are millions, if not billions, but I’m trying to make things simple here, so that even a caveman or gecko can understand it). Let’s label each stimulus A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. Go ahead and count ‘em. There’s ten labels there. Now let’s say your awareness is scanning these stimuli one by one, going from A to B to C on down the line through J, and then starting all over again at A, over and over again. In this case your awareness is not focusing at all. It is just scanning everything going on around you, one by one, over and over.

But let’s say awareness takes a liking to the stimulus labeled “E.” Hey, E is a well-proportioned strong and sexy letter, so why wouldn’t awareness take a liking to it? So now awareness wants to spend all of its time with E, and to hell with all the other letters.

Ah-ah, no can do.

Awareness is not allowed to spend any longer than an instant with E, and then it must move on, shifting to other stimuli. This is because it is impossible for awareness to spend any longer than an instant dwelling on any one stimulus.

But you know how love affairs are. No matter how hard you try to keep two lovers apart, they always find a way to get together. And the same is true with awareness and E.

Awareness finds a way around the restrictions on its love life by shifting away from E to F, and then shifting right back to E again. And then that sly romantic awareness shifts away from E to G, and then back to E again. And it keeps doing this sneaky back and forth romance game with E, creating a shifting pattern something like this: E-F-E-G-E-H-E-I-E-J-E-A-E-B-E-C-E-D-E-F-E-G-E-H . . . and so forth.

And so you see that awareness continues to scan all the stimuli in its environment. But it spends a disproportionate half of its time shifting to the one stimulus E, while dividing the other half of its time shifting to the remaining nine stimuli.

This is how awareness focuses on E. And when this focus happens, awareness becomes divided into two types: foreground awareness and background awareness. This is like typical class warfare. Foreground awareness involves all the stimuli that awareness shifts to most often. The rich, privileged class of stimuli, so to speak. And background awareness involves all the stimuli that awareness shifts to least often. These are the poor have-nots. The huddled masses, if you will.

Maybe your brain has gone numb at this moment, and you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs with this book laying open in front of your glazed-over eyes. Okay, then. I can relate, dude. So let me explain this from where you’re at right now.

As you sit at your desk twiddling your thumbs, your thumbs and the act of twiddling are part of your foreground awareness. Everything else going on around you, such as the words in this book, is all kind of a blur. You’re sort of aware of it, but not too much. That’s all part of your background awareness. And this is because your awareness is shifting more often to your thumbs than to anything else in your environment.

Now pay attention to the words of this book. Put them back into your foreground awareness. I guarantee you will learn something of value from reading my words. I know that love affairs with letters of the alphabet can get a little weird and boring, but meatier things are yet to come.

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