Freeing Attention as the Key to Insight, Memory and Action

When daunting problems mount up, that mounting up is the situation in which we need the most free attention.

Free attention is the ability to move attention, intentionally -- and also to fixate it, intentionally.  It makes possible the ability to imagine and the ability to remember.

When attention is free, it can move; when it is free, we can more easily hold it, undistracted, upon the object (or subject) of our choosing.

One easy way to free attention is to solve accumulated, smaller problems that are not so daunting, that can be handled quickly.  Small problems generally resolve more quickly than daunting problems and solving them frees attention, now available to dedicate to daunting problems.

When attention is free and available, we are more capable of receiving insight and of recognizing resources to apply to daunting problems.

Insight is not something that we "dig for".  To "dig", thus, relies upon memory -- whereas daunting problems are daunting, in part, because we have no applicable memory for solving them.

Insight is an emergent.  Insight doesn't from "from" us; it comes "to" us -- when attention is sufficiently free to apprehend what is emerging.

To capture insight (foresight) at the instant of its emerging, attention must be sufficiently free to imagine remembering it.  To imagine is the key to remembering:  "imagining remembering".

The insight that is captured, that way, forms the seed for further insight, which crystallizes upon and around that seed insight.  This is also the way crystals grow:  if a tiny crystal is submerged in a solution containing the same substance, it acts as a "seed" upon which more of that substance deposits upon and around it.

The key is to capture the seed insight, which emerges spontaneously into imagination, to capture it in memory.

Free attention -- the freedom both to move what is imagined into memory and to fixate it in memory -- is the necessary key.

Free attention by solving small problems quickly.  Then use that free attention to capture and apply emerging solutions.