What's Required for Us to Focus?

Here's something nobody ever told you:

FOUR things are required for focus.

attention
intention
memory
imagination

ATTENTION

Focus is a matter of attention, and the essence of attention is locating things. That's what placing attention means and that's what focusing does. Everything else about attention follows from that.

INTENTION

Now, about intention, the essence of intention is control. Intention moves attention and once attention is placed somewhere, intention holds it, there. But that's not the whole story.

Why?

MEMORY

Because in order to hold attention on something, we have to remember what we're holding on to. That's where memory comes in. The essence of memory is persistence.

If we forget what we're attending to, we forget to persist in paying attention. Some people can't even go from one room to another without forgetting why they went there. So, where is their attention? on trying to remember why they went, there!

Holding attention someplace is what, "paying attention", means. The "payment" is the effort of intention we're having to make. The more distracted we are, the more we have to "pay".

IMAGINATION

Now imagination.

Why imagination?

Imagination is the incoming channel for all new perceptions, even sense perceptions. Imagination is like a mouth facing the Unknown. The unknown comes in through the "mouth" of imagination (and memory "swallows" it).

Every experience happens before we know it, at first. When something comes into our field of perception, that perception is unregistered, by us (yet to be known), for a moment. It's a little like reaction time; there's a lag.

Imagination has special roles, in focus. It's also the incoming channel for foresight and insight, which we never know are going to happen until they have already happened.

A person with no imagination has no foresight and whatever insight they have is limited by what they remember, rather than being closely tuned to the present moment.

When coupled with memory, imagination is the link to conscience; conscience is both imagination-based and memory-based.

So, those four expressions of intelligence are required for us to focus.

Did you notice uneven-ness among them, in you?

That's a clue. Balanced intensity of all four is necessary for optimum focus.

Balanced intensity doesn't mean "high intensity". It's when they are of balanced intensity that they integrate, together. When they are balanced -- even at moderate or even low intensity, they work better than when they are unbalanced with some of them at higher intensity.

Where intelligence is concerned, integration is the name of the game, isn't it?

That's all, for today. Stay tuned for the next one.