THE AMAZING and RELENTLESS HUMAN DEVELOPMENT of FOCUSING

Please first read the summary in
The Habitual Ruts of Security and Pleasure

To learn, we usually have to repeat the things we do and know. Repetition confirms, and makes knowledge and actions automatic and secure. To repeat, we have to focus on memories. It is an efficient system. Focusing and learnt habitual repetitive ruts are essential for our survival.

Hands with opposable thumbs, and a larynx with vocal cords, would have been useless without focusing. Even our larger brain would be useless without focusing.

These days, we encourage concentrated focusing from the earliest age to give children a good start in life. We learn to focus with our eyes and ears to read, write, draw and listen; with our bodies to coordinate riding bicycles and kicking footballs; and with our minds to think and remember. Without focusing we can do nothing, learn nothing, and remember nothing.

We're trained to have a focus in life, to have ambition and a purpose in life, and except for the times when we have just got something, we always want something materially or emotionally.

Even when we dream or daydream we are absent-mindedly focusing on something specific. We live for our focal points, our wants, our purposes in life, otherwise we feel our lives are pointless.

Development of Language

And the words, grammatical constructions and memory systems we developed, to describe and understand the practical world, were very successful in mastering that material world. We learnt to process, collect, and communicate ideas. And we soon learnt to repeat an amazing amount of tricks.

Focused thinking was the way we learnt how to make fire and wheels. More recently, focusing and focused thought gave us houses of brick, hot water bottles, peanut butter and deep freezers. This system of doing and thinking is deeply confirmed in all of us, both individually and culturally, because it gets things done.

Modern civilisation has successfully confirmed several billion times that focusing – learning, memory, abstract thought, and repeating the habitual ruts of the past – works successfully to get the things we want and need for our survival.

Focusing doesn't automatically lead to wanting and emotionally learnt habitual ruts. Look at a wall, focus on it, you don't want it; focus on the floor, a bus, a tree, you don't want them all. It's only when we feel, see, hear, smell, taste, touch or think something which causes pleasure or displeasure that it sometimes – depending on the degree of pleasure or displeasure – leads to wanting it (or wanting to avoid it).

But then, once we want something, we will repeatedly focus on it in our memory, and it becomes an habitual rut. Wanting always leads to focusing. If we want a bicycle or a french fry, we will either focus on it until we get it, or we will stop wanting it.

We repeat what is pleasurable, or what promises future pleasure. We avoid repeating what is unpleasurable. This is sensible. And such habitual ruts are a successful way to live with purpose, and to get what we want.

Even if an habitual rut, a 'memory repetition', is unpleasurable, it gives us a sense of direction and a basis to compare, evaluate and guide other experiences. It gives us a direction in life. Having a sense of purpose is all to do with having focus points in life.

This is a self-supporting, self-perpetuating feedback loop. But, in itself, this is also a positive influence.

When we want something, we will periodically remember it, focusing on it in an abstract form, until we do it, or get it. Then the focusing may stop for a while – except as a 'self-confirming memory' – till the next time we want it. But that's efficient.

And even after we invented writing, and could write down lists of 'next things to do', it might have lost it's fun, but it was still efficient and the system worked well... so it still all seems a very sensible way of doing things.

But how to infuse life into what - with all the repetitions - becomes a sterile system?

Our cultures have developed some ingenious and valuable balances for our focused work, but all we ever do is to do with focusing.

Even when we are dreaming or daydreaming it is about something specific, we are absent-mindedly focusing on doing something or going somewhere.

The only exceptions are the occasional panoramic moments when we are amazed at the stars or looking over the ocean, but when they happen we hardly recognise why or how.

When we focus on something specific, we directly inhibit our general awareness of the many other things which are happening. Selective attention, is always a dissociation from the wholeness of our sense of reality. Focusing on a girl, i drive into a tree. But this is not felt as a draw-back to 'focusing', we interpret the problem as a lack of concentration on priorities.

We focus on where we're going or what we want. So, focusing is inevitably not entirely now and in the present moment, it's a relationship, a direction, a purpose.

Not being now, but being on the way, is what focusing does, it was built that way, it's going somewhere which is not here, doing something which hasn't happened yet.

The main difficulty it involves is on the level of selecting priorities, because doing everything which we want to do is impossible.

So, focusing works best for practical things in the material world; but this same focusing learning system seems to work successfully for emotions, wants and pleasure.

And there seems to be nothing basically wrong or critically inefficient for survival, connected with having an emotional content to memories, or the consequent behavioural habitual ruts, aims, ambitions, and wants.

Focusing and focused abstract thinking, has been so very successful in our human development. It is so confirmed in all our thinking and learning, that we can't imagine another way of looking at anything, understanding anything, or doing anything.

This is especially problematic when the repeating memories are unpleasant ones. But even with pleasant memories, we can't stop the repetitions. And as we grow older and repetitions and memories accumulate, we get dull, either contented, maybe happy, maybe stressed, bored, or scared, but stuck in our self-perpetuating habitual ruts with our fixed behaviour.

And the eternal abstract chatter in our minds, continually rethinking and reconfirming our ideas and beliefs, leads directly to a lack of actual life, and inevitably closed-mindedness.

As human culture developed beliefs in Gods, they became the central priority for our sense of reality, identity, purpose, and even hope. They became our central focus point.

And life slowly became more pleasurable and secure as we repeated all the things we wanted. But this inevitably led us to an ever-increasing multiplicity of things to want, with more things to focus on and think about. And gradually The Speed of Modern Life increased.

Then as modern man explored his abilities with abstract thought, we started questioning our ideas and beliefs.

So that nowadays, regardless of our modern material security, our beliefs are insecure in a way no humans in any previous culture, have ever experienced... and this is causing a form of pain and suffering that no animal or early human could ever imagine.

Please continue with Beliefs and Their Confirmation

Back to Chapter Three : Civilisation's Habitual Ruts
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