By Tomasz Kopec

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

When asked what they mean by attention, most people describe focusing. However attention can also be diffused, immersed or objective, and using a variety of attention styles can extremely beneficial and balancing.

Paying attention makes you more productive and efficient, I’m sure most people would agree with this statement. But can it also cause harm? And if so, what would be the remedy for it?

Diffuse Your Attention, Open Your Focus

Can you remember your parents and teachers telling you — ‘watch what your are doing’, ‘stop daydreaming’, ‘listen to what I am saying’? We learned from them to believe that focusing is the best way to attend the world. We carry this belief throughout our busy lives, making a lot of effort to pay attention and to avoid distractions.

Can you remember your parents and teachers telling you — ‘watch what your are doing’, ‘stop daydreaming’, ‘listen to what I am saying’? We learned from them to believe that focusing is the best way to attend the world. We carry this belief throughout our busy lives, making a lot of effort to pay attention and to avoid distractions.

Yet, have you ever realised that focusing is intertwined with ignoring. In order to focus on something we have to neglect the rest and push it out of our conscious awareness. In other words, from the early stage of our lives we have been trained not to notice a big part of our reality which is constantly present, the background.

Do you know, you can retrain yourself and start attending the world in a different, more open and balanced way. Diffusing your attention and including the background into your awareness can calm, nourish, and harmonise your mind and physiology. This simple adjustment unlocks hidden potential which comes from stabilising the brain activity. It is the quickest shortcut to resolve stress, anxiety and anger. It can help to ease a physical pain. It can also make you aware of many unnoticed but important aspects of life which are hidden in the background.

What is the Background?

According to The Oxford dictionary, background is the part of a picture, scene, or design, that forms a setting for the main figures or objects. I suggest modifying this definition and assuming that the background is everything which is out of the focus of our attention. Consequently everything that is inside the focus and is consciously attended, forms the foreground. You can imagine attention as a ray of light which illuminates a piece of your reality (something you see, hear, feel, etc). The more focused you are, the brighter is the light, and the more details you can notice. The rest of the reality forms the background and becomes somehow blurred, or stays completely invisible for you.

An example of the background is the white space on the page above and on the screen in front of you. You are not noticing the white space while you are reading this text. You focus on lines of text, leaving the white space out of your conscious attention.

The same can be applied to the 3D reality we live in. Physical objects (the screen in front of you, the chair you sit on, your body, etc.) can be the foreground. The empty space which is around and between them, is the background. You move your focus from one object to another, ignoring the empty space between them.

It can also be used as a metaphor to our life. Most people pay attention to things which seem important to them. They focus on problems, commitments, ‘to do lists’, hopes and goals to achieve. These all can become someone’s foreground, but there is always the background which is out of the focus and is often left unnoticed. Have you ever thought about what stays out of your focus? And what would change if included it into your awareness?

CONTINUE READING:

Previous article by Tomasz Kopec:

• The Open Focus Theory – Diffuse Attention, Unify Reality

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