in full mental focus. His choice is to evade that knowledge or to exert the effort of raising the level of his
awareness.
The decision to focus and to think, once made, does not continue to direct a man's mind unceasingly thereafter, with
no further effort required. Just as the state of full consciousness must be initiated volitionally, so it must be
maintained volitionally. The choice to think must be reaffirmed in the face of every new issue and problem. The
decision to be in focus yesterday will not compel a man to be in focus today. The decision to be in focus about one
question will not compel a man to be in focus about another. The decision to pursue a certain value does not
guarantee that a man will exert the mental effort required to achieve it. In any specific thinking process, man must
continue to monitor and regulate his own mental activity, to "keep in on the rails," so to speak. In any hour of his
life, he is free to suspend the function of his consciousness, to abandon effort, to default on the responsibility of
self-regulation and let his mind drift passively. He is free to maintain only a partial focus, grasping that which
comes easily to his understanding and declining to struggle for that which does not.
Man is free not only to evade the effort of purposeful awareness in general, but to evade specific lines of thought
that he finds disconcerting or painful. Perceiving qualities in his friends, his wife, or himself that clash with his
moral standards, he can surrender his mind to blankness or switch it hastily to some other concern, refusing to
identify the meaning or implications of what he has perceived. Dimly apprehending, in the midst of an argument,
that he is being ridden by his emotions and is maintaining a position for reasons other than those he is stating,
reasons that he knows to be untenable, he can refuse to integrate his knowledge, he can refuse to pause on it, he can
push it aside and continue to shout with righteous indignation. Grasping that he is pursuing a course of action that is
in blatant defiance of reason, he can cry to himself, in effect: "Who can be sure of anything?"—plunge his mind
into fog and continue on his way.
In such cases, a man is doing more than defaulting on the responsibility of making awareness his goal: he is
actively seeking unawareness as his goal. This is the meaning of evasion.
In the choice to focus or not to focus, to think or not to think, to activate the conceptual level of his consciousness
or to suspend it—and in this choice alone—is man psychologically free.