choose to generate this effort. He discovers that, on this new level of awareness, he is not infallible; error is
possible; cognitive success is not automatically guaranteed to him. (Whereas, on the perceptual level, to look is to
see—on the conceptual level, to ask a question is not automatically to know the answer; and to know what question
to ask is not automatic, either.) He discovers the continual need to monitor and regulate his mind's activity. A child
does not, of course, identify this knowledge verbally or explicitly. But it is implicit in his consciousness, by direct
introspective awareness.
Just as a man cannot escape the implicit knowledge that the function of his mind is volitional, so he cannot escape
the implicit knowledge that he should think, that to be conscious is desirable, that his efficacy as a living entity
depends on it. But he is free to act on that knowledge or to evade it. To repeat: Nature has not ''programmed" him to
think automatically.
(In some cases, the "motive" of non-focusing or non-thinking is anti-effort, i.e., a disinclination to exert the energy
and accept the responsibility that thinking requires. In other cases, the "motive" is some wish, desire, or feeling
which one wants to indulge and which one's reason cannot sanction—and so one "solves" the problem by going out
of focus. In other cases, the "motive" is escape from fear, a fear to which one knows one should not surrender, but
to which one does surrender, suspending one's consciousness and negating one's knowledge. These "motives" are
not causal imperatives; they are feelings which a man may choose to treat as decisive.)
As focusing involves expanding the range of one's awareness, so evasion consists of the reverse process: of
shrinking the range of one's awareness. Evasion consists of refusing to raise the level of one's awareness, when one
knows (clearly or dimly) that one should—or of lowering the level of one's awareness, when one knows (clearly or
dimly) that one shouldn't. To evade a fact is to attempt to make it unreal to oneself, on the implicit subjectivist
premise that if one does not perceive the fact, it does not exist (or its existence will not matter and will not entail
any consequences).
Consciousness is man's tool for perceiving and identifying the facts of reality. It is an organ of integration. To focus
is to set the integrative process in purposeful motion—by setting the appropriate goal: awareness. Nonfocus is
nonintegration. Evasion is will-