- There are degrees of awareness. There is a gradient of diminishing mental clarity along the continuum from focal
awareness to peripheral awareness to total unawareness or unconsciousness. To use a visual metaphor, the
continuum involved is like that between two adjoining colors on the spectrum, say, blue and violet; the area of pure
blue (focal awareness) shades off by almost imperceptible degrees to blue-violent (peripheral awareness), which
shades into pure violet (unconsciousness).
The phenomenon of degrees of awareness makes it possible for a man not to let his left hand know what his right
hand is doing. A man can be aware of something very dimly—but aware enough to know that he does not want to
be aware more clearly.
The mind can contain material which, at a given moment, is neither subconscious nor in focal awareness, but is in
that wider field of consciousness whose elements must be distinguished and identified by a directed effort which
will bring them into focal awareness—an act that a man may or may not choose to perform.
- Man is a self-programmer. To an extent immeasurably greater than any other living species, he has the ability to
retain, integrate, and automatize knowledge.
As a man develops, as he learns to form concepts and then still wider concepts, the quantity of programmed data in
his brain grows immeasurably, expanding the range and efficacy of his mind. Cognitions, evaluations, physical
skills—all are programmed and automatized in the course of normal human development. It is this programming,
retained on a subconscious level, that makes possible not only man's continued intellectual growth, but also the
instantaneous cognitive, emotional, and physical reactions without which he could not survive.
When a man's mind is in active focus, the goal or purpose he has set determines what material, out of the total
content of his knowledge, will be fed to him from the subconscious. If, for instance, a man is thinking about a
problem in physics, then it is the material relevant to that particular problem which will normally flow into his
conscious mind. Focal awareness controls the subconscious process by setting the appropriate goal(s)—by grasping
the requirements of the situation and, in effect, issuing the appropriate orders to the subconscious.