When you concentrate you also ignore stuff.
(we all concentrate, for work, play, reading, studying, school … we practice it in school … people who are good at it are “good workers”…)
But you call it CONCENTRATION instead of IGNORING because the stuff you concentrate on gets easy-to-see but the stuff you ignore sorta fades away (and then you stop thinking about it, and then it disappears).
The stuff you concentrate on is relatively small. A book. An idea. A game. An attractive girl’s butt. A plan for the future. A tv show.
And that stuff getting ignored is relatively HUGE. Like a whole invisible universe there.
It’s spooky when you think of it. Like a little bit of DIY brain surgery that everybody does but nobody talks about. Like we’re all a bunch of Harry Potters casting obliviate upon ourselves.
And then we forgot that we cast it, because it’s obliviate.
So tell me what you think.
Think about it like this: There is an almost endless amount of stuff around us at any given moment that we could be aware of. If we factor in the things that are not actually there but we can still think about, then there are infinitely many things we could be paying attention to at any moment.
But we only have a finite amount of energy to do it. The more energy we use to think about one thing the less energy remains to think about everything else.
I wouldn’t say that we are ignoring things when we concentrate. Because to me when you ignore something you are actually aware of it but choose to ignore it. When you concentrate, you just don’t have enough energy left to be aware of other things.
Yes, I see the reason for doing it. But it’s the appalling, universally-ignored and massively-powerful side-effects that I’m looking at here.
It’s like going blind, except for that tiny important speck in focus.
It’s invisible. Whole universes disappearing… maybe lingering in memory for a while, then poof.
And everybody does it. And nobody talks about it. A 360 degree blindspot called reality.
Re your last paragraph. Call it a side-effect blindness then. Maybe a bit conscious at first. Then habitual and unconscious thereafter.
(Ah, there’s another kind of blindness : unconscious action. I did it but I didn’t see myself do it)