Our Natural Trance State

Our Natural Trance State:

It all starts with the fact that we are unable to focus our attention on more than one thing at a time.

I offer as evidence: trying to read one paragraph while writing a different one.

You can jump back and forth between the tasks very rapidly, but you are still only focusing your attention on one thing at a time.

Why this is important, is that we have a survival need to watch out for threats while we are doing any other activity.

The method with which we compensate for this attention focus limitation is based in our peripheral awareness, which is the awareness that we have of our surroundings without focusing our attention on it.

We have a natural ability to automatically react to outside input provided by our peripheral awareness (senses), without the involvement of the intellect.

It may help to think of this as being like mental reflexes.

You can see this effect easiest in the reactions of a spooked kitten.

It will jump straight up in the air…then after it lands it casually looks around for what it was that made it jump.

We do the same thing when we catch something surprising out of the corner of our eye; we react first, and then find out what really was going on.

A somewhat more dramatic example is watching someone cutting open a very sour lemon, then seeing them picking up a piece of the lemon and sucking on it and immediately grimacing.

I am willing to bet, that just reading that last sentence made your mouth automatically react, without your intellect being involved in the reaction.

We can (and do) however, learn specific automatic responses that are automatically used at a later time when a specific triggering input is received.

This turns out to be what the majority of learning really is.

We learn how to automatically react to things without having to think about them when we do tasks involving them.

This type of learning is accomplished via repetition.

We call this: learning the ropes, getting the hang of it, becoming accustomed to it, OJT, etc.

We learn these things via repetition, so that we can do them without having to focus our attention on them when we do them.

Classic examples are: Learning to play a musical instrument, learning to drive a car, on the job training, learning by doing, etc.

It finally comes down to us automatically reacting to something or other, at least 98% of the time.

So it is this natural ability of ours that enables us to automatically react to outside input provided by the senses, without the involvement of the intellect that I define as our natural trance state.

This natural trance state manifests itself whenever we focus our conscious attention on something. You may be surprised to learn that is very used to working side by side with our normal functioning intellect while our attention is focused on something else.

This automatic reactive ability, that I call our natural trance state, is at its strongest when the focus of our attention is internal to our body.

This is because when none of the senses are focused externally, the only outside input we still get is from our peripheral awareness, so it has to be at max to keep us safe.

Again, I define our natural trance state as simply our ability to automatically react to outside input (via the senses), without the involvement of the intellect.