Question

The other day I was at the gym, reading "The Four Agreements" and thinking about class. One quote from the book reads: "Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind... That is the way we learned everything we know." Using knowledge from this psychology class, what is the best explanation for why the direction of our attention creates our reality?

Answer 1

The direction of our attention creates our reality because attention determines what we perceive and what we focus on.

Step-by-step explanation:

The direction of our attention creates our reality because attention determines what we perceive and what we focus on. The resources demanded by conscious thought can be understood in terms of attention, which places increased energy demands on the brain. When our attention is focused on a specific task, we become less aware of other stimuli outside that focus, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness.

For example, in a study conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, participants were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed between players. During the video, a person dressed in a gorilla costume walked among the players, but nearly half of the participants didn't notice the gorilla because they were so focused on counting the passes of the ball.

Our perception is also influenced by our previous experiences, expectations, and motivations. For instance, motivation to detect a meaningful stimulus can shift our ability to discriminate between true sensory stimuli and background noise. Overall, our attention determines what we perceive and how we construct our reality.

Answer 2

The direction of our attention creates our reallity because we first use our attention to learn symbols.

Step-by-step explanation:

We believe those symbols represent our knowledge and reality. Then we reach a stage where we realise that this reality is not real. So we try to change it and create a new one. It is like we declared war against all the lies in our knowledge and we fight to throw off the belief system that causes us to repeatdly punish ourselves for past wrongs, which is the system that brings up past thoughts and punishes us over and over again.

When we accept ourselves just the way we are and everyone else these punishments end.