Conscious vs. habit

[marginnotes]

Conscious attention

• Listening to part of a song on Zappa's new 81 Halloween album, and trying to reproduce it or harmonize with it on guitar.
• My job (writing documentation, communicating, and writing software) seems to require a fair amount of this. Trying to understand the differences between conditional text in our DocBook implementation and conditional text in Asciidoctor, then writing the software to translate between the two during the conversion. I must look closely at the small things that change, and ignore lots of details.
• Cooking: preparing the right amounts of ingredients, adding them at the right time and temperature, selecting the right seasonings.
• Ritual: Central ray, feeling the light or the elemental centers. Morning meditation.
• Reading: this is almost half-conscious in some cases. I'm getting the idea but also some of it is going past my conscious mind.

Conscious action

• Choosing to make dinner; choosing to play guitar exercises.
• Ritual: morning tending to the cats, preparing coffee, LRP, central ray, meditation.
• Going to get a hair cut.

Unconscious/habitual attention

• This is more difficult for me to spot.
• Most of my attention must be this way while sleeping, walking, riding, listening, but it's hard to be aware of the fact that I'm not consciously aware.

Unconscious/habitual action

• Falling into work. The attention is conscious, but the actions are habitual.
• Breathing, sleeping, swallowing, walking, typing, even riding the bike.
• Noodling on guitar. Standing or sitting most of the time.
• There are layers of unconscious and habitual action underlying even my conscious actions. Without these, I'd be unable to continue.
• Eating is too much this way. I have been paying attention, acting consciously while preparing food and then gulping it down.