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Show Ideas for Better Living . . . Your 'Awareness' If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. Most of us tend to look at a tree and classify it into the perceptual category of "trees in general" without really experiencing the miracle standing before through your body. What feelings are coming from your mouth, nose, shoulder, foot, scalp, palms, stomach, eyes and ears? Poet William Blake summed up the importance of improved im-proved awareness when he said, if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is infinite. Dr. McBride can be seen every Monday on Channel 11 's "Newsroom" at 6:00 p.m. If you have a question or topic you would like Dr. McBride Mc-Bride to discuss in his column, write: Dr. M. Ford McBride, 1161 East 300 North, Provo, Utah 84601 us. Psycholgist Abraham Maslow has studied the perceptual habits of people peo-ple who are unusually a-ware, a-ware, alive, open and mentally healthy. He He finds that these people are fully awake, that their perceptions percep-tions are marked by: total concentration and immersion in the present; lack of self-consciousness; self-consciousness; a sense of timelessness; innocense of vision like that of an artist or child; and freedom from selecting, selec-ting, rejecting, criticizing, evaluating. The person is aware of everything at once. The kind of perception Maslow is describing is like that of a mother with her newborn infant, a child at Christmas, or two people in love. Heightened awareness at an advanced level may be difficult dif-ficult to attain, but a valuable increase in awareness can be achieved. How can awareness be improved? im-proved? It is important to realize that many perceptual habits that limit awareness serve no useful function. They are habits and nothing more. In short, any change in perceptual per-ceptual habits can make an experience "new" and fresh again. Maybe we need to heed the advice of country singer Mac Davis and "take time to smell the roses." Attention is the second approach to heightened awareness. Attention Atten-tion can be voluntarily directed direc-ted to sensation that are normally nor-mally tuned out. Try letting your attention take a walk |