Focus
The directed concentration of attention upon a specific object, task, or field of awareness - the cognitive capacity to select what enters Consciousness while excluding competing stimuli. Focus operates as the executive function that gathers scattered mental energies into coherent application, transforming diffuse awareness into pointed engagement.
From a cognitive perspective, focus represents the mind’s capacity for selective attention - what William James called “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” This selectivity is both gift and limitation: focus enables depth but necessarily creates peripheral blindness. What we attend to becomes our experienced reality; what falls outside the beam of attention effectively ceases to exist for us.
The contemplative traditions have long recognized focus as foundational to inner work. The Sanskrit Dharana (concentration) names the sixth limb of Patanjali’s eight-fold yoga - the gathering of mind that precedes Dhyana (meditation) and Samadhi (absorption). Buddhist samatha practice cultivates one-pointed concentration as the stable platform from which vipassana (insight) becomes possible. Without the capacity to hold attention steady, the deeper operations of contemplation cannot proceed; the mind simply wanders, lost in distraction and associative drift.
Yet focus differs from the open, receptive Awareness emphasized in many traditions. Where focus narrows, awareness expands; where focus selects, awareness includes. The relationship between these modes - concentrated attention and panoramic presence - constitutes a central polarity in meditation practice. Some paths begin with focus and relax into awareness; others cultivate spacious awareness first. The mature practitioner moves fluidly between both, recognising each as incomplete without the other.
See also attention, concentration, Dharana, samatha, Awareness, meditation, Mindfulness, one-pointedness.