The Dynamic of Context Blindness in Apparent Ignorance

Beingness has the innate capacity to know. In its undisturbed expression, this knowing is wide, open, and inclusive—it is aware of all experience while remaining quietly rooted in itself. Within this field of knowing, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions arise as content.

Because awareness can register this content—and because the mind organises content through patterns and narratives—it has the capacity to narrow attention. This narrowing, which we can call context blindness, occurs when a particular mental or emotional event arises and captures attention so fully that the broader context of beingness is temporarily eclipsed.

Crucially, what causes this narrowing is often the emotional charge of the content. The stronger the emotional tone—fear, desire, shame, grief—the more compelling and believable the content becomes. Attention appears to become narrowed, and the full field of awareness seems to contract into identification with thought or sensation.

This conditioned emotional content typically arises when the mind perceives that the body’s needs are under threat, whether through immediate circumstances, past trauma, or neuro-physiological predispositions. Importantly, the content of such thoughts may be conditioned by inherited beliefs—such as the culturally embedded assumption of being a separate person—while the focusing of attention is a capacity of awareness itself, operating through the mechanism of mind.

It is not that beingness literally forgets itself—as if it had intention or agency—but that the natural capacity of attention becomes so localised in appearances that beingness seems to veil itself. This veiling is not a flaw or a failure. It is simply the dynamic potential within consciousness to appear as limitation—an innocent movement of love appearing as forgetfulness.

We can describe this narrowing through the lens of context blindness. The term originates in psychology and neuroscience, where it describes the brain’s tendency—especially in neurodiverse conditions—to overlook contextual cues and become locked into literal or fragmented interpretations. In this teaching, the term is respectfully reinterpreted and extended to describe an existential phenomenon: the appearance that Beingness has become blind to its own presence by attending too closely to its appearances.

This veiling is impersonal and universal. It is not something one mind does—it is a movement within consciousness itself. In fact, it can be likened to a principle from quantum theoretical physics, where a field collapses into a discrete state upon observation. Similarly, awareness appears to collapse into form through the narrowing of attention. This could be seen as a kind of quantum-like switching, where infinite being momentarily assumes the form of limited identity—not through will, but through its inherent capacity to appear as multiplicity.

This context blindness is never total. It only appears to be so. The background of awareness—our true nature—is always quietly available, even in the most absorbed or reactive states. The forgetting is apparent, not actual.

Moreover, this movement does not occur in isolation. It plays out simultaneously across all minds and bodies, as a single dynamic appearing in countless forms. Though the localisation of attention may vary in its intensity and duration, the ground of Being is always unified and unbroken.

This also explains why, even when we rest as our true nature, we appear to be aware of only one particular mind and its contents. Context blindness can occur in reverse: beingness, in its localisation, becomes context blind not only to itself, but to the full range of other finite minds also appearing within it. This selective attention gives rise to the appearance that "I" am somehow identified with this one mind and body alone. In truth, awareness is universal—but its local expression, through attention, gives rise to the appearance of individual identity.

In recognising this, the return to wholeness is not a process of acquisition, but of re-seeing. Attention relaxes, the grip of identification softens, and what was always present begins to shine again in its full context.

With Love,

Freyja