In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that
effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of
focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full,
active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and
let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance
stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected
sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it
might happen to make.
When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense
of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense
of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware
of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions
and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not
conscious.
Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.”
Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or
not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life
or death.