Since humans began to think, we developed ideas and beliefs to feel safe and secure in our abstract reality. But now, the mutually confirmed beliefs and identity of our traditional cultures have collapsed.

Nowadays, individuals must find their own identity.

Now we have to 'find ourselves' on a practical and spiritual level.

The main modern challenge to all educators and parents, is to help us discover and develop what we want to do and who we want to be.

Being a fulfilled individual and believing in ourselves are the modern cultural ideals – "you are unique, a special individual", "believe in your dreams". And inevitably, new-age gurus are talking about self-realisation.

In an attempt to give ourselves something objectively 'real' and 'true' to believe in and hold onto, we developed scientific reality by focusing through larger telescopes and smaller microscopes.

Then, Einstein told us everything is energy and light. Perhaps in another million years humans will evolve to perceive themselves as a 'real self' full of light and energy. Perhaps we could all discover the power of love... perhaps...

But it's ridiculous, right now we could be doing what every animal does, experiencing safety in the wholeness of panaral reality.

Focusing is a perspective on life with its own inbuilt logic, and it is blind to panaral reality.

Panaral reality is whole, just being without wanting or knowing.

What it lacks, is a sense of individual purpose and identity. And also any need for individual purpose and identity.

Our identity won't disappear, our sense of purpose and meaning in life won't vanish, it'll just be secondary for a moment, not compulsively repeating its own habitual routines all the time.

We need to be without fear of the emptiness which focused sensing finds whenever it stops repeating its routine background world-view.

We need regular brief panaral periods like every other animal. Other animals need them to be safe from actual reality, we need them to be safe from our abstract reality.

What we are now, and what we think we can become, is being severely limited by only recognising what we can be by focusing.

The individual and social situation we've created is crazy and stupid, and it's a result of this self-obsessed focused box we're stuck in, .

It promised us new identity, and then left us in obsessive vicious circles, trying to establish and confirm this abstract identity.

And our individual psychology and world-view reflects in our politics. Some understand and organise their lives like supreme rulers repressing uncomfortable areas; some have the yes or no mentality of two party systems; others juggle with compromises in proportional systems.

But, all these approaches to organising life are conceived, entirely by and for people with a focused world view.

While challenging the inherited power and wealth of class systems, by exclusively focusing our culture has produced an ego-centred form of individuality. In this condition it's an effort to be socially empathic. And so we needed to create morality and ethics, rights and then laws.

And recently, all our codes of work, play, etiquette, and mating habits, and the possibilities of how to break those codes, have rapidly diversified and multiplied. The rights and laws can't keep pace.

A chaotic state in our herd mentality – our collective social identity – has developed.

Our modern fight for survival has transferred to the abstract dimension of rights, beliefs, ideas, and opinions.

Without embracing the entirety of humanity, our modern collective psychology lacks security. Rejoicing in the rich tapestry of life is something the best of us agree on and aim at.

And our modern liberal thinking to contain the diversity of beliefs – rather than infallible rulers forcing a consensus of ideas – is a great step for civilisation.

And this is truly the best option our exclusively focused understanding of life can offer.

Gandhi and Mandela were wonderful, they gave us a basis, but their ideas can never contain the ever increasing diversity, and the inevitable majority who will always develop opinions with some new form of prejudice.

The colours in our rich tapestry, and the groups within groups, are always multiplying. It's not going to stop suddenly. The fragmentation inherent in focusing is relentless.

All the new trends and their derivations will inevitably get even more individualistic and more abstract. The chaos in only ever exclusively focusing, is preprogrammed.

And we accept it, even when we don't like it we accept that this chaos is happening and think there's nothing we can do about it.

But this or something like it is what we could expect from a culture which only looks for security and safety by focusing.

And all the time we ignore panaral reality. How on earth could we ever hope to develop a feeling for the common good – without sensing life as whole?

Numbers, words and writing are the criteria of the modern civilised world. Among animals, it's the actual sounds which are relevant, but for humans it's the abstract meaning of abstract squiggles.

It's not our essential nature or any higher principle which dominates modern social thinking – it's how we identify ourselves, whoever we think we are, our abstract and projected individual image.

A comedian bought it on the point when he couldn't get served at a drive-in burger cafe because he was on foot, so he told them "I identify as a car".

Our Projected Image
Quite generally in modern society, projected images are the form in which human individuality is recognised and acknowledged.

This took form with industrial mirrors around 1850, when our common self-image rose from the murky depths of reflections in water to a vivid practical everyday experience of self-reflection. And a century later we could record and pre-record our reflected image.

It's so normal that we don't notice but television through to social media, are abstract images. They are projections on a screen.

What we're looking at, listening to, and understanding, is a representation of reality which is continually becoming more abstract. And at best it only replicates reality as sensed by focusing.

In 2011 image filtering (to show what you would look like if you were the opposite sex, or another species, or with perfect make-up), started on Snapchat and Instagram. In 2024, AI started producing its images of surreal human identity.

We're setting ourselves up to live in a focused and abstract tunnel vision world.

And again the point is, we accept it even if we don't like it, we accept this is happening and think there's nothing we can do about it – and apart from years of discipline with body awareness exercises, such as the internal taste of our own bodies – there is little that we can do by focusing.

We have an abstract image of ourselves, which we try to believe in and then celebrate socially. And it's basically the same situation early man was in – it doesn't matter so much if it's the actual truth, as long as it's socially confirmed and emotionally gratifying.

And this is all happening because focusing needs focal points, and individuals need relationships to feel whole.

There are a fascinating variety of psychological conditions which this generates; and we could spend centuries analysing all the curiosities.

But the central energy and confusion – the search for identity and purpose – is still coming from the age-old question of "Who am I?".

And all the time we're ignoring part of our essential nature – reality as experienced panarally.

Panaral reality is a sense of the attitude of other people, the volume and tone of their voice, (the colours they wear, their shape and size, the speed and direction they move, the sound of their shoes) – it never even considers what people say or how they identify on an abstract level.

Panaral awareness opens up a whole new world of life and reality. There's no sense of the abstract, and no question about "who am I?". We can experience just being and a sense of wholeness. And, it is no coincidence that this is also how all other animals stay safe.

We're habitually almost psychotically wanting to do something, go somewhere, think something, and essentially to be someone. We focus on the things we want and how to get them. This is the nature of wanting and learnt behaviour. And there is no way to stop the process continually repeating, except for the vague nothingness of focusing on letting-go, or giving up to a drunken stupor.

We have an ingrown self-absorbed understanding of life. To continue on this path will lead to stupidity, anxiety, and ultimately insanity.

And this is all such a hopelessly pessimistic view of modern civilised man that it would be unmentionable – except for the solution that if we want safety, peace, and a feeling of wholeness and wholesomeness, then we need to learn how animals do it.

We have inadvertently suppressed part of our basic awareness, and intelligence.

The key to solving our cultural and individual chaos, is to realise that in order to survive, all other animals coordinate or alternate almost all of their focused activities with periods of panaral sensing.

Panaral awareness is the natural counterbalance to focusing, and the cure for overfocusing.

Yes, we need a purpose in life, we need focal points, but we also need to coordinate or alternate them with panaral sensing. Panaring makes focused activity secure, safe, and effective.

Regular periods of panaral sensing are necessary for our human sanity. Other animals need them to be safe in actual reality, we need them to be safe in our abstract reality.

We desperately need short interruptions to the continuous routine mechanics of the ego and its projections. Short experiences of pure panaral receptivity interrupting our habitual sense of ego, our subject-object consciousness, our thinking-knowing-doing consciousness.

Panaral reality is a moment of being without any need for individuality, identity or purpose. Without wanting to be or do anything except feel the satisfaction of being panaral and connected with the environment.

The panaral experience isn't a new religion to identify with, we don't have to believe in it for it to work. It's not even really a skill, though humans may need to think along these lines to relearn it.

It's a natural way of being, something animals just do without even thinking about.

We're not using all our basic and natural sensory abilities to experience and understand the world and our lives.

It's been tried and tested by animals for billions of years – it is obviously part of a successful method to survive. Every animal uses it. Every animal except humans.

Please continue with Solid Ground

Back to Chapter Three : Civilisation's Habitual Ruts
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