DISPLACEMENT BEHAVIOUR IN HUMANS

Other animals repeat instinctive behaviour. Instinctive behaviour generally repeats without any noticeable change over generations. It repeats constantly.

Humans repeat learnt behaviour and ideas. The more we learn, the more we need to learn. To learn and remember we need to focus. The more we focus, the more we need to focus.

Hens scratch and peck at nothing just because they feel nervous and insecure; dogs and cats clean themselves when they are confused or want feeding. Any habitual activity can be displaced.

And we have begun to act like birds in captivity with compulsive grooming habits, plucking their own feathers out to such an extent that they can't fly.

Or, overpopulated deer who rub off so much musk on their territorial marker trees that whole rings of bark disintegrate and their territorial trees die.

Humans in the Western world, are collectively displacing. We are in the process of destroying ourselves with an inappropriate habit.

We are overfocusing – overwanting and overdoing.

And in the same way that a dog obsessively scratches himself because he can imagine no better response to his confusion, we hardly notice that we are compulsively focusing – we have no idea that there is any other way of sensing.

But it's not just a physiological displacement like other animals – it's a development specific to humans, a psychological level of displacement.

It's the way we think about our own thoughts and ideas – our abstract understanding – we're overthinking and overabstracting.

We can sublimate it for periods of entertainment, and we may succeed in repressing specific ideas, to be replaced by others – but the only sense of satisfaction or relief we know, is to try and do the things we think about, and try to get the things we want.

Focusing first drives us to associate ideas, and then act on at least some of these ideas, to fulfil the sensation of purposeful living.

So, the overthinking goes hand in hand with our material overwanting and overdoing. And we have learnt to recognise this process as progress, having a purpose in life, and normal.

What we recognise as progress, is mostly displacement.

Focusing got things done, and it was fun. It gave us toys and tools. But the more we used it, the more we wanted from it. With our early education we have become more clever and creative than ever before. And, we have slowly become overwhelmed by the exponential repetitions involved in focused learning.

We are not only destroying our environment, but also the individuals we are trying to be, by excessive focusing.

The faster we run, the faster the treadmill turns. Life is too much hard work. It's making the majority of us feeling exhausted and insecure.

Hard work was fine when we could see that the field was now ploughed, or we'd hammered out a wheel. But our modern human psychological work is chaos – only the young can keep pace for a while.

We are blind to this feeling of inner stillness, this connectedness with the environment which all other animals experience in their everyday lives .

Why are we making life so hard for ourselves?

Without incorporating the pahana mode in our lives it's impossible to develop any balanced, realistic, or wholesome, relationship with life.