DISPLACEMENT BEHAVIOUR IN HUMANS
Other animals repeat instinctive behaviour. Instinctive behaviour repeats without any noticeable change over generations. It repeats constantly.
Humans repeat learnt behaviour and ideas. To learn, remember and repeat we need to focus. The more we learn, the more we need to learn. The faster we run, the faster the wheels turn.
Displacement
Displacement activity is a behavioural illness which animals often suffer when they feel stress or insecure. They compensate with habitual, but inappropriate, sometimes self-destructive, activities.
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 and our environment, 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, because we have no idea that there is any other way of sensing.
But it's not only a practical displacement like other animals – it's a development specific to humans, a psychological level of displacement.
The way we sense our own thoughts and ideas – our abstract understanding – is overthinking and overabstracting.
Thinking About Thoughts
Most people realise this, we know we're continuously thinking about thoughts. And most people have given up hope of ever stopping it.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 automatically 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 overdoing and overwanting. 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 needed to keep on using it. 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, with an inappropriate habit, focusing.
Nature's Cure
We've blind-sided theWe need to focus, we need focal points in our life. But all other animals alternate this with panaral sensing. Panaral awareness makes focused activity safe.
Panaral sensing is the natural balance to focusing, and the easiest, quickest, and most effective cure for overfocusing. Panaral sensing automatically stops any displacement.
Focusing is the root cause of thinking. We can't use panaral sensing to think, it's useless at constructive thought. And that's its great value. Panaral sensing stops us focusing and thinking for a moment.
To enjoy purpose and action which is conjusive to wholesome living, we must balance our focused activity with periods of panaral awareness – on the lookout, waiting for everything but nothing in particular.
Pre-emptive panaral listening automatically stops the endless thinking process, and paravision shows the world as a whole without any need to do anything to it, except be directly aware and alert.
Every few minutes every other animal interrupts whatever they are focusing on, they stop still and silent for a moment and use their panaral senses.
Every other animal can stop focusing at will, and they do it easily and naturally.
At those times, animals can't even start to question what they are experiencing, because they have to be alert, and ready to react immediately without a moments' thought. So the mental wheels stop turning for 5 seconds.
And this 5 seconds is all they need to reassure themselves that their lives are safe.
5 seconds breaks the focusing habit. It interrupts the automatic turning of the mental wheels.
We humans are only conscious of our need for identity and a purpose in life; we think that this will satisfy us and even make us happy.
Five seconds is all we need to stop the relentless repetitions governing our lives, otherwise all we are doing is satisfying our preconditioning – making our preconditions happy. Keeping our learnt preconditioned wheels running in their habitual ruts – but never feeling safe.
The Human Labyrinths
Our experience of life is biased. Our understanding is perverted. We are locked in tunnel vision and tunnel behaviour.All we can think of doing to solve our problems, is more focusing. We develop clever new abstract theories which we will always need to focus on to learn and repeat.
From this perspective, the one pointed, concentrated focusing methods used in many meditations are especially ironic. Concentrating on a focal point automatically encourages all the mechanisms associated with focusing.
But this is life as we know it. We don't remember there is an alternative panaral way of sensing life which automatically and immediately stops this endless thinking-doing routine.
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 panara mode in our lives it's impossible to develop any full, balanced, realistic, or wholesome, relationship with life.
Please continue with The Individual and Wholeness
Back to Chapter Three : Civilisation's Habitual Ruts
Back to THE PANORAMA SENSES Priority Pages