# SURVIVAL STRATEGIES

Focused sensing specialises. It focuses on specific small areas. Animals use it to do all the things they need or want.

Panoramic sensing is a receptive all-round awareness. Its primary use is to guard against danger. It makes life safe.

Animals coordinate or alternate almost all of their focused activities with panoramic awareness. Their survival depends on it.

## A Fundamental Common Sense

Life started panoramically. Every amoeba has chemoreceptors (for 'smelling and tasting') and a generalised sensitivity to light and vibration.

Most birds have a sensitivity to ultraviolet light; a quick panoramic glance allows them to detect any threatening life-forms.

Land animals must stop still for a few seconds and watch, listen, and smell, to detect movements and changes.

Panoramic awareness developed because it was the most efficient way of sensing instantly, everything that's happening all around us.

It's a very simple, everyday, and ordinary way of sensing. It knows no ideas, no truth or lies, no cause and effect.

Panoramic sensing is non-judgemental, but it is not impartial or indifferent, it's intensely receptive, ready and waiting for any sign of change or movement.

Throughout evolution it's been the natural way to stop doing or wanting anything, except to be actively receptive.

Sensing panoramically is a different way of experiencing life. It's not like focusing on lots of different points all at the same time. It's feeling directly connected and even involved in all we're sensing as a whole.

In panoramic reality, our senses connect us with what we're sensing. There's an intimate and immediate feeling about it.

Animals have been using their senses in this way for billions of years.

Vulnerable animals alternate panoramic and focused sensing.
Predators, when they're hunting, combine the two.

Predators generally watch over a middle sized area, a stretch of water or a field. This waiting and hoping phase usually lasts several minutes. It's motivated by focusing with the intention of catching specific prey.

## The Human Experiment

Humans secured their survival by developing their focusing abilities, especially their general intelligence. Unlike all other animals, we learnt how to survive without actively using our panorama senses.

Focusing is a perspective on life with its own depths and logic.

First focusing divides life into bits, then focused thought makes associations to join the separated bits together again in relationships.

We developed an astounding ability to think and understand these relationships – to focus on memories and to learn. We discovered how to shape flint tools, to make fire, and wheels, to read and write, and gradually our modern civilisation developed. Focusing can be amazingly clever and creative – and it gets things done.

We developed our purpose in life by reasoning out cause and effect, understanding relationships, and then acting and achieving results. This gave us a sensation of wholeness.

The problem is that nowadays, we have so much we need to learn, that our early education of focused thinking overwhelms our panoramic abilities before they even start developing.

And we just don't recognise that everything we think, want, plan, or do, is happening because we're focusing. We don't remember any other way of experiencing life.

Our only knowledge of panoramic sensing comes from the subliminal use of the horizontal peripheries when driving, to alert us to something we might need to focus on.

Animals would become extinct if they only ever focused.

## Beliefs and Wholeness

Humans are the only animals who try to find peace of mind and wholeness through ideas and beliefs.

Beliefs are the epitome of focusing. They are inspiring, often perfect focal points.

Beliefs are probably civilisation's greatest achievement. For hundreds of thousands of years spiritual beliefs were at the centre of human life. Traditional beliefs were pure in their simplicity with their common practical goals. They gave us identity, purpose, and a deep – almost animal – sense of belonging in our community.

But, as we reasoned more and our understanding developed, the mutually confirmed beliefs of our traditional cultures has collapsed.

And whenever we found new, deeper understandings of reality, we discovered a new abstract level of relationships, with more questions.

Reasoned thinking gave us new beliefs with ideals of freedom of choice, equality and general education. And consequently the secure identity of inherited family trades has vanished.

So now, in our global community, we have to 'find ourselves' on a practical and a spiritual level.

Finding ourselves, believing in ourselves, self-fulfilment, and self-realisation all sound wonderful – but they often lead to self-righteousness... and even lying criminals can believe in themselves and be authentic individuals.

Our focused experience of life is inhibiting our understanding.

We have created a fascinating and ludicrous situation which no animal, or human in the ancient world has ever experienced or even imagined.

## Civilisation's Neurosis

Focusing is essential in order to think constructively and its use in nature is to do – it leads to action.

Focusing leads to a feeling of individual validity, with direction and motivation. A perfect contrast to the panorama where there's only the vaguest sense of looking forward, going anywhere, or wanting anything.

As our modern feeling for individuality developed, it promised us hope, purpose, and reasons. It promised us a free-thinking identity. But then left us continuously thinking, trying to find or confirm our identity.

And the big practical problem resulting from this is – we can't stop thinking... one thought associates with the next automatically, and we think it's natural. It isn't. It's neurotic. It's an illness only humans have.

Humans don't realise how easy it is to stop thinking.

Our intense training and education of concentrated focusing has turned off the off-switch. We can't even remember that there was an off-switch.

## The Off-Switch

When we are panoramically aware, we can't focus on anything specific. And when we can't focus, it's impossible to want anything, or develop a constructive thought.

It's a state of consciousness where egoism is not possible. There is no concept of self-justification, needing to achieve anything, nor any sense of pride or being right.

The panoramic way of sensing is almost entirely useless, except that it keeps animals safe, and – by luck or design, because we're in touch with all we're sensing – it's also a state of wholeness.

Our individuality doesn't disappear; our sense of purpose and meaning in life doesn't vanish. Our focused-self just becomes neutralised for a moment, not compulsively wanting to do something or be someone.

Panoramic sensing transforms our focused understanding of reality. Our focused reality is always abstract and one step removed. But more importantly, in its present form, it's closed-minded – it's based on incomplete information.

Panoramic reality is directly involved in life. There is no feeling of a subject and object doing anything. It's a different perspective on life and it has totally different priorities.

## The Safety of Openness

Safety for civilised humans is found by closing off, secure in relationships, behind walls, laws, beliefs, and our own constantly repeating inner dialogue.

"Safety by openness" sounds irrational. But this feeling is normal and natural with panoramic openness.

Panoramic sensing evolved to stay safe in the middle of life, by being open to a random and unpredictable environment.

And then, humans have a great advantage – we don't need to run away every time we see a cat or a dog. Our advantage has led to indifference and ignorance.

With panoramic sensing, we witness sudden, inexplicable, and chaotic changes as normal; and there is peace of mind and security in just being open to them and sensing them.

At present, we never find peace of mind because we're continually thinking. And it's unquestioned in every sentence we think, in every subject and object – without a deep understanding of relationships, there's no hope of wholeness.

Our focusing has led us into a collective blind-spot. We're forgetting panoramic awareness.

We are missing the opportunity to feel involved, whole, safe, and just amazed at life, now, in this random reality.

## Basic Mental Health

Panoramic sensing isn't a belief, animals don't have to believe in it for it to work, it's basic to life. It's not a mystical experience, it belongs to everyday human life.

Beliefs and ideas are necessary in order to have an identity and feel like an individual with a reason to live – with something to do, a direction and purpose.

This has immense value, but to want both individuality and wholeness at the same time is unnatural.

Focusing evolved to give us individual direction and purpose. Panoramic sensing evolved to experience life as a whole. Vulnerable animals alternate these two extremes.

All ancient and modern therapies and meditations can help us develop our hidden potential; bring our lives back in balance; and give us a feeling of belonging – but nothing is as direct, fundamental, practical, easy to do, and less expensive(!) than panoramic awareness.

Panoramic openness makes focused activity safe. And this is as true for animals and their mortal safety, as it is for humans psychologically.

Panoramic openness interrupts the neurotic patterns of thinking and wanting which are causing the pace of modern life to overrun us.

Every single panoramic moment helps needs and wants, thoughts and actions to clarify and realign. The regular experience of openness, safety, and wholeness, brings peace of mind.

This is a natural way of sensing, experiencing, and being. It touches reality from a different perspective. This creates a shift in consciousness.

It is not a new theory or philosophy. It's nothing glamorous or clever. It's ages old and just practical. It's used by every squirrel stopping for a few moments on the lawn.

Human children are born with this way of sensing. Panoramic openness is a potential which we have collectively learnt to ignore – it may well be the only natural resource which humans don't exploit.

It's there within us all the while. All it requires is curiosity, a little effort, self-discipline, and the courage to temporarily break free from every focused form of human herd mentality.

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