SAFETY AND BELIEFS

They are often interlinked, but there is a fundamental difference and animals would understand it.

Animal security means having a nest, shelter, or a food hoard. Animals need to use their focusing abilities to find and build security.

Humans have learnt to look for both security and safety by focusing.

We think that when we have security we will be safe. Our security is about food, shelter, relationships, work, and finances. They're often further secured with insurance policies, locks, laws, and police, and passwords for internet and banking.

In our first years of childhood, feelings and ideas about safety get associated with specific dangers, such as fire, and electricity. Safety is often about keeping us safe from our own inventions, with safety warnings on medicines and machines.

Road safety is a prime example with its rules, lights, and sounds, which we must focus on and learn, (a behaviour which some animals have learnt to copy).

The key point is that humans try to find both security and safety by focusing. We hardly remember how it feels to use our pahanal senses.

PEACE OF MIND and FOCUSING

Humans even try to find peace of mind – our feeling for psychological safety – by focusing.

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

This was a natural development and it is probably human cultures' greatest achievement. Ancient cultures were bound together by their beliefs. They were mutually confirmed, celebrated, and we worshipped together, openly.

Beliefs gave us safety, purpose, and identity. We had a common understanding of life, and a deep – almost animal – sense of community and belonging in a group.

For hundreds of thousands of years beliefs enhanced human life.

Beliefs are the epitome of focusing. Beliefs are awe-inspiring, often beautiful, perfect ideals to focus on.

Today, every individual is free to find and follow their own beliefs.

Believing in ourselves is the modern ideal, the basis of an independent individual with free-will.

But after that, everyone believes in something different – we lack the social safety of common belief.

Many have a simple belief in work, play, and family. Some choose old traditions, others politics or science, spirituality or the local football club. Most follow someone else who seems to believe in themselves. Groups form following social norms, and typically we identitfy with a mixture of group beliefs. These constitute our identity and world view.

Probably the deepest sense of safety (which often develops into a belief, but actually transcends it) is in a love relationship.

And none of these are wrong, in fact, most of them are right, believing is better than disbelieving, and we need to use anything we can to help us feel safe – to help us find peace of mind.

Mutual Respect
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with beliefs. If we are devoted to some pure ideal we will probably find a degree of personal peace. But socially, in modern times, we will still be surrounded by chaos and insecurity.

There is such diversity in beliefs that there simply isn't enough social acceptance, let alone mutual confirmation, to go around.

The solution to this, among those who are most concerned for humanity, is to follow Gandhi and Mandela, we have to learn their lessons on mutual respect for all beliefs.

And respect and empathy will certainly help, but they can never replace the safety of a mutual belonging and unquestioned confirmation of all the members of an entire local social group.

Whether belief in ourselves or belief in an idea or spirit, beliefs and ideas always involve focusing on something specific.

Focusing always creates a subject-object situation. The focusing system doesn't feel complete unless the parts are in a relationship.

Actually arriving at a permanent and unquestionable state of rest, contentment, or wholeness by focusing is unnatural.

Usually the only state of rest we will find is a constantly repeating, reconfirming cycle of our own opinions and habitual world-views.

Beliefs 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. Beliefs define us and guide us in what we do and think.

Focusing and beliefs have immense value, but it isn't necessary to be an individual with an identity in order to feel safe and wholesome. To want both wholeness and individual identity at the same time is irrational.

Animals are often alone, out in the wilderness where life is insecure.

Panoramic sensing evolved to live in an insecure world. It was built for that purpose. It was built to feel safe and to remain open, alone, in the middle of life.

And, it is inherently inclusive of everything possible, it is inherently whole.

In this sensory condition we can't want or think of anything specific, because if we do, we stop being pahanally aware.

There is only a vague sense of our identity, wanting, desire, or a sense of purpose. There's no going round and round in cricles reasserting the same old ideas and worries, trying to reconfirm our identity and purpose, our beliefs, our comfort zone, our box.

Though it's questionable how animals think, when humans use it, all associative thinking stops – the thoughts stop being, what is in fact, neurotic.

Animals fear for their mortal safety, as we should for our psychological safety.

But, the basic reason modern life became unsafe and we became unsure, is that we forgot how to go pahanal.

We relied exclusively on focusing, and with our brilliant focused thinking and questioning we then dismissed all our consensual focal points.

So now, civilised humans have no mutually shared herd mentality; nowhere they feel they belong, except their own, extremely insecure, individual comfort zone.

Socially and individually we are not psychologically safe... it's realistic... it exists... it's nothing which can be psychoanalysed away... not until psychologists study animal behaviour and realise that all other animals find their sense of safety by using their pahanal senses.

Finding safety and a sense of belonging is not only possible, it's normal and natural with pahanal sensitivity.

I can't explain the neurological connections involved in the cognitive process; but rather than be vulnerable, or paralysed by panic, fear, and worry, animals sense pahanally.

If vulnerable animals were stupid and dumb, felt no fear, and ignored danger, they would have been eaten alive long ago.

Exceptions to this rule are very rare and either prolific or poisonous with no natural enemies. Examples are the Ocean Sunfish or Mola mola, who are incredibly stupid but equally prolific. And the Koala Bear who digests so many eucalyptus leaves that it's poisonous to other animals.

In a species with no pahanal awareness (and no common focused consensus) we can expect stress, fear, worry, anger, paranoia and even paralysis.

We can expect such a species to cope with this stress by repressing their feelings and intelligence, becoming depressed, and to try and compensate for this with defensive weaponry, self-deception and self-righteousness.

Many deeper traumatic conditions need specific (focused) psychotherapeutic treatments but even these treatments would be better if supported by pahanal awareness.

In time, I could hope for general early preventative pahanal care.

Peripheral lights and sound stimuli could be developed (use your common sense, i'm not suggesting electrodes) and used as therapy for anti-social, criminal and violent behaviour.

But why? Why all this emphasis on focusing? Why are we making life so difficult? How many humans have found peace of mind?

Thropughout evolution, animals have found psychological, emotional, and physical safety by opening their eyes and ears, and staying still for short periods of pahanal alertness to everything possible.

Pahanal sensing evolved to make focused activity – want and purpose – safe, (and successful). It's been there all the time.

Why are we so blind to it? Tunnel Thinking and The Blind Spot attempts to explain why we've neglected our natural pahanal talents.

We are ignoring a basic rule of nature.

We need focal points in life, but they need to be alternated with pahanal awareness. Pahaning makes focusing safe.

Our higher beliefs are especially strong, loveable focal points, and they especially need pahanal balance.

I would suggest, that whether a belief is in abstract Gods, leprechauns, Atlantis, or UFOs, if it is combined with, and still felt as valid after regular periods of pahanal sensing, then it is safe and will profit the culture's survival.

Going pahanal at regular intertvals is the only realistic and direct way to stop our obsessive focusing habit, and resolve our insane individual and cultural dysfunction.

We not only believe in order to find peace of mind... but then we display our beliefs openly.

In traditional times it worked wonderfully, the outward display of our beliefs was central to establishing our psychological and social safety.

This habitual human behavioural pattern is deeply imbedded in us.

So nowadays, we feel a need to express our beliefs openly and wear the clothes and badges of our identity. We do this to find safety in social belonging.

But safety, among animals, avoids display.

If a vulnerable animal has any concern about its own appearance when wanting safety, it is to be invisible.

Animals display only on specific occasions to do with courtship rituals, social rank, and territorial behaviours – but not for peace of mind and safety.

The only animals who try and establish safety by displaying are humans. This fascinating theme is explored in Display Rituals.

Please continue with Collective Dysfunction

Back to Chapter Three : Civilisation's Habitual Ruts
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