SAFETY AND BELIEFS

The difference is easy to understand in animal terms.

Animal security means having a nest, shelter, or a food hoard. It involves a place to call home or future provisions. Animals find or build security in trees and burrows. Security is dependent on focusing abilities.

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

We focus primarily on security. Food, shelter, relationships, work, and finances are our main practical concerns. Safety and security are often connected, and they're highly organised with insurance policies, laws and police, and unbreakable passwords for banking.

In our first years of childhood feelings and ideas on safety get associated with specific dangers, typically about keeping us safe from our own inventions. As with fire, and electricity. Safety warnings on medicines and machines. And road safety is a good example with its rules, lights, and sounds, to focus on, (a learnt behaviour which even some animals 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 panaral senses.

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

Beliefs are the epitome of focusing. Beliefs are attractive and awe-inspiring, often beautiful, perfect ideals to focus on. Beliefs have to be in secure and usually unchanging focal points.

And they worked amazingly in the past because we had a super-ego in the sky and everyone around us found comfort in the same meaning of life. We worshipped openly and celebrated our beliefs together. Our beliefs were socially anchored.

But these days everyone is worshipping something different. Every individual is free to find their own beliefs. Some follow old traditions, others politics or science, spirituality or the local football club. Many have a common belief in work, play, and family. And many follow others who seem to believe in themselves.

Our ideals and beliefs give us the promise of peace of mind or fulfilment. But the problem is that these days, 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 that we need 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 only in extraordinary circumstances or individuals could this ever develop into a feeling of wholeness or peace of mind.

Our focused experience of ourselves and life is inhibiting our understanding.

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

A feeling of wholeness or peace of mind, is a rare occurrence in the focused world.

But if we're looking for peace of mind or a sense of wholeness, being any sort of focal point in a relationship is misleading.

Beliefs are necessary in order to have an identity and feel like an individual with a purpose. Beliefs define us and guide us in what we do and think.

This has immense value, but it isn't necessary to be an individual with an identity in order to feel safe and wholesome.

Panaral awareness is a sensitivity to everything all around in the environment. There is no separation of isolated points, it is vital to include everything possible in the awareness, it is inherently whole.

In this sensory condition there is only a vague sense of our individual identity, wanting, desire, or a sense of purpose. And no need for them.

When we are directly aware of everything all around in the environment, ready and waiting to react instantaneously, we can't want anything specific, we can't even think of anything specific, because if we do, we lose the panaral awareness.

For animals this is a constant reminder of being without wanting. And though it's questionable how animals think, when humans use it, all constructive thinking stops.

There's no question about what to do next, there's no going round and round in cricles, reasserting the same old ideas, reconfirming our identity and purpose, our beliefs, our comfort zone, our box.

The form of perception is different, the thinking is different.

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

Humans have a great luck and privilege. We neglect this privilege.

In reality, modern humans are psychologically insecure. Socially and individually we aren't 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 panaral senses.

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 panarally.

If they were stupid and dumb, felt no fear, and ignored danger, vulnerable animals would be eaten alive.

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

In a species with no panaral awareness, we can expect paranoia and angst, near paralysed with fear and stress, compensating for this unbearable stress with a degree of dumbness, depression and stupidity, and/or have developed impressive defensive weaponry.

But, it would be advisable to use panaral safety and wholeness as a therapy for identity crises or dysphoria; conditions of fear and worry like paranoia and OCB (obsessive compulsive behaviour); conditions like depression and schizophrenia; and many more general fixed thinking or behaviours like compulsive lying.

In time, I could foresee peripheral lights and sound stimuli being developed (use your common sense, i'm not suggesting electrodes) and used as therapy for anti-social, and even criminal behaviour.

The Natural Balance for Beliefs

Focusing and beliefs have great value. They enable and support having a reason to live – with something to do, a direction and purpose.

And, our modern civilised herd mentality is used to this feeling for life. It's a comfort zone, we all agree on the central value of beliefs and purpose.

And we have spent centuries fascinating ourselves with theories and facts, questions and answers, about how our psychology has developed, and what to do about it.

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

Our higher beliefs are especially strong, loveable focal points, and these need an especially strong and loveable balancing point.

Panaral 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 describes how focusing, especially in our modern overfocused times, has overpowered our ability to experience the world panarally.

We need focal points in life, but they need to be alternated with panaral awareness.

The reason modern life became unsafe and we became unsure – is that we are ignoring a basic rule of nature.

Generally speaking, whether a belief is in abstract Gods, leprechauns, Atlantis, or UFOs, if it is combined with, and still felt as valid after periods of panaral sensing, then it is safe and will profit the culture's survival. Extreme and violent beliefs will need more intense panaral involvement, or at best early preventative panaral care.

But our teachers are not even aware of the possibility of sensing panarally. We are blinded by focusing, we've forgotten this natural talent and don't realise how easy it is to use.

Firstly, even though panaring is not a belief, human behaviour will probably need to turn it into one.

Then hopefully someone will realise that believing in something and not doing it is dumb. Because actually doing it is the only realistic and direct way to disrupt our obsessive thinking and wanting; and slowly resolve our insane individual and cultural dysfunction.

Stopping Still, Silent, and Sensing

Panaring makes focusing safe. Panaring makes life safe.

Animals find psychological, emotional and physical safety by opening their eyes and ears, staying still, silent, and panarally alert to everything but nothing in particular.

We not only believe in order to find peace, 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 still feel a need to express our views openly and wear the clothes and badges of our identity. We do this to be recognised and feel psychologically confirmed and safe. (Or we've become depressed, drunk, lazy, or lost.)

But safety, among animals, avoids display.

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

Animals display only on specific occasions to do with courtship rituals, social rank, and territorial behaviours.

The only animal who looks for peace and safety by displaying are humans. This fascinating theme is explored in Display Rituals.

Please continue with Abstract Reality vs. Panaral Reality

Back to Chapter Three : Civilisation's Habitual Ruts
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