WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM ANIMALS

Animals have two ways of using their senses; focused and panoramic.

Focused sensing is always selective, it focuses on specific small areas. Its primary use is to do all the things which animals need or want.blackbird on the lookout

Panoramic sensing is the receptive awareness to everything happening in the immediate environment. Its primary use is to guard against danger – it makes life safe.

Animals coordinate or alternate all their focused activities with their panoramic awareness. This is a balance. Their survival depends on it.

The Human Animal

Humans secured their survival with their focusing abilities. Unlike all other animals, we learnt how to survive without actively using our panorama senses.

We developed an astounding ability to think – to focus on memories and learn. We learnt how to shape flint tools, to make fire, and wheels; then cars and internet. Focusing can be amazingly clever and creative, and it gets things done. And gradually our modern civilisation developed.

Until nowadays, when our modern early education of focused sensing and cat and dog focusing fixed on tvthinking, undermines our panoramic abilities before they even start to develop.

And we don't even bother to recognise that we do and think and want because of focusing, everyone does it, it's normal. But the mere fact that there is an alternative way of perceiving the world, presents us with a depth perspective on the story of human civilisation.

We're focusing so intensively that we don't even see that there is this other way of experiencing life. We suffer from tunnel vision and a blind spot.

After an amazing million-year history of focusing for our survival, our one-sided strategy has now led us to a point of critical overload. We are overfocusing: closed-minded, greedy, and self-centred.

Animals would become extinct if they overfocused.

Panoramic awareness is the natural counterbalance to focusing, and the cure for overfocusing.

The Wholeness of Life

Panoramic sensing evolved to notice all the changes and movements happening here: in the immediate environment – and now: in the present moment. It is the natural way to be completely here and now.

Focusing always limits our general awareness of all the other things which are happening. At best, we can only focus on a specific part of the here and now.

Throughout evolution, panoramic awareness has been the natural way to stop thinking, wanting, or doing anything, and be actively receptive.

This is a state of being ready and waiting to respond spontaneously without thinking. It connects us with our surroundings directly, and as a whole. It is a very simple state of being.

As soon as we focus on anything specific – a thought or an object – we lose our pure panoramic receptivity.

Predatory animals have a way of combining their focused and panoramic abilities. They search for specific prey. Under the influence of wanting, they focus and think.

Animals Make The Best Gurus

Human children are born with this way of being in touch with and sensing the world.

We must balance our increasing stimulation and early education of focused reading, writing, and thinking, with an early education and encouragement of the panorama mode.

Don't listen to me! Animals are the experts, and they make the best gurus. They've been using it for billions of years – it is clearly part of a successful survival strategy.

We must play at 'going on the lookout' with our children. Watching for movements all around and out of the corners of our eyes like blackbirds – listening-out for dogs and humans like a hare does – hedgehog scenting the breezeand smelling on the wind for coffee or food cooking, just as the hedgehog will smell for apples and beetles.

The Need for Common Sense

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." – Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943).

If clear, simple answers are available, why look deeper?

From the way we sense and the way we use our senses, we create the world we feel. Sensing in the panoramic way is a different way of experiencing and understanding how life actually happens.

charlie brown and linus stargazingWe are not using all our basic and natural sensory abilities to experience the world and our lives, we have a limited experience of life.

This is an innate potential which we have collectively learnt to ignore, it is probably the only natural resource which humans don't exploit.

Panoramic awareness is the easiest, most direct and natural way to get a sense of wholeness and safety in our everyday lives – for anyone and everyone, no matter which culture or special beliefs, it is something we all have in common. Something which unifies all creatures and people of all cultures.

Please continue with Going On The Lookout

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