SURVIVAL STRATEGIES

Focused sensing is always specialised, it focuses on specific small areas. Animals use it to do all the things which they want or need.

Panoramic sensing is a receptive all-round awareness. It's a state of being open, ready and waiting. 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. This is a balance. Their survival depends on it.

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

Land animals must watch, listen, and smell, for short periods of time to detect movements or changes.

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

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

Throughout evolution, it's been the natural way to switch off, stop doing or wanting anything, and be actively receptive for a moment.

Sensing in the panoramic way is the feeling of being directly in touch with all we're sensing as a whole. It's not merely a collection of focal points. It's a totally different way of experiencing life.

The senses are often seen as the door between us and the world outside us. In the panoramic reality, our senses connect us intimately with what we're sensing. The feeling is : we are the door.

Animals have been using their senses in this way for billions of years – it's clearly part of a successful survival strategy.

Whereas vulnerable animals usually alternate panoramic and focused sensing, predators combine the two.

Predators generally watch over a middle sized area, a stretch of water or a field. The predatory usage usually lasts several minutes, and is governed by focusing with the intention of catching specific prey.

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

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

And we just don't recognise that everything we think, want, plan, or do is happening because of focusing. We don't remember that there is another 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.

After an amazing million-year long history of focusing for our survival, our one-sided strategy has now led us to a point of critical overload.

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

Animals would become extinct if they only ever focused.

The Psychology of Focusing
Focusing is a perspective on life with its own inbuilt logic and depths.

By focusing we divide life into selected bits. One of the consequences of this is, that in order to find a sense of wholeness, we must make associations to join the bits together again in relationships.

By focusing we understand life in terms of past and future, cause and effect, and subjects doing verbs to objects.

Focusing is essential in order to think constructively. And to feel integrated in life, we need to fulfil at least some of our ideas. We are forever chasing after the next focal point, the next missing piece in our satisfaction puzzle; and some of us are successful, others fail.

The central drawback of the system is that there's no off switch.

We can't seem to stop thinking... one thought follows the next automatically and we think that'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.

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.

We are still doing something, being watchful – but it has no future context, it serves no purpose except to be watchful.

Panoramic sensing diffuses the anatomical perspective of "forward looking", it's not going in any direction, at the same time, psychologically, there's no feeling of looking forward to, or wanting anything.

It is useless at purposeful activity. It is largely pointless except that it keeps animals safe, and perhaps coincidently, it is a state of wholeness.

Beliefs and Identity
For any being who only knows how to focus, the most efficient way to find wholeness and safety is, as the ancients did, by belonging to a social group with a mutually confirmed and unquestioned almighty higher focal point.

But now, the mutually confirmed beliefs and identity of our traditional cultures have collapsed.

Over this last century, even the secure identity of inherited family trade and work skills has vanished.

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

Finding ourselves, believing in ourselves, self-fulfilment, and self-realisation all sound wonderful, but focused sensing has developed tunnel vision in its own abstract world. It is lost in a vicious circle of self-obsession.

We are blind to panoramic reality.

Panoramic sensing evolved to experience life as a whole, and then among vulnerable animals to stay safe. What it lacks is a sense of individual purpose and identity.

Our individuality won't disappear, our sense of purpose and meaning in life won't vanish. Our focused self just becomes neutralised for a moment, not compulsively trying to be someone.

Individual identity is a product of focusing. To want both wholeness and individual identity at the same time is extremely complicated and frankly greedy.

What we are now, and what we think we can become, is being severely limited by only recognising what we can be by focusing.

The Safety of Openness
Safety for civilised humans is found by closing off, secure behind walls, laws, and the constantly repeating inner dialogue of our own ideas.

"Safety by openness" sounds irrational. But finding safety by being open is natural with panoramic openness.

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

The panoramic connection with the environment neutralises any need for self-realisation or self-belief and even self-identity. In short, it eliminates all seperation of specialised parts.

With panoramic sensing, we witness impermanence and change as normal and there is fulfilment and security in just being open and sensing it.

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

Balance and Potential
Focusing and panoraming are vastly different experiences of how life actually happens. They are not opposites. Among animals they go hand in hand, like good friends dependent on each other.

Panoramic awareness is the natural counterbalance to focusing.

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

Human children are born with this way of being in touch with and sensing the world. Panoramic awareness is an innate potential which we have collectively learnt to ignore. It may well be the only natural resource which humans don't exploit.

Just one panoramic moment automatically interrupts the compulsive vicious circles of our chronic focusing. It interrupts the neurotic patterns of thinking, wanting, and being which are causing the pace of life to overrun our modern cultures.

This is a natural way of being. It isn't a new theory or religion. It's just practical – watch any squirrel stop for a few seconds on the lawn.

What possible harm could there be in doing what every other animal does to stay safe? This is a completely wasted opportunity for humanity and civilisation.

This way of sensing is common to all creatures and people of all cultures. It's a fundamental unifying factor. It underlies and supercedes all belief systems and meditation practices.

And all it requires is curiosity, a little self-discipline − and initially: the courage to break free from normal forms of human herd-mentality and try something apparently new.

The Priority Pages continue with Warm-up Exercises

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