CIVILISATION'S HABITUAL RUTS

Traditional Ruts : Skills and Beliefs

In traditional times humans were materially insecure, often cold and hungry – but we had a bigger brain than other animals; an intellect which put ideas together.

We made tools, developed skills, clothes, and shelters for a home with a fire. We cooked meat and then celebrated with hunting tales. We looked at the stars, questioned deeper meanings, used our imagination, and developed an understanding of life.

To think, learn, remember, and then repeat all our skills and beliefs, we had to focus. All of our social and practical skills, knowledge, and beliefs, are based on our focusing abilities. Focusing gets things done.

Our civilisation is happening as a result of what we have learnt by focusing.

Beliefs and Identity

Our practical skills were easily and readily exchanged with neighbouring tribes. Occasionally we adopted beliefs, especially when conquered by tribes with more powerful Gods, but essentially our beliefs remained our own.

Traditionally we worshipped together, openly. We had a vivid consciousness of a common spiritual essence, and doing things for the common good.

Beliefs were always central to human identity. We lived and died for our beliefs.

But since the 1,600s with the questioning of traditional beliefs, came the development of individual freedom of thought and a multiplicity of modern beliefs. Slowly, our sense of psychological safety and collective purpose in life, has become a matter of individual choice.

And with that, we've lost our unquestioned and often adored common belief with its obvious subsequent goals and clear focal points in life. We've lost the safety of an automatic mutually and culturally confirmed idea of knowing who and why we are.

The problem is that for abstract ideas to feel real they require confirmation from other humans who can witness and understand the ideas. And these days, there are so many choices and simply not enough mutual confirmation to go around... and there never can be.

We have no idea what's really happening or why (we blame politics and each other), we accept it as inevitable and normal... and it is normal because everyone else accepts it as well.

We are now facing a form of collective psychological insecurity, which no species or any previous culture has ever experienced or even imagined. 

Even if we could all develop Gandhi's and Mandela's sense of human respect for others – it could never replace the security of the mutual, united and unquestioned confirmation of all the members of an entire local social group.

And our cultural insecurity has become its own cause, always generating more of itself. It's exponential.

If we continue to experience life exclusively from a focused perspective, without the natural paramic balance of wholeness – our thinking and our beliefs will inevitably become even more diverse and fragmented, and there will be more social fracturing.

The Paramic World

With paramic sensing we can experience a sense of safety and wholeness, with nothing to do except be directly aware, alert and ready – there are other ways to do this, but none are so natural or easy.

Paramic sensing evolved to keep us safe, it developed in order to notice the first sign of danger.

With pre-emptive listening we can instantly neutralise all our repetitious thought patterns. If we start thinking we won't notice sounds till a split second after they happen. Any fox would spring on the opportunity, any duck would be dead. There are other ways to stop thinking, or control the thoughts, but again none are so effective, natural, or easy to learn.

With panavision we can experience the world all happening together, as a complete entity.

The central fallacy of our focused thinking is that life happens in terms of subjects doing verbs to objects. Focusing is only one perspective with its own inbuilt logic.

When paraming, there's no question about cause and effect. It's a different form of logic. The only thing of importance are the changes, and if i'm aware of the first sign of any change, then there's a chance of survival

Paramic awareness makes focused activity safe; and, especially among predatory animals, it makes focused activity sucessful.

We've lost the animal sense of belonging in our immediate social and cultural group; and simultaneously we've lost a background feeling for the wholeness of life.

Paramic awareness gives us what we're missing. It's a feeling of the underlying wholeness of life; and simultaneously it's a feeling of belonging in our environment.

Please continue with Displacement Behaviour in Humans

Instinctive behaviour repeats without any noticable change over generations.

Humans repeat learnt behaviour, learnt ideas involve focused learning, memorising, and repetition. And as we learn more, we need to repeat more.

The wheels of the repetitive focusing, learning, remembering system were set turning, we combined and created, and look how successful it all was!

We developed a fascinating array of new toys and new tools and all of a sudden found ourselves with an Industrial Revolution which simultaneously specialised on smaller repetitious segments, and speeded up the whole process. Henry Ford gave this process gestalt (form), with piece work on assembly lines.

But all our inventions have an ever increasing momentum of development, which require us to continually adapt quicker to the new stimuli which we create.

The car went faster and (apparently) more efficently than horses. So that between 1910 and 1930 the horse vanished from city streets, and with that the carriages, wheelwrights, stables, blacksmiths, oats and barley and an entire 5,000 year old global balance and established structure of specialised social identities vanished. They were replaced with mechanics, garages, metal and rubber production, tarmacked roads, and oil manufacture.

Other people make a case for the climate. On a psychological level, the problem is the form of education needed. You can look after animals with empathy, carts with common sense, but cars and the industrial world need technical and abstract skills.

Education and Training

So, to contain the ever increasing new knowledge, skills, and ideas, an ever increasingly early education in abstract thought is necessary. And we can only learn by focusing.

But focusing is blind in one eye. Our modern education system systematically increases our focusing abilities and synchronically suppresses the natural development of our paramic senses.

Our practical skills are easily shared, often simply copied, and although they are increasing quickly, it's a fairly steady rate of increase. But in our abstract reality, the increase and diversity of thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and opinions, is exponential. The possibilities are maybe infinite.

It's even more extreme than that. Our modern education is a very specific form of focused attention using a serious, rational, and logical way to use abstract words and images.

Artificial Intelligence

And though i've missed a few steps, now we've developed Artificial Intelligence to cope with and contain all the combinations and associations between the abstract words, symbols, and ideas. A step which within a few years has already created a labyrinth of increasing possibilities.

AI. was always inevitable, it's the perfect expression of how we use our brains visual and auditory focusing talents, with their inherent repetitions and memory systems to coordinate all the ideas, all the focal points.

It is significant that AI. can't experience, and doesn't understand even the subliminal paramic systems of modern man. It has no connection with the parasympathetic nervous system, or with the senses of smell and taste which stimulate and are governed by the lower brain.

AI. is designed to further accelerate the combination of possibilities and ideas. Our world's abstract thinking capacities are destined to skyrocket. AI. is discussed in detail here.

Alice's Red Queen

Even though we are materially secure (in the Western world), we're collectively psychologically insecure, and we are compensating with our species' habitual survival stategy  – even more focusing. We're overfocusing.

We're in a ridiculous situation, like Alice's Red Queen, there simply isnt any time left to slow down because there is so much more to keep repeating.

We are being incredibly stupid. We have no free space left to remember and experience the relevance of paramic sensing.

Please continue with Displacement Behaviour in Humans

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