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INTRODUCTION TO BROADBAND SENSING

Terminology
I call it panorama or broadband sensing. The panoramic sense is initially a more accessible word, and it implies ‛the big picture’. The new idea and word ‛broadband’, describes better what this sense does.

Humans are so unaware of this way of sensing, that our culture has no clear descriptive name for it.

Peripheral vision is the word we use for how horses and pigeons see everything centrally and roughly 350° around them. But periphery usually only means the boundary or edge. We need clear words to think clearly ... For me, it is clear, my broadband field of vision has a periphery.

Panoramic or broadband listening or smelling appear to be totally unnamed.

The lack of a name always indicates a lack of cultural recognition. Without a scientific name, or even a clear common name, we can expect a whole range of unrecognised and unresearched physiological and psychological effects which sensing the world like this has.

Our culture has not recognised this, probably because animal trainers and researchers mainly study how animals focus, and to what extent animals can learn from us, and develop memory and abstract thought.

Part of Life's Balance
Broadband sensing is a vital and integral part of how animals manage to survive. For animals, it is a balance for all their active focussed sensing and when dozing.

Broadband sensing doesn't lead to the same mental problems, and it doesn't have the same ingenious creative potential that focussing has. By itself it would not solve anything, we would starve or get eaten. Animals must focus and react once they perceive food or danger. The value of the panoramic sense lies in balancing and alternating it with focussed sensing.

Watch how any blackbird pulling at a worm, continually checks for predators. And hares ears are always scanning for danger while they're eating. Or when dozing, how the hare turns his ears outwards, open for sounds, and sleeping birds have one eye open.

Animals use this mode of sensing in combination with all their focussed activities, and also while passively dozing. It doesn't replace any activity, or dozing, it makes it safe. It's part of being alive. Broadbanding is part of the mix.

It's nothing special, every animal does it. Every animal except humans. The Panorama sense is a forgotten part of life's basic balance.

Going Broadband - Seeing
There are many qualities of broadband sensing. Humans all have some subliminal awareness of what's happening around us, even when thinking about other things.

Occasionally we have an intense experience of awareness and pleasure, sensing in a broadband way. This often happens spontaneously when looking into the distance at a panorama. At those times, we're not focussing on anything specific, we're just amazed at everything. It opens our senses in a special way.

How can we find this intensity without anything awesome or beautiful to sense? The inner openness is the vital part, not the outside stimulus.

You might be able to get into the feeling quickly, if you find a blank sheet of A4, - fold it in half (for some stability), and hold it sideways in front of your eyes. Focus on it, and concentrate, but look at the interesting things happening all around it. Then move it a few inches away, look around it again - move it another few inches away and keep focussing on it but looking all around it.

Once you can do this effectively, find a blank wall, or a monotonous area of sky, anything which has no focal point, and focus on it - while looking at everything else. (If this is too difficult, then find a boring, unmoving focal point straight ahead, focus on it but concentrate on everything else.)

Chapter Four discusses a variety of other methods to see in the panorama way, but already you will have a feeling for the oval shape of your whole field of vision. If you are outside, you will see lots of things moving, just notice them all but keep looking at the whole picture.

My experience is that instead of looking at the world like a T.V. screen, it feels as though i'm right up inside the T.V. screen. The normal feeling of a subject looking at an object is considerably different, it's a 'being with' what i'm seeing, instead of looking at it.

Focussing Separates, Broadbanding Integrates
Focussed thinking evolved to understand the distinction and relationship between objects; focussed sensing evolved to do things and thus always involves a doer and a done to, a subject and an object.

With the panoramic way of sensing, animals feel more involved and connected with everything they sense. It evolved over billions of years exactly for that reason: because it is the most direct, most reliable way of being in touch with all that's going on around you.

From the way we sense and the way we use our senses, we create the world we feel. This has often been said, but - we think this cognitive change implies a spiritual or psychological change of perspective, - it is only rarely directly applied to our physical senses. It's nothing mystical or metaphysical, it's not even philosophical, it's just at first rather strange: I'm suggesting a physiological method of using the senses, to be awake, now, and feel connected with our immediate environment.

It's not difficult, animals have been doing it for millions of years. We did it all as babies.

Broadbanding belongs with that collection of rare words like love, and empathy, as a state of being where the subject is intimately involved with the object.

This mode of our being, is part of being a complete human being. It is a baseline experience for any philosophy or psychology of man, then without it, we are only considering a limited version of what human beings can do and be - only understanding humans in the context of a relationship between focal points : 'I' and 'God'; or self and the world, - without the broadband balance of integration.

Please continue with The Simple Sense of Now

Back to Chapter One : Individual Usage