Over these next few days Trisha is out of town and so I’m taking care of Hero and she is one intense little puppy. If she perceives something as having one iota of preyful essence then it’s meant for her mouth only and must be brought to ground. She goes from point A to point B at the speed of light and knows how to shift tectonic plates when access is denied. She was bred for work and would be every canine handler’s dream dog, and yet could just as easily be fodder for the euthanasia meat grinder that is the American pet marketplace. So what to do with this little furry ball of caged lightening? Of course, no training, no walk; let’s get some wood. The day before I had dropped a dead ash in the lower field so I loaded up my chainsaw, splitting maul, gas and oil in the tractor and off we went. Hexi is in heat so our logging party comprised of me, Hero and Hessian.

I spent an hour or so sawing up the limbs and trunk, getting the brush out of the way and then splitting the slugs into cordwood, all during which Hero and Hessian had their own private little adventures that radiated from the job site as epicenter of their synchronized orbits, Hero covering twenty paces for every one of Hessian’s (he’s nine years old now). There is a relatively busy road a hundred yards away but I knew that Hero’s drive to make contact is so strong that what is a problem in one context is an asset in a supportive environment. She was at the center of the only universe that mattered to her so there was nothing else out there.

The tree I was working on fell at the edge of a small thicket of white pines and poplar saplings where the woods were beginning to encroach on my field (next summer’s project) and on one of Hero’s sorties I saw her coming out from under the pines with a big chunk of frozen something buried so deep in the back of her mouth I knew the attraction was primal magnetic. I assumed it was a chunk of a deer that a coyote had taken down and eaten most of and now Hero had found its remains. It might have been a section of the skull and there were wads of fur still stuck to it. Hessian too could see the primal importance of her discovery and was soon trailing in her wake and sniffing at her mouth and this allowed me to see just how great Hero’s temperament is. Even when she lied down to concentrate on her meal, and with Hessian crowding her muzzle and milling around to get a good whiff of what was going on, nibbling on the crumbs and flecks in the snow by her paws, Hero never growled or interrupted herself to deal with Hessian. She wanted that carcass with every cell in her body and Hessian could feel it so there was absolutely no tension between them even though they were check to check and jowl to jowl. It was a powerful experience to watch them achieve reconciliation over a potentially charged moment and completely via their own resources. I cringed thinking how so many such incidents in a domestic household distort the cooperative faculty that every dog is born with when two dogs find themselves in a comparable situation before this faculty has fully evolved.

But the dog trainer in me couldn’t resist the teachable moment so I called Hessian, had him lay down by the tractor and then approached Hero and knelt down about twenty feet away. “What a goooood girl, she’s sooooo boootifulll, Heeerroooo, yea, looook at that fluffy, furry wabbittt you’ve got there. Hero got up and came toward me and so I stood up and began to slowly backpedal while I increased the volume of my cooing. Hero proceeded to circle me and so I knelt down again and with her leaning against me, I gave her a good rub-a-dub along her topside and flanks and she all the while continued to hold the carcass calmly in her jaws. Perfect, she was giving me her energy. What a temperament.

An hour later when I was stacking wood in the shed behind the house, Hero found an old marrow bone in the yard and so to build on what had happened earlier I asked her to Hup while I patted my chest. To my delight she did. And why not, when you love what you’re doing, it’s all in a day’s work.

Related posts:

1. New NDT Blog!
2. Kevin Pushing and Pulling with Hessian
3. Kevin Training Hero

In my view consciousness is energy that reflects back on itself so that it reliably repeats and nature is so construed with elements that reflect, absorb, conduct and interrupt the “flow” of consciousness, and this is because consciousness is not a self-contained phenomenon. Consciousness is a network device because it takes a network to turn physical energy into information. I believe that what happens in the mind is that a frame of reference is erected as containment vessel so to speak, so that this reflecting back and forth process can be enabled rather than energy being diffused and dissipated into the surroundings. The more advanced the brain, the more arbitrary the containment device, but that not to say that these frames of reference are completely in error since they are akin to dolphin sending out a sonar ping and then getting back a ping or a pong and thereby constructing an acoustical image of their reality. But it’s easy for the highly intellectual mind to be waylaid and I think this is the problem Whitehead is addressing.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that dogs and humans seem particularly prone to epileptic seizures because the higher the emotional capacity of a species, the more they go by emotional sonar and if there isn’t enough emotional grounding in this ping/pong process of consciousness, they can get stuck in an echoing loop that generates an unbearable amount of electro-chemical energy spikes in the central nervous system and the system crashes. Less emotional capacity and the animal stays reliably grounded into its network niche since it doesn’t have to create frames of reference on the fly and in novel circumstances. For animals of lesser capacity if they experience a rate of change that is too high they just go by instinct and this has its own measure of being adaptive. I think this is also why electroshock therapy remains the only viable course of treatment for the most severe cases of depression (which is over-stimulation rather than under-stimulation of the involuntary nervous system). The shocks wipe out these reverberations so that the system can reboot and establish a ground into the little-brain. {Luca Turin also talks of some morbid scent pathologies being a kind of epileptic seizure.}

These containment vessels while necessary, as I mentioned above are also arbitrary to greater or lesser extents because the human intellect tends to become attached to these frames and we end up projecting the ones that work for us onto animals in order to account for their behavior, and in particular to feel safe about emotionally investing in what dogs do.

Related posts:

1. Definitions
2. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
3. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other

CR: Images, I think that is an important key to dog behaviour if it is true.. what kind of images do you think dogs can hold in their consciousness, and how do they fit into the chain of attraction, collapse thereof, etc…

KB: I’m presuming that they are straight images in accord with the visual processes of dogs, like we can hold an image in our mind, but again in accord with the particulars of canine vision.

CR: if we “rehearse” certain responses to stimuli with our dogs, i.e. mom gets tense on the leash because she sees another dog, dog gets aggressive, but when rehearsing in the back yard, the dog can be trained to seek eye contact to momma tensing on the leash, instead of focussing aggression on the other dog…

would that be OK in order to get them away from red zone behaviour (my dogs do not have red zone but I guess those behaviours seem to be the ones that requires the most work by the handler to integrate our dogs smoothly into our lives..hence CMs focus on them I guess)

will that change the emotion, or are we just “intimidating” them so they give up temporarily, but when the emotional battery is full, there is no avoiding red zone ?

KB: The problem with eye contact is that while distracting, it’s still part of the intensity syndrome. Barking on command is far more relaxing as it gives the dog a safe way to express its fear, also pushing in for hard physical contact is grounding, and ultimately, having a bite toy in mouth as way to fully absorb fight/drive with owner. Ultimately however the goal is to shift dog from visual orientation to nasal. This reflects that its body is becoming sensual and in this mode (magnetic) it can feel how to connect with another dog. I’ll write a lot on aggression when I get a chance, but for now let me say that sociability evolves through a precise protocol and the owner can be the template for this evolution so that the dog’s emotional capacity increases. This should happen before trying to solve the “red zone” or “missile-lock” problem. Just having a dog around other dogs is not necessarily socializing if the dog’s emotional capacity isn’t evolved enough.

CR: so there is fear of collapse (in dogs?) and also fear as a result of collapse of attraction ? does aggression in dogs (biting etc, the stuff that makes them red zone) come about as a result of this fear ? or is it more of a Fixed Action Pattern, (fight.flight, procreation, etc.) as described by Jean Donaldson, apparently not as predictably ascribable to dogs as to species that have continuously lived in the wild.

do you even believe in the existence of FIxed Action Patterns in dogs, or is it just that it looks similar to other species’ FAPs and is basically not the same?

KB: There is only one fear, the fear of falling. The collapse of emotional attraction piggybacks on this experience so that the animal mind has a means of evaluating what’s going on. So when a state of emotion collapses, and if the resulting sensation is more than the emotional capacity of the individual animal can handle, then an instinctual fixed action pattern takes over, or also a habit in more complex beings, and this locks the individual into its network niche role. If on the other hand, the dog’s state of arousal is high enough due to a high emotional capacity, this sensation merely increases the state of hunger and then we have a dog flipping polarity so that the collapse of balance increases arousal, and then this “magnetic field” collapses increasing the strength of the electrical displacement, this collapses again into the magnetic and it continues to propagate on and on exactly like a light wave at which point the dog feels the midpoint with object of attraction in its heart. This is why we say of beings in such a state that they are enLIGHTened.

CR: Which study of dogs and energy are you referring to that shows how dogs cannot experience negative emotions?

KB: There are no such studies, it’s my opinion. It doesn’t make sense to me that there is such a thing as a “negative” emotion, just as there is no such thing as a negative gravity. My study of animals indicates to me that emotion as a networked intelligence is the most logical interpretation of behavior. And this then means that emotion can only be understood as energy, that it is a “force” of attraction, that an animal is only attracted to that which it wants, and that it doesn’t want anything that doesn’t make it feel good. Therefore there is only positive emotion (which is why young children are so literal and apprehend in terms of that which is concrete rather than abstract, i.e. time as a function of physical distance to be covered, and why they are more grounded by ice cream than creamed spinach.) and since every feeling is predicated on emotion, a true feeling can only be good. The instincts and/or thoughts that become attached to emotion and feelings are responsible for what we experience and interpret as a negative emotion or a bad feeling. This is why it’s so critical to me to make such distinctions otherwise we are completely misinterpreting the nature of emotion (fear is not emotion, it is the collapse of emotion) and the nature of animals, and sooner or later that will translate into an incorrect approach.

CR: Alistair Scott writes about his dog’s accidental pregnancy, (Tracks Through Alaska). he had to take her puppies away. as a result, she clearly is not her usual perky self, so one could say “depressed”.

what about dogs who do not eat for long periods, and are not perky, responsive to the stimuli they usually respond to, when they lose a doggie house mate or human companion.

KB: I have boarded tens of thousands of dogs and I found it interesting that it was only a certain temperament type that manifested so called depression, pining away and even what some would call grief. They manifest these states however because they feel ungrounded whereas the dogs with strong sexual/drive make-ups always had fun in the boarding context and wolfed their food down and so on. So (in the kennel) when things aren’t familiar to them and because they have sensitive temperaments so that they can’t apprehend any preyful features in their new setting with its high rate of change, their physical memories of being disconnected are brought to the surface and these are affiliated in their body/mind as emotional battery with being corrected. Thus they appear depressed as if they are missing their owner. (With the mother dog above, it did indeed project its e-cog into her puppies and so was unplugged from her “self.” So while it’s not accurate to call it grief per se, what I’m saying is even more sublime because it means the complex state of what we call grief, which is a state of emotional attraction underlying a feeling of suspension- – yearning – - that is then attached to an instinct, the collapse of the above, that is then attached to a thought, i.e. that person/being is never coming back, and then this then can become a reverberating process with a debilitating life of its own.)

My own dogs have never grieved or missed a beat when a beloved companion died. We must remember that it’s only in our mind that they are gone. If the dog carries the feeling in its heart as triggered by physical memory of the other dog, then in its mind the other dog isn’t gone. It’s always present.

Back to temperament types, when I started my own kennel in 1981, I built a big play yard to excite the prey-making attitudes of these more sensitive types and sure enough, the vast majority began to play and have fun, started wolfing down their food and became much easier to handle. However the interesting part was that when they went home, often their owners called to complain because these types very often became problematic. They wondered if something bad had happened to them while in my kennel. But what had actually happened was that the dog had come out of its shell in my kennel by becoming free to play, bite and bark and be a dog again and so when it went home, it didn’t want to go back into its old box. The owners were the ones who had put all the “shame” into the dog that it had overcome in the kennel and didn’t want to yoke up again at home. But its human reflex not to see the true source of what’s going on emotionally.

Related posts:

1. Final Post Of 2009
2. Why Do Good Dogs Do Bad Things?
3. Why Are Dogs Attracted to Human Beings?

CR: I found this (entertaining?) quote on the internet , by a guy called Mark Pettinelli..

Emotion Is a Combination of Feeling and Thought
“By a combination of feeling and thought I mean a combination of what it feels like to have a thought, with the feeling of what it feels like to have a feeling – I don’t mean the combination of actual verbal thoughts with feelings, but non-verbal thoughts which are like verbal thoughts in that they are about something, you just can’t identify what it is all the time because it is non-verbal”

KB: Emotion cannot possibly be a thought because it’s an immediate moment phenomenon. Thoughts in my model might be classified as verbal, they certainly wouldn’t be images, in other words I believe animals can hold images in mind and that this mental activity doesn’t require a capacity for thought. But my definition of a thought is the capacity to compare one moment with another moment, or one point of view with another point of view; these are actually the same thing. It seems to me that every abstract concept falls into this model. For example, it’s inaccurate to say a person or an animal “feels threatened,” because the concept of a threat is predicated on a series of moments that lead to a consequence, with the observer able to compare point A to B, C, D and so on all the way to the final and unfortunate moment Z. A person could think that they are threatened, but to say feeling threatened which is coupling the immediate-moment energy of emotion/feeling to a thought is actually an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. So you can think about a feeling, and thoughts can become habituated and associated with feelings, but the two aren’t the same. For example, one can think about love, but one can’t think love. You either feel it or you don’t.
One could say quite accurately on the other hand that an animal feels compressed, or displaced, or pulled or pushed, or heavy or light, weightless, or outright falling, because these are how we feel states of energy, as for example when we try to hold the north poles of two magnets together, or when we project ourselves emotionally into basketball players running up and down the court, and in particular listening to compelling music and we feel the falls and rises, the weightlessness and even compression.

CR: Or how about this one from http://www.alldepressiontips.com/depression-questions/difference-between-thoughts-feelings.php

“Scientists now know through the use of experiments and clinical observation that thoughts, feelings, and perceptions coexist as a unified whole and cannot be easily teased apart.”

KB: Once we understand behavior as a function of attraction, it becomes possible to parse it all apart. Emotion is release from a whole body tension. Feelings originate in the heart and are apprehended as a state of suspension. They are characterized by welling up of energy and are easily deflected into states of alignment and their most notable feature is that this happens without a loss of emotional momentum. Feelings leave the individual energized even without the realization of something material. Instincts begin with a collapse (anger and guilt are not true feelings and are attached to an instinct, and then an infinite series of reverberating thoughts) and are characterized by a state of relief and are enervating. An instinct can be interrupted but not deflected. Instincts leave the animal drained unless they realize material energy. Finally, thoughts are relative by which they reflexively compare one thing to another. Thoughts and instincts center one’s consciousness in the head. Feelings center one’s consciousness in the heart.

CR: hm so what about doing this emotion is a consequence of thought- thing, where we say we have to stay Positive in our thinking, otherwise, the emotions will be tainted and we get all tedious and depressed.

i.e. if you feel sad and frustrated about not being able to go to California, it is best not to think about it. but think about the stuff you CAN do…

KB: I’m no guru, but I do know from a study of dogs and energy that there’s no such thing as a negative emotion or a bad feeling. So if one is experiencing what one thinks is a negative emotion or a bad feeling, I suggest not trying to be positive, rather, try to stay present with the emotion and feeling until they can find the thought attached to the fear (btw, fear is not an emotion, it’s the collapse of a state of attraction) that is making the experience seem negative and bad. A good starting point, whatever one is angry at or being made guilty by, is that underneath it all is a state of attraction. But then there is a fear of collapse associated with this, and then instincts and thoughts kick in as a protective device, and then this amalgam takes on a life of its own and will have undoubtedly built up a charge over the course of a lifetime. But once the attraction and the fear is articulated and out in the open, the thoughts and judgments lose their grip and your heart will feel free and sooner or later your own emotional genius will tell you what to do.
We can learn from dogs how to become our own expert. Learning to trust in the nature of a dog is simultaneously learning to trust in the truth of one’s heart. No one knows better than your heart what’s good for you. I’m not saying one shouldn’t seek counsel and leave stones unturned, rather, take it all in, turn over every stone and then only accept what’s feels right. Dogs are here to teach us how to learn the distinction between emotion and instinct, and between thoughts and feelings.

CR also, if an owner keeps thinking about all the bad stuff a dog has done and might do, the dog will perhaps pick up on that vibe, and do exactly what the owner is projecting. visualizing in his anxiety, anger, whatever negative emotion the owner might have about the stuff the dog is doing wrong for him….but if the owner is completely positive emotionally about the dog’s behaviour, the dog will, potentially, feel that kind of a spin coming off the owner and have a better success ratio in training,

KB: The dog doesn’t go by what we think or even what we do, the dog goes by what we feel and since feelings arise from the emotional battery over which we have no control and almost no awareness, while our brilliant minds can easily hide the truth of our feelings not only from others but even from our own awareness, we can never fool or trick our dog. So I tell owners to not waste energy trying to be positive when they aren’t feeling positive. As long as you’re clear about what you’re feeling, then the dog doesn’t have to bring it to your attention with a “problem.”

Happy New Year and “Keep On Pushing.”

Related posts:

1. Anthropomorphic “double-talk?”
2. Questions for the New Year
3. Why Do Good Dogs Do Bad Things?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/science/08angier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

(I’m not according any particular publication the status of papal infallibility, just making the point that physics is as Einstein once remarked, our best way of knowing the mind of the “Old One” and that the New York Times is especially good at making scientific concepts accessible to we mere mortals.)

While usually circular logic is seen as disqualifying to an argument, in physics circular logic means that a wave is being strengthened, whereas circular reasoning in logic means two thoughts are canceling each other out. The circular logic of the universe squares very well with network consciousness and NDT and so I would also like to call your attention to the article I posted in June explaining why dogs do everything in a circle.

http://naturaldogtraining.com/blog/why-do-dogs-do-everything-in-a-circle/

Most scientists think that the only challenge to evolution theory comes from religious fundamentalists; that a credible intellectual argument can’t be made against the idea that random mutations is the basis of evolution. (My theory is that nature evolves as a whole and is moving toward complexity.) At the moment disciplines such as emergence theory are being used to support modern Darwinian theories but I think that this and other research will ultimately undermine it. For example Dr. Kaufmann in the “The Origins of Order” points out that a cell didn’t evolve to be a sphere by random processes because a sphere is the only shape that can work, and this theme is greatly reinforced in the Times piece as Angier writes that everything in nature appears to be a circle, which is what I’ve discovered in the behavior of animals as well. The next wave in scientific advances I believe will prove to be a great unraveling from the current Darwinian models, which in my view will reveal that nature evolves as a whole, not via separate and distinct pools of information.

In my model Temperament is a circle so that energy reflects back on itself and thereby becomes information. I believe a circle is the only way raw physical energy can become information and this is why curved forms are emotionally attractive to our eye and touch. The circle, sphere, or ellipse is a calculation of motion within a field of mutual attraction, the line leading back to the beginning and on and on into infinity, energy repeating itself and constantly expanding. Orbs are the physical embodiment of the principle of emotional conductivity, energy reflecting back on itself so that it can repeat and elaborate into more complex structures via behavior as a circle.

Here’s another compelling link on the theory of the circle.

http://www.circular-theory.com/

Temperament with a small “t” in any given individual is that same circle but with a “flaw” in it, a gap in the circle which causes the organism to “vibrate.” Near my old home in Ridgefield, Ct is a fire house with a massive iron ring suspended inside a wooden frame and which has a gap in it. When the fireman bangs on it, the gap amplifies the sound and it thus served as a summons to farmers in their fields to come fight the blaze. This flaw or gap in a temperament, makes an individual feel unsettled, they vibrate and are motivated to orient to a preferred resting position as a way of compensating. (This is why we need to be right. We’re protecting ourselves from a perceived inadequacy.)

So we can think of the central nervous system firing off, like a spark leaping between two terminals in a spark plug; or the potential energy firing off across the synaptic gap between two neurons, as it attempts to complete the circuit and close that gap. If the subsequent “vibration” of the nervous system (the “signal” being broadcast in manner and movement) can attain resonance with the environment, then the circle is whole again and the individual feels good.

The purpose of the two brain, bipolar make-up is to allow individuals to “flip polarity” in order to achieve this state of resonance with others and thereby complete this gap in their temperament. This process is how dogs are able to do everything in a circle.

Related posts:

1. In Search of Distinctions
2. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?
3. Physical Memory Is A Circle

KB: Perhaps my next article (Nature/Desire) will address your points more precisely, but for now let me just say that the nature-of-information is variability, but not variation by virtue of some random process. Rather as emotional beings become entrained they will always end up manifesting complementary traits; they will manifest a wave pattern to everything they do. Therefore even were two beings to be in the same field, there still has to be an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic between them that is independent of an actual field so that this differentiation as one becoming the equal/opposite relative to the other can transpire. My premise being that this emotional ionization happens through physical memory. Whereas if two individuals tune into the same electrical field there’s no guarantee they will respond to it in a complementary way. However if it is a virtual field that arises from the physical memories they each trigger in each other, then what one does will reflect back onto the other, and vice versa, and only in this way can their interaction evolve into the pattern of differentiation which we otherwise know of as sociability. Otherwise it’s up to them to figure out mentally what to do.

LCK: Meanwhile, I don’t see how a virtual field could in any way affect actual physical behavior. There is no virtual tail-wagging, virtual leash-biting, virtual squirrel chasing, or virtual peeing on fire hydrants.

KB: Actually there is and this characterizes all of animal learning. We can condition a dog to experience something, and then trigger it with a cue and the dog will perform a complex series of behaviors just as if it’s experiencing the real thing. For example, a police or protection dog has to perform what’s called a “courage test” where the helper first runs away a long distance and at 100 yards out the dog is sent after him. As the closes in, suddenly the helper turns and runs at the dog, waving a stick and hollering at the top of his lungs. The process of training for this began with the helper back pedaling while confronting dog with stick raised and so much later when the dog sees the helper threatening and confronting it, it nevertheless feels the helper as moving away. The good dogs become so energized, that when the helper is running at it they launch at the helper with the velocity needed to make contact given that trajectory of a fleeing person. Needless to say with that kind of emotional computation they hit like a linebacker and this becomes an ingrained behavior that needs little reinforcement since it’s what they apprehend this intense crash as the feeling that leads to the grounding. If on the other hand, the developmental process is botched, the dog learns to hesitate and thereafter much more carefully chooses its launch point. The virtual reality induced by physical memory has to precede the actual experience in order for an animal to learn something complex.

LCK: I understand the idea of virtual gravity — <i>it’s just as if the animal is an object of mass</i> — but again I don’t see how a virtual form of energy or anything else could affect physical behavior.

KB: The physical and neurological affects that physical memory incites in the body/mind is what creates the virtual energy. I posted an article on why-dogs-prefer-to-drink-from-toilet-bowls to explore this more fully.

LCK: What’s wrong with just calling it <i>emotional</i> gravity? From what I understand there are still many, many questions to be answered about what gravity is and how and why it works. There’s string theory, torsion physics, and more. So while the general consensus in the minds of most people is that mass = gravity, that may not be the whole story. Is the behavior of a black hole due to its enormous mass or its enormous energy, or both? On a certain level aren’t mass and energy the same thing? If emotion can be stored in the body as electro-chemical energy, why does it have to be virtual?

KB: If we were actually tasked with designing a doggy robot with a functional kind of consciousness, I feel these distinctions would soon become overwhelmingly significant. We do know that gravity isn’t a real force of attraction, but a virtual force. There is no actual force of attraction between objects of mass; they move toward each other as the result of a displacement in the space/time continuum. So there is no actual force of attraction that draws animals together, rather there is a displacement of the current stasis an individual is in as a ratio of hunger/balance, and this excitation of nerve energy by the imbalance needs to be grounded, and so animals act just as if there is a real force of attraction. Meanwhile mass doesn’t mean weight, it’s defined as resistance-to-acceleration. So emotional mass is the physical memory of resistance to the virtual force of attraction and keeps the animal on track, resistant to being accelerated by some change out of its feelings, habits or instincts.

LCK: I don’t think a real, rather than a virtual, field would have to be in complete control of anything. It would be part of the feedback/tuning mechanism, acting both as a template and a potential catalyst. Telepathy doesn’t of itself control anything. It simply gives the animal mind access to one stream of information, emotion: tele/<i>distant</i>, pathy/<i>feeling</i>. So it’s just one part of a very real, not virtual, communications system. At any rate, if the purpose of feelings is to <i>turn change into information</i> — and I’m not sure that’s the whole story; I think feelings motivate an animal to take action, they create tension but they can also create, or at least foster, harmony –, then I would have to say that since telepathy is a normal biological function in animals (and in some humans if they can turn off their brains and tune into their gut feelings), it must play some role in doing all that.

KB: Yes, I believe that feelings have everything to do with achieving harmony and that this is in service to turning change into information. I will develop this idea further in “Nature Conforms to the Power of Desire.” However if the field isn’t the same as an auto-tuning/feedback mechanism then it seems to me that would only leave thinking as the tuning/feedback mechanism.

LCK: I agree that it’s not very practical to try to communicate telepathically to a dog who’s scared of thunderstorms not to worry, that “everything’s going to be okay,” or to telepathically tell a dog to sit (though I’ve done that, accidentally). Telepathy is just one informational stream. The question is, why is it there?

KB: The unified field is necessary so that evolution can happen. It mandates that the future is indeterminate; it can be changed by emotion. Thus the virtual field of emotion and feelings proves to be a modeling device that can be imposed on the real field.

KB: The balance imperative is invoked anytime output (behavior) doesn’t equal input (stimulation)… This is the body/minds’ means of dissipating energy in order to satisfy the balance mandate which is the tuning component of animal consciousness as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic in order to implement the ever present principle of emotional conductivity by which any two organisms differentiate relative to each other. …

LCK: It just seems to me that when you describe the need for balance in terms of the “fear of falling,” and relate it back to a puppy’s experiences of being knocked down by his littermates, there’s a subtle implication, at least for me, that the dog is “thinking” about this stuff. “If I’m not careful I might fall…” It’s too linear for me. If two animals feel a combination of attraction and resistance, and one can see that playing out in how they interact, where does the fear of falling come into it? They may be looking for ways to achieve internal balance, both physically and emotionally, but neither is afraid of suddenly falling down, which is what I think is being implied.

KB: Learning to ride a bike has nothing to do with the thought of falling, but the feeling of collapse. And as the feeling achieves a higher and higher capacity so that it becomes harder and harder to collapse, then the bumps in the road, which might at first have invoked an outright heart-stopping panic, can then become thrills. So the balance influence is the fine-tuning mechanism that can have an infinite range, from an abject fear of collapse, to a modulation as in an intensity spike in a radio wave.

If the resistance gets too intense, the feeling of attraction can collapse, and this sudden evaporation of energy evokes the first memories of life on earth, falling. The puppies go from the weightlessness of the womb to the weighted-ness and fear of falling at the instant of birth. The degree of displacement, i.e. rapidity of acceleration, is variable and thus there can be a very fine gradient of sensations tied to reaching a breaking point, and coming after a breaking point, all of which are related to the master sensation of full fledged falling.

LCK: We have different ideas of what binary means. Yes, in computers it’s on or off.  In consciousness Eros (life, sex, and creativity) and Thanatos (aggression, conflict, death wish); they oppose and compliment each other. Besides, for any change to take place — any real, lasting change, that is — there has to be a third force acting on the first two, the way a catalyst is necessary for a chemical reaction to take place.

KB: I can’t speak with any authority on these but I think we can look deeper into Eros/Thanatos and recognize them as elaborations of energy reflecting back and form between any two beings via their hunger/balance circuitries. Eros would be focus on preyful aspects, Thanatos focus on predator aspects, i.e. overcoming resistance to prey-making. In Hunger mode, the prey controls predator, in Balance mode the predator pushes energy onto the prey.

LCK: I also don’t think morphic fields are electrostatic in nature.

KB: I would suspect it would be everything, from gravity, electromagnetic to nuclear as well as whatever else there may be yet to discover.

LCK: I agree with everything you said except your use of the words <i>virtual</i> and <i>hunger circuitry</i>. (Note: I have no problem with <i>balance circuitry</i>.)

KB: If the little-brain-in-the-gut can apprehend preyful aspects from visual input, then the hunger circuitry is engaged and this is the primary function of sexual energy.

LCK: Again I agree with everything except the use of the word “hunger.” Eros and Thanatos are the two sides to sexual energy. In Darwinian terms the urge to reproduce is worth nothing without a commitment to protect one’s young at (nearly) any cost. So sex and aggression are just two different forms of the same energy; one is creative, the other destructive. The two may co-exist, though, so they’re not binary in computer terms.

KB: In my view, the urge for sex comes from a further arousal of the hunger circuitry as emotion cycles back and forth. Offspring are likewise perceived of as preyful and because both a sexual partner and offspring can reflect the projection of emotion back onto the projector of emotion, this allows the simple prey/predator modality to evolve into complex expressions such as tender care of a mate, or protection of the young. But then there are so many examples of mothers killing their young, wolves eating sick puppies, the lioness having no problem bearing the young of the Lion that just killed all her cubs, sexual predators/rapists and so on. These crude expressions reveal that the prey/predator modality remains as the basis of even the most complex relationships. In my model, sexuality and aggression are both forms of the same thing as means of accelerating emotional mass, specifically sexuality is the capacity to hold onto a feeling of attraction despite resistance, and is magnetic so that the urge to ingest evolves into the urge to deflect, whereas aggression is the means to overcome resistance to a feeling of attraction so that the individual fights to sustain contact with an object of resistance. Thus it is not coincidental that dogs are such sexual and aggressive animals, in service to the overarching program of sociability.

LCK: But it seems to me that if you want to reduce this to its purest essence, neither <i>hunger</i> nor <i>ingesting</i> are the right words, just as “fear of falling” isn’t quite right. I would say that <i>fear</i> and <i>desire</i> should do the trick, or perhaps <i>instinct</I> and <i>drive</i>. That’s because in the auto-tuning/feedback loop the nervous system is the safety mechanism (fear/balance) while the gut is the driving mechanism (desire/hunger). The third force is probably the morphic field.

KB: Emotion is based on desire and desire is one part arousal (hunger) coupled to one part vulnerability (balance). So when an animal is aroused, it feels in equal measure vulnerable and is immediately and innately inspired to be circumspective. If the object of its attraction can mirror this energy back at it, and has the same emotional capacity to go by feel and hence equal measure of arousal and vulnerability, then they will evolve from separate and distinct particles of consciousness, into a group mind or wave function. So a particle and a wave form would be the purest essence of what I’m trying to say. Physical memory as emotional mass makes an individual a charged particle of consciousness, and then when physical memory as emotional mass becomes an emotional counterbalance between two individuals, it computes their perceptions and actions into a wave form, i.e. orbiting around a common object of attraction that can absorb their combined energies. Hunger and balance would therefore be necessary in order to implement this wave/particle duality.

LCK: It just seems to me that when you describe the need for balance in terms of the “fear of falling,” and relate it back to a puppy’s experiences of being knocked down by his littermates, there’s a subtle implication, at least for me; that the dog is “thinking” about this stuff. “If I’m not careful I might fall…” It’s too linear for me.

KB: Actually I think it’s the other way around, without the hunger/balance continuum, then all one can do is think. For example, telepathy isn’t information without a thought to go with it. If I telepath to a dog an image of it sitting and me feeling good about it sitting and with a cookie in my hand, and then the dog sits, without the dog thinking then how did it want to sit? Either it did so reflexively and so there’s no auto-tuning/feedback mechanism going on, or it thought I would give it a cookie if it conformed to the image and the pleasant feeling I had in my mind of it sitting.

LCK: If two animals feel a combination of attraction and resistance, and one can see that playing out in how they interact, where does the fear of falling come into it? They may be looking for ways to achieve internal balance, both physically and emotionally, but neither is afraid of suddenly falling down, which is what I think is being implied.

KB: The experience of resistance derives from the sense of balance, its most extreme manifestation being the intense sensations induced by a fear of falling. This is why we say something “feels right.” In other words, we have imported the essence of the thing into our gut via our hunger circuitry and we’re still standing, still up-right. As I mentioned earlier there are infinites shades of balance along a gradient of varying intensities and these various sensations are the “tags” by which the nervous system keeps track of the various layers of physical memory. Experiencing intense resistance (as when someone is in our face) displaces the body/mind just as much as falling physically and then the emotional battery releases the deeper and stronger energies held in reserve in order to keep the organism upright. This is where the “bad” in a “bad feeling” comes from, the fear of falling. When a batter leaves the plate and rushes the pitcher for brushing him back, he intends to punch him in the jaw. It’s the emotional collapse that he attributes to the pitcher which angers him and he leaves home plate intending to strike with a balled fist. But when he arrives at the mound, he ends up “breaking his fall” by pushing his hand out forward and grabbing the pitcher. The pitcher does likewise because neither is trained to fight and so they end up wrestling on the ground which favors the heavier stronger man, a bad tactical strategy. In effect, they have broken each other’s fall by pushing the other with their open hands.  Martial artists don’t do this. They don’t break their fingers when they strike, unlike Basketball players when they brawl, because they have the training to override these intense physical memories of early life. Similarly, when we stumble in public, we’re embarrassed if not humiliated because our physical memories are attached to our physical center-of-gravity and it rushes up with the p-cog as we attempt to right ourselves.

All instincts and habits have the fear of falling in common as they are the collapse of a wave form, i.e. a feeling, because the balance imperative (output-must-equal-input, action must equal stimulation) popped the bubble. Notice the abject expression of terror on an infant child’s face whenever she is in a state of need, even hunger. This demonstrates that the two are on a continuum, thus the little-brain-in-the-gut has as many neurons as the Big-Brain-in-the-head because all animals feel hunger and balance exactly the same way and therefore this bi-polar makeup becomes the platform for a universal form of communication, a network wide language. Furthermore these sensations are not only universal, but provide the basis by which an organism can rate the intensity of things so while an animal can’t think about one being relative to another, or one moment relative to another, it can feel a rising or lessening of intensity from being near one being relative to another, or between one moment immediately relative to another.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Reality in Natural Dog Training
2. Why Are Dogs Attracted to Human Beings?
3. The Mind of Squirrel Dog

LCK:  1) Why do you call it a virtual field? It seems to me that the network consciousness you talk about is dependent on there being some sort of medium connecting all things in nature. Valerie Hunt seems to have found the frequencies for this field, which it seems to me is essentially the same thing as (or is consonant with) Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic fields.”

KB –> I do believe there is indeed a real field and you see this in a dog’s knowing that an animal is outside in its yard (among many other amazing feats). I’ve seen a dog leap out of a deep sleep and run exactly to that part of the house proximal to where a raccoon was on top of a stockade fence getting ready to climb into the yard 100 feet away. The dog wasn’t using its nose or looking, it was the dead of winter the house sealed up tight, the dog could feel the disturbance in the field. However because of the special problems of evolution we should nevertheless regard the real field as subordinate in importance to a virtual field. I believe this is because the primary problem in evolution is to turn change into information, and in order to do that, the animal mind must be set up so that the emotional energy the individual projects onto objects of attraction, reflects back to it so that ultimately this mirroring process will render them emotionally different from each other (prey/predator–>female/male–>active/reactive/direct/indirect Personality traits) and yet complementary to each other. In this state, they are governed by the laws of physics rather than in terms of an evolutionary history (genes) as overwhelmingly strong as this can be, or individual life experiences (habits of mind) as overwhelmingly powerful as this can be. Therefore it’s just as if the animal is an object of mass in a gravitational field invested with an inherent momentum that then due to the interaction evolves into electromagnetic energy so that they can connect with other. Sociability is a recapitulation of the unified field. (And it might even be that there is no unified field, other than how it exists virtually within the domain of animal consciousness.)

Another way of saying this is that the nature of information is to guarantee that organisms interact in order to render sociability, this process being most visible in the nature of dogs. If animals went primarily by a real field and were exclusively telepathic, they would be infallible from the point of view of their individual self-interests and it would be hard if not impossible for individual motivation to be fundamentally dedicated to turning-change-into-information in service to the network.

2) Does the network consciousness you talk about provide the medium for telepathic communication between dogs and their owners? Or don’t you think telepathy (which is Latin for “distant feeling”) exists? It seems to me that the process of a dog picking up our feelings, of us tuning into our dog’s energy, etc., can’t be accomplished without telepathy. I’m quite certain dogs are telepathic, and humans can be too if they switch off their brains and tune into their “gut” instincts.

KB-> Yes telepathy makes sense. However I believe that in terms of the virtual field, for the most part, dogs pick up our feelings over time as our emotional currents slowly play out through our actions as we come and go here and there, as if we are a transmitter putting out a radio wave with a frequency many miles (and years) wide and moving in super slow motion. So we have an immediate-moment degree of emotional conductivity that dogs pick up in an instant, perhaps they even see it in our aura but also I believe in our body language. But this internal state can fluctuate minute by minute, hour by hour, and I believe what’s more important is that we are semi-conductors that over the long term these fluctuations play themselves out in order to render larger currents. In the long term, the decryption occurs from being immersed in our currents, as if the dog is dealing with a code nested within a code. For example, it takes my dog about eight years to pick up and then manifest my deepest stuff. Never fails. So the question we have to ask is what is the purpose of feelings from the evolutionary point-of-view? In my view it’s not primarily about point to point communication, but rather turning change-into-information. For this reason telepathy does not prove to be particularly therapeutic when it comes to training or solving most dog behavioral problems. Why can’t an animal psychic just transmit the information that if the dog keeps biting people or other dogs it will be put down? Or if it runs away it will be punished or killed by a car, shot by a hunter, and so on? Sometimes you hear of a psychic picking up that a dog is biting due to an abscessed tooth, and sure enough once it’s treated the dog never bit again. But as a reliable method of rehabilitation with the typical cases telepathy doesn’t have any impact. I believe that once the cells of the body are aligned around the heart and that the heart has effected the environment as a virtual field: then the telepathic can come into play and be part of the emotional dynamic.

LCK  3) What is the opposite of the fear of falling? And would your theory work just as well by referring to this aspect as feeling off-balance or in-balance? You certainly refer to it that way often enough. The reason I ask is because I’ve thought about the various feeling states that the human and canine body share for many years (starting after I read your book). As an actor you have to pay attention to such things, so it was natural for me to be able to project that same sort of attention onto what dogs must be feeling when they’ve got too much nervous energy in their systems, etc. Maybe I just don’t relate to the idea that seeing a squirrel would cause a dog to have a fear of falling. I certainly see it as a displacement in the energy field, which would cause the dog to feel emotionally off balance (lifted up by a sudden wave of energy), which is also almost always felt in the body as not being grounded, but I don’t think it has anything to do with a fear of falling learned from puppyhood. Maybe you could explain that more. You may be right, but I’m not sure the fear of falling is necessary for the theory to function. (Maybe that’s just me.)

KB–>  The balance imperative is invoked anytime output (behavior) doesn’t equal input (stimulation). For example, we can consider every impulse of animal consciousness as akin to a young child learning to ride a bike. The child keeping the bike in the upright position and moving forward is the conductive state. There is a certain amount of energy that the child can safely channel into forward momentum and this is the system’s carrying or conductive capacity. When the energy exceeds the skill level of the child, the fear of falling comes up. Sometimes we see the child trying to “dump” energy by vibrating the handlebars back and forth rapidly as they try to maintain an upright position. This is akin to a dog’s tail being held 90 degrees over the top line, and any manner of intense bodily vibrations. This is the body/minds’ means of dissipating energy in order to satisfy the balance mandate which is the tuning component of animal consciousness as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic in order to implement the ever present principle of emotional conductivity by which any two organisms differentiate relative to each other. No matter how expert the child becomes, the balance imperative is always just below the surface moderating its conductive capacity.

I don’t believe that a binary system of on/off is enough to constitute information in animal consciousness because the fundamental issue is that energy must be made to reflect back on itself in the animal’s mind so that they become different yet complementary. So if two beings are both in a real electrostatic field, there’s no guarantee they will perceive it in an organized way that complements the others’ perspective. It must be a virtual field so that their minds will be collectively organized.

Underneath the binary system is the far more primal medium of semi-conductivity as in sometimes a thing is conductive and sometimes it is not. This is how cell membranes work; the internal milieu of the cell determines when an ion gets through the cell wall and when it will not be allowed. So hunger and balance are always inter-relating so that the animal’s mind always functions as a semiconductor so that simple binary logic can be implemented but always in response to the emotional climate that the dog perceives itself as being in. So just as two objects can’t be in the same place at the same time because they have physical mass, two animals can’t perceive each other exactly the same because they have emotional mass as a result of resistance experienced in terms of emotion as the confluence of hunger and balance. When A goes forward out of hunger, it will effect B’s balance circuitry. And then when B needs grounding via its hunger circuitry and goes toward A, this will trigger A’s balance circuitry. They will evolve to be mirror images and the virtual gravitational field will evolve into a virtual electromagnetic field.

LCK 4) I’m also still having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of the hunger circuits being about ingesting rather than just eating. I can certainly understand that when a dog chases a squirrel it’s not because he wants to eat it. Many dogs who catch squirrels don’t even bite down on the poor little critters. So what is the “essence” that’s being ingested (or have got that all muddled up)?

KB–> If the little-brain-in-the-gut can apprehend preyful aspects from visual input, then the hunger circuitry is engaged and this is the primary function of sexual energy. (I will go into this at greater length in another article by way of comparing how the visual sense of breaking-down-form via sexual circuitry, is how the sense of smell and the healing of bones are physical processes that derive from this underlying emotional process.) The hunger circuitry is the feedback loop in animal consciousness it is the means by which any sensory input, whether it is food or the sight, smell or sound of something is taken in, i.e. ingested. So when a dog is chasing a squirrel it is ingesting its essence via sight because the squirrel is emitting so many high-frequency prey behaviors and has fluffy, twitchy and supple physical aspects to its body. The sexual/sensual circuits are merely elaborations of the hunger circuits which is why beautiful models are now called “eye candy.” But were Squirrel Dog to get close to the squirrel, and since the squirrel is not likely to reflect energy back to Squirrel Dog, then the sexual circuitry will not elaborate and kick in.

The question then, is which part of its body/mind is Squirrel Dog referencing. If output-equals-input, the amount of energy it is expressing through its behavior is equal to the amount of sensory stimulation, then the balance problem is for that context addressed and the dog can begin to reference its gut and perhaps flip polarity to develop a more refined way of connecting with the squirrel. But if the output/behavior vs. input/stimulation margin is too thin, then it goes by instinct and/or habit and whatever it does will be the same old same old. We can see for example how if Squirrel Dog gets hungry enough, because every time it chases a squirrel the squirrel gets safely up a tree and also because an owner isn’t giving it a big bowl of dog food every night to subsidize its inefficiency, it will begin to reference its gut and then its heart and in this way will “figure out” the lying-in-wait possibility and end up with the squirrel for its dinner. It will become the opposite of the squirrel’s hyper-active state and get into the stalk and pounce mode in order to complement the squirrel.

Balance is essential to the principle of emotional conductivity. The balance component divides the world into paths of resistance, infinite scalability rather than just a simple binary on/off switch. The stronger the force of attraction between A and B, the more gingerly they will interact since if A acts suddenly, it instantly bounces back to A via a counterbalancing move by B. The same applies to B. Feeling the midpoint between them (where they can both safely focus their attention) and then revolving around it in order to connect indirectly as each other’s equal and yet opposite, is an auto-tuning feedback mechanism because the greater the force of attraction (hunger), the stronger the fear of falling, and the greater the incentive to self-modify to sustain forward motion. Were the appetite component to vanish, we observe the immediate activation of the fight/flight instinct as the bubble bursts and the fear of falling is all that’s left. (Note how individuals’ lose their appetite in uncertain circumstances when too afraid.) Without the hunger component, which is the basis of the imprint period of infancy, we end up with nerve sensations, memories and emotional states, not synchronized emotion, i.e. true feelings. So in effect because balance constitutes the gradient of resistance to the expression of emotion, and since all experience of resistance be it of an actual physical kind, or be it a temperamental kind from another being, these both trigger physical memories of infant experiences and so we can say that in animal consciousness, gravity is triggering electrochemical events within an animal just as light triggers electrochemical events within plants. Gravity is becoming part of consciousness and this is consciousness’ solution of  the unified field problem.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Reality Continued
2. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
3. How I Developed The “Pushing Technique”

The main thing to realize is that the real action isn’t in the head. The Big-Brain is fundamentally but one terminal in the body/mind as an emotional battery. There is something going on to be sure up there, but the main function of neurological activity in the Big-Brain is to put the individual into conflict. Conflict makes energy and the intensity of the energy accesses physical memory. A state of conflict accesses physical memory.

When a squirrel-chasing dog sees a squirrel, the first thing that happens is that it will perceive being knocked off balance, just as if its physical center-of-gravity has been suddenly displaced, just as if something has literally pushed it off center. This response was established via Pavlovian conditioning during its infant imprinting phase. As an infant pup every time its mother or litter mates moved it was knocked off balance and therefore for the rest of its life any change in its perceptual field equals a state of imbalance because it triggers this physical memory of change. The degree of displacement equals the force of attraction. The intensity of this force activates a specific layer of physical memory. A loss of equilibrium is energizing because it provokes neurological activity as neurons fire off, just like a battery being ionized by an electrical input of a charger.

So the dog is emotionally “charged” by this sudden ionizing event upon the sight of a squirrel and typically, because the mandate of balance is engaged but the little-brain-in-the-gut doesn’t yet have anything tangible to digest, Squirrel Dog’s body tenses up like a rope twisted tight.

If we could ask Squirrel Dog where exactly its sense of consciousness is centered in its body/mind, where is the absolute center of its “self,” Squirrel Dog would point to its head, as this is the epicenter of the intense pressure of energy, the physical memory of having fallen face forward because it was knocked over by something moving fast, or it was moving too fast and tumbled before it had mastered locomotion. The point in the dog’s body it references as the center of its consciousness is the basis of its mind and will determine the nature of its perception and range of likely responses. This center point determines the nature of the physical memory to be summoned up into awareness, and then what menu (electric=balance, magnetic=hunger, or electromagnetic=heart as wave) will be activated in order to deal with this memory. If we had to reduce what’s going on in Squirrel Dogs’ mind to a human concept in order to articulate what is going on inside its head at this point, Squirrel Dog would say “I am squirrel” because as far as it can know all of its attention is fixated on a squirrel and so this is the entire scope of its consciousness in this moment. A dog has no concept of its “self” relative to other points of view. It’s view of its “self” depends on what it wants and how it feels.

It is possible that a dog might reference its little-brain hunger circuitry as its center point and in this case it could be said to be “ionized” to the negative polarity (preyful) and in this mode it has energy to absorb. It will then perceive the situation as if what is going on inside its body is pulling an object of attraction toward it, even if the dog is actually moving toward something standing still. This is a virtual state of magnetism. But in the hypothetical example above with the typical squirrel-chasing-dog it is referencing its Big-Brain balance circuitry and so it is ionizing toward the positive (predator) polarity and has energy to give. It will thus perceive as if it is pushing energy out and this pushing impulse will be the basis of whatever it learns next. The balance circuitry is the electrical menu.

Sometimes in the beginning of a squirrel-chasing dog’s career, we notice its hackles raise and it might growl and then bark at the sight of a squirrel. This is a bio-mechanical response to relieve this electrical-like tension referenced above, a pushing out of energy, especially if it is unable for some reason to pursue the squirrel as when held back on lead or when afraid of first squirrel it ever saw. It is not trying to communicate to the squirrel; rather it is off/loading energy so as to restore its body to a sense of stability. In this sense it is in fact communicating energy and this can be adaptive because barking and getting excited tends to make prey run and then the dog can flip polarity to the hunger circuitry.

But for Squirrel Dog working from the balance circuitry, it is therefore pushing energy out by pushing itself away from the spot that is so destabilizing and running to squirrel as ground, terra firma. In contrast, notice how a cat stalks its prey. It is referencing its little-brain and going-by-pull. It is feeling that its focus on the prey from its little-brain hunger circuitry is pulling the mouse toward it, in other words it has imported the essence of the mouse into its hunger circuitry and is beginning to feel what the mouse is feeling and self-regulating because it is magnetized to the prey. It stalks very quietly and then waits until the mouse quite literally walks into its waiting jaws. However, when the gap between them closes to its critical distance, this feeling will collapse given that the prey is so near (and much bigger) and the only mechanism it has that can handle such energy is the striking instinct. This is also why when we excite our kitties too much, they are prone to claw, clench and bite us, but before doing so usually run away to push off from that spot. Since dogs have a much higher emotional capacity than cats, it is possible for them to flip polarities from positive to negative, even when near the prey and this capacity would be necessary to allow the feeling to elaborate into higher expressions, such as herding the prey rather than killing it, or listening to the owner rather than chasing the squirrel. Flipping polarities causes the dog to reference its heart. (We can also see that wolves in the hunt would differentiate along the hunger/balance ratio and so each would respond to large prey differently and in a coordinated, complementary way, some would be pushing, some would be pulling.)

The typical squirrel-chasing dog straining at the lead upon seeing a squirrel is completely in its head and is electric. Its emotional capacity is overwhelmed because it cannot reference its body and so it will respond to form of squirrel via instincts and habits. It cannot take input from its handler precisely because it is referencing its inner-ear balance circuitry and trying to push energy out. No matter what the handler does to the dog, even if the handler’s corrections make the dog submit, or if a food reward distracts the dog from the squirrel (which isn’t likely), if the handler doesn’t constitute the full “ground” for this energy, the need to get to the squirrel for grounding is merely being reinforced. The dog is going by the form of the squirrel and is unable to discern the subtle energetic essences of the squirrel let alone that this person shouting and jerking is its beloved human. Because the Big Brain is running the show, the dog isn’t feeling. The brain can’t feel a thing which is why gray matter can be operated on directly without anesthesia. Furthermore, the only thing tangible the little-brain is getting to digest is the tactile input from being jerked around, straining into the lead and digging into the ground, and so the dog learns that this is what hunting a squirrel feels like.

The interplay between intensity of the Big-Brain and the capacity of the little-brain to ground this intensity reveals an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic by which all interactions with the environment proceed, and thereby render the dog’s mind as a function of energy. Animals have a bipolar constitution because of a two brain makeup so as to implement the principle of emotional conductivity so that all learning factors out a networked-intelligence. The following is the logic loop that drives the network: The greater the degree of displacement: the stronger the force of attraction. The stronger the force of attraction: the greater the fear of falling. The greater the fear of falling: the stronger the urge for grounding. The greater the resistance to grounding: the stronger the Drive to make contact. The more resistance to the Drive to make contact, the more sexual/sensual energy is engendered by physical memory. The more sexual energy: the easier to flip polarity in order to connect with object of resistance.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Reality in Natural Dog Training
2. Why do dogs chase their tails?
3. Virtual Reality Continued

So the handler sends his dog at me and I catch the dog. Then I become still with dog locked on grip. As the handler approaches the problem dog begins to growl, shake and thrash with more conflict then before, as it is tensing up with the approach of its handler. When the handler arrives I ask him to take his time, pet and massage his dog while he’s biting my arm and then begin to sweet talk with that prey-like patter. The dog is now able to feel attracted to his handler because of the preyful energy the handler is putting out with his tone, touch and words.

You can see the dog begin to soften and for the first time the dog can sense that I have become still, subdued by the strength of its bite. (Sometimes I will renew the fight with even more intensity and then become still again to increase the dog’s power of discrimination between the on and the off position of the helper. I do this a number of times. I also want to become increasingly intense and violent as a way of absorbing the intensity the dog is experiencing from the approach of handler and the physical memory of having been interrupted by incorrect out training that caused the sudden jarring and stripping of the emotional gears. Paradoxically, dogs that don’t Out well are holding back an emergency reserve and until this is cleanly released in the bite, the dog won’t release cleanly the sleeve, and so the more intense the helper gets, the more the dog releases this reserve energy.)

When the dog becomes aware of the on/off modes, he can begin to sense that its energy is impacting the helper, especially the release of that emergency reserve, and thus it begins to feel more in control of what is happening to it and this has a calming effect. In other words, the dog gets into conflict with approach of handler; the helper becomes more intense and struggles to get away, so the dog perceives that a state of conflict towards handler allows its prey to get away and so it gets more focused and learns to discard the old memory of interruption by arrival of handler. As the dog calms because it is more and more focused on holding the subdued helper in position, it can now feel that its handler (the one with whom it’s bonded) is present, rather than some guy trying to fight him over the sleeve just as the helper is.

The handler is on his side so to speak. Then with the dog able to discriminate between helper on and helper off, I go as limp as possible while remaining upright, and when the dog is beginning to soften with the handlers’ words and tone, the handler says “Out” in a firm but completely composed if not gentle manner and the dog comes off easily. (If the dog is still too charged to Out, we let the dog run it off with the sleeve in its mouth and then come back to the helper, and now the handler holds the dog with sleeve in its mouth and massages and coos to it while I begin to crowd them, this then induces the release of the sleeve.

Sometimes I’ll have a second sleeve in front of where dog stops and begin to steal it rather than putting it into conflict about the sleeve that’s in its mouth and this will induce the dog to let go of sleeve in mouth.) Whichever way the dog comes off, the moment the dog Outs I begin to tense up into the poised position, but just below what would trigger the dog to strike, and as the dog gets ready to strike his handler now has a chance to get on board with the dog’s feeling of getting ready to go as well and speak whatever command he uses, “Watch Him” or “Pass Auf” to associate these words with reanimation of helper.

Then I make a move and the dog bites and so now the dog is learning that the handlers’ words control the helper. So “Out” doesn’t end up meaning let go because the handler commanded it to let go, but rather that it’s time to get ready to bite again. In other words, there’s an even better bite available and the handler knows where it is. This is an important distinction because a dog must always learn something as a function of attraction. This progression leads to the dog feeling attuned to its handler because the handler is demonstrating that he knows where more prey is, or to put it another way, how to reanimate the prey that was just dead. So the dog always stays focused on the helper-as-access-to-the-bite, but paradoxically it is therefore easier for the dog to be aware and responsive of its handler as access-to-the-helper without having to directly focus on him. He becomes receptive to auditory input. (The reason a dog is in conflict is because there are competing “negatives” of equal intensity, helper and handler and so the dog has to divide its attention between these.

Ideally, a dog shouldn’t feel different when the handler approaches; the handler should only serve to strengthen the existing feeling. So we want to straighten this conflict out to be the feeling that the handler (-) equals-access-to-helper (+) imprint, rather than dog in effect fighting the resistance of two negatives, handler and helper.) Also, it’s important to say that when the feeling is straightened out so that handler-leads-to-helper and helper-leads-to-bite- and-OUT-leads-to-more-bite –therefore the dog isn’t suffering any loss in “emotional momentum” even though it is being required to suddenly stop doing something that it was previously fighting to sustain.

In fact, even though it’s doing the exact opposite of what it was doing a second before; it nonetheless feels it’s nevertheless moving in a straight line because it can always feel potential energy inherent in the next sequence of events. It actually wants to subdue the helper to get to the Out command so as to reanimate the subdued helper. My premise is that the ultimate reward for a dog isn’t something material and tangible, i.e. the sleeve in its mouth, but rather is “potential energy” i.e. the prey poised to move again. Dogs are consumed with potential energy and so are always motivated by body postures indicating energy is about to move, from owners about to suffer epileptic seizures, other dogs about to eliminate or ready-to-fight, earthquakes, tsunamis, full moons animating prey, and so on. In the way the canine mind is constructed, it seems the moral of Aesop’s fables is wrong. In the animal mind the bird-in-the-bush must always be worth far more than birds-in-hand because otherwise nature can’t evolve.

Animals are always moving toward potential energy. So the dog never gets the idea of listening to its handler per se, rather, the words of the handler always lead to potential energy, and this singular feeling is what construes and holds a complex chain of behaviors together.

Related posts:

1. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
2. Why Do Dogs Wag Their Tails?
3. Why Do Dogs Love Car Rides?

“Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins’ behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as “bang-bang extremization,” the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.”

## These “extreme states” in NDT would correspond to prey and predator polarities. When two dogs meet and differentiate themselves according to these poles, (which is inevitable because according to the principle of emotional conductivity they will experience extreme friction if they don’t) all the emotional charge they’ve accumulated over the course of their life and which vibrates as their “personality” can eventually smooth out into a wave function, (dogs playing and mounting) and then evolves into what we recognize as an emotional bond. Now this energy has been harnessed and moreover is a source of information (deflected onto a midpoint) that can be applied to overcome more and more formidable forms of resistance (group of wolves breaking down a herd defense) and thereby add new energy to the system. ##

“The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.”

## Our mistake is to look at behavior and thus evolution through the prism of Time because this compels us to find The Prime Mover. And whether it is the God of Genesis or the God of Randomness, these are both Deities in their own way requiring the exact same leap of faith and this then precludes objective inquiry on what is happening right before us. It is a mistake to think in terms of a Creator (even though I am very comfortable with the notion of a Divine Intelligence) because this runs the evidence through the filter of causation. For example, these researchers uncovered the nature of this protein mechanism not by searching for its cause: in that case they would have settled for a gene theory, but by coming to understand how energy worked in the immediate moment. This is the same way physicists studied the atom, electron, photon, and so on. Science didn’t ask: What is the cause of electricity? In order to understand the nature of electricity they simply studied it in terms of the immediate moment and this manner of inquiry is so powerful that it then led science to understand the possibility of a Big Bang. So the irony is that only an immediate-moment analysis can apprehend the nature, and only apprehending the nature can allow us to offer educated guesses about causation. Likewise we shouldn’t interpret animal behavior through the prism of Time because then we will need to divine the source of their behavior via the notion of a Creator of some type.

In my view a better way to state the paradigm is: the DESIGN is in the INTELLIGENCE. For example, the “intelligence” inherent in electromagnetism is that it has a variable state of conductivity and this has gone on to evolve into the operating system of all computers. It doesn’t matter who invented the computer, because by virtue of electromagnetism being semi-conductive, the invention of the computer, and therefore even the internet of interconnected computers, is a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t matter who invented it, someone would have. The Hero will always remain faceless in our minds because of this certainty. Likewise, since emotion captures environmental energies as system inputs, and then it serves as a synchronizing medium for self-organization according to the variable conductivity of emotion, (once an organism acquires unresolved emotion it requires another individual to trigger and resolve it) sociability is as inevitable in the evolution of biological systems as the internet was in the evolution of the computer. ##

“Chakrabarti said that one of the aims of modern evolutionary theory is to identify principles of self-organization that can accelerate the generation of complex biological structures. “Such principles are fully consistent with the principles of natural selection. Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, but at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity.”

## All these recent breakthroughs (epigenetics, emergence theory and this protein-energy-transfer system as an example of PCT) that are now seen as “extending Darwin’s theory” (which I suppose they do if evolution isn’t seen as a gene driven theory in service to the God of Randomness), is for me not leading it down toward a deeper understanding but in the final analysis will be seen as slowly taking it apart bit by bit. ##

“In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace’s original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks,” Chakrabarti said. “Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows.”
“The researchers are continuing their analysis, looking for parallel situations in other biological systems.”

## I’m proposing that what we are looking for, the fundamental mechanism underlying all other mechanisms whether physiological or psychological, is visible in the behavior of animals as an expression of energy. In other words, animals evolve as a network, their genes subscribing to its universal energetic logic, not the other way around. ##

Related posts:

1. Energy theory vs. Personality theory
2. I agree there is energy – everything does have energy – but there are also plain old basic learning principles that have been around for a long time.
3. Behan is too new-agey in his explanations to be taken seriously. He also dismisses large tracks of learning theory and psychology and ethology. He prefers undefined explanations like “emotional circuitry of dog and owner” Frankly I tend to dismiss and distrust anyone that talks about ‘energy’ or ‘vibrations’ to explain animal behavior.