Our hand moves to our heart because the middle of our chest is the focal point in our body/mind as the place where we feel our projected physical center-of-gravity (our emotional c-o-g) that physically connects us to our surroundings. This is not a mental phenomenon, it is a visceral one. Physical organisms evolved complex nervous systems in order to render complex elaborations of simple physical phenomena (energy) as the invisible architecture of social structures. In a state of resonance with others or with our surroundings our heart becomes the epicenter of our emotional consciousness. Referencing our heart we are induced into a state of emotional suspension. One can only feel flow in a state of suspension. Flow is the perception of a virtual current of energy between the individual and the surroundings, not that it actually exists, but that it is an elaboration of the internal current (physical affects of emotional experience which Damasio interprets as integral to homeostasis) connecting the two poles in the body/mind. The feeling of flow softens the experience of the e-cog moving through the body after it has been projected onto external objects of attraction so that the movements and impacts of these external elements are likewise being apprehended as part of that overall sensual experience. And if the feeling evolves to be strong enough we feel “swept off our feet” because we are quite literally suspended by our heart (in our animal mind) in a field of mutual attraction.

Heart is where we feel potential energy. Heart orients us to the exact midpoint around which two entrained individuals achieve symmetrical alignment so as to turn their surroundings into a conductive medium. In other words, feelings evolve from emotion in order to turn the environment BACK INTO EMOTION, i.e. a field of mutual attraction that induces its constituents (via their feelings that make them feel conductive) to exploit their setting and thereby add new energy to the system.

The substratum of a subjective experience is not thoughts, but is due to one’s relationship with their physical memory, (the physical cog being the seed of all physical memory) which is simultaneously a feeling of where in the circle, or group, one feels connected. So one hundred people could be riding on a Ferris wheel and as it goes round, some are rising and some are descending and this universal spinning motion is nevertheless rendering a unique subjective impression within any given individual based on where on the circle one happens to find oneself in any given moment. The same energy, the same experience, depending on where in that frame of reference one is, determines the basis of a subjective experience and well before any thought or self-evaluation can ever take place.

It’s imaginable therefore that a subjective view of experience can be rendered far below any mental awareness and which will percolate up at some point, often slowly, until expressed in some kind of action and in the case of humans, can also potentially be grist for self-reflection (but not necessarily). Nonetheless whatever actions result will to some extent move the emotional momentum that’s been invested in the organism and this energy will run its course no matter what the human intellect might come up with as a means of interpreting what they are experiencing. This is because despite whatever thoughts are being pondered, there remains a thermodynamic reality to emotion in conjunction with the principle of conservation, with feelings being its means of implementation by way of syncing up with other like-minded beings, and these laws of nature will do the work they evolved to do no matter what a human being might think about what he is experiencing.

We can think about emotion in any way that we may choose, but nevertheless it will still act on us as if it is a virtual force of attraction, like gravity. We will have absorbed a charge of momentum and until it reaches terminus, it motivates us. And we may think about a state of suspension (feeling) in any way that we may choose, but it still affects us as if we’re suspended within a field of electromagnetism buffeted by arriving waves like a radio receiver and we will be differentiated in its course simply by virtue of our very nature. Our thoughts may distort or deny this energy but this can only serve to build up a charge and sooner or later, and nature has all the time in the world, it will come out on its own terms just as every drop of rain inexorably reaches the ocean no matter how many dams might be erected to hold it back.

So Damasio is studying the nuts and bolts of the neurological machinery by which this emotional dynamic is implemented into action and solely on the level of the individual; but he’s not actually studying the emotional dynamic, i.e. the heart. (To do that one must look at animals and their behavior as an expression of energy. There’s no other way.) We must remind ourselves that there is necessarily neurological machinery because heart can’t move a muscle and so it does indeed require nerve and a central coordinating apparatus to flex tendon, bone and muscle but this doesn’t therefore mean that the neurological mechanics is the source of the emotion or feelings. For example, I believe I could design (with the help of engineers) a doggy robot that could respond to other dogs and people in a way that would perfectly mimic how dogs respond and without any software or preprogramming whatsoever in regards to the core formatting of how the doggy robot would conduct itself and “know” what to do. My doggy robot would manifest complementary traits in response to the situation (or not if the moment was not conductive) and which would conscript other dogs and people into its “wave form” so that as an ensemble they could evolve into complex social actions and structures. The core computation would take place in real time and without preprogramming and would be based on states of energy evoked by batteries, magnetos, compasses, capacitors, and so on embedded in the robot. The process for robot dealing with an actual dog or person would be “written” on the spot in perfect compliance with the emotional conductivity and energetic parameters of the moment and yet even though this would be happening in the deepest recesses of the doggy robot’s “consciousness,” nevertheless I would still need a CPU and software layered on top of all this so that all these energy states could be fed into each other and then mirrored in the “higher” nerve centers in order that this underlying dynamic of “consciousness” could be executed into actual behavior via the hydraulics and appendages of the robot. This software/CPU “nerve center” would constitute the mechanics of implementation but it would not therefore be the source of the doggy robot’s core “consciousness.”

What Damasio terms homeostasis, which he sees as being in service to an individual agenda of survival and overall well-being, I recognize as “emotional ionization” which is in service to an interconnected network agenda, a networked-intelligence. These physical affects of emotional experience are in actuality capturing energy and then later during encounters with others, ultimately converting this captured energy into a “wave form” i.e. social energy.

When two dogs encounter each other, the friction between them will polarize them toward preyful or predator poles so that they differentiate from each other in a complementary way. This immutable tendency towards variability, Damasio misinterprets as homeostasis, when in fact it has nothing to do with stasis but is wholly concerned with flow and renders for each individual a distinctive subjective perception of what it is experiencing. But in the overall one dog has transmitted energy onto the other (predator – - > prey), and sure enough months if not years later the one that manifested prey-like traits (generally mislabeled “submissive”) and which absorbed the energy, then as if out of nowhere becomes predator-like (generally mislabeled “dominant”) in deference to this underlying template which prejudiced each other’s subjective impression of what they’ve experienced, and recruited them in the overarching dynamic by which the network moves energy through the environment to suit its purposes. Meanwhile behaviorism/biology says that respect, appeasement, dominance and submission has happened between A and B. And so while we all observed an obvious transfer of energy when A first met B, we then assume that all this energy somehow went into a mental ether; a psychology, and so we therefore miss that two to three years later that internalized energy in B has then finally emerged in some vigorous expression of action. A spring inside dog B was coiled, energy captured, and then released, energy returning to the flow.

Differentiating into complementary traits in order to turn environmental inputs into social energy; causes individuals to affect their environment so as to capture new energy. Feelings are not subjective (unique to that individual) in terms of being dependant on introspection or self-reflection, experience is subjective and unique to an individual because it is immutable that individuals will manifest these primary traits, two beings cannot experience the same moment the same, and then at some point exchange them if they create a true social framework.
The problem Damasio runs into with a top down, thought-centric model is how then to bring animals into the emotional fold because if they aren’t thinking, then they aren’t experiencing a feeling. And so we end up with a bifurcated model with body split from mind, animal from human; and human culture falling outside the domain of natural evolution.

An animals’ sense of its “self” derives from its relationship to its physical center-of-gravity which via Pavlovian conditioning evolves into an emotional center-of-gravity that is then “projected” onto complex objects of attraction so that given the bipolar, two-brain makeup of an animal, complex stimuli can be broken down into simple energetic conductors (what Damasio terms “emotionally competent stimuli”), and this then serves to help the projecting individual become the equal and opposite to such a complex object of resistance/attraction. This means that an animal can’t experience its “self” except through an external source of displacement, in other words, the animals’ identity depends on the external environment affecting it physically rather than via mental thought, or via an impression or reference of its “self” as something distinct and separate from its surroundings and then relative to its surroundings.

Damasio treats fear as an emotion, and as an irreducible aspect of experience, when with but a little introspection one can see that fear can’t possibly be a basic element on the periodic chart of emotions, but rather a compound construct several steps removed from emotion. For fear to be experienced, first there must be a state of attraction (emotion) as well as a sense of flow (feeling) that then collapses by an interrupting agent (construed by animal as predatory aspect) and the resulting sensations of falling (instinct) in the absence of grounding render the composite experience we understand as fear. All one has to do to verify this thesis is simply take note of what they experience when seeing a trooper suddenly looming in the rear view mirror.

A theory of stasis is a two-dimensional linear system that cannot explain the infectiousness of emotion. We can see that if someone laughs or vomits, others (because they involuntarily project their e-cog into the forms of their fellow persons) experience an involuntary reflex to emulate such behavior. Yet a supposition of maintaining stasis would suggest the opposite. How is vomiting in the absence of an actual toxin in the body returning the observing individual to a state of stasis? Rather it is upsetting an individual already in a state of stasis. That would be like riding a bike in a group and upon seeing someone fall off their bike then having to resist an overwhelming compunction to fall off in kind. But emotion is about flow rather than stasis, and so we emotionally project our e-cog into others in order to maximize flow, which is why we feel a simpatico infectiousness with laughter/vomit as an irresistible feature of our emotional nature, and then simultaneously we experience no urge to fall off our bike if our riding companion were to founder. The fundamental purpose of emotion is flow rather than stasis.

The basis of a “self” is resistance to acceleration, the degree to which when some force acts on a self, that self is capable of reflecting that energy back at that acting agent. This services the network’s impulse for complexity. Without that sense-of-self, then a feeling can’t elaborate from the underlying and fundamental state of mutual attraction that is the substratum of all consciousness and which compels organisms to differentiate into complementary traits.

The problem with a mental approach to emotion is that it leads to a sterile and bifurcated model because it is always preoccupied with the machinery of emotion rather than the emotional dynamic itself, which is the inculcation of virtual states of energy (gravity/electromagnetism) in consciousness, perception and experience. So Damasio sees culture as distinct and apart from nature, the brain as distinct and apart from the body – - and so then where is the role of the heart, the physical center-of-gravity, the symmetry of the skeletal arrangement, the tension between the dynamic demands of internal organs – - in the role of the mind?
A mental model of emotion is mechanical and ultimately denaturing and it will logically follow that taking drugs to numb an individual to what they are feeling will be seen as therapeutic since the mental machinery is always reducible to chemicals.

Occasionally Lee and I get involved in debates with behavioral scientists or at least those that seem to be well informed on the science of behavior since they post anonymously, and the back and forth follows a predictable course that ultimately doesn’t get anywhere because apparently I don’t have any data. I thought I had pretty good data, i.e. the things we see dogs do everyday. But the question persists, and it is at face value a reasonable one, how could a few dog trainers be right about an energetic logic as the basis for learning and complex social behavior, and which stands in complete contradiction with what the very best minds in science have determined? Why, if an energy theory of behavior is so comprehensive and accurate, hasn’t science arrived at the same conclusion? Well, it has, it just doesn’t know it yet.

By this I mean that science is inexorably moving in the direction of an energy theory and there are indications of it emerging everywhere but first it needs to be pointed out. For example, I have caught several episodes of the series “The Human Spark” hosted by Alan Alda. In it some major tenets of the theory are verified by the latest in behavioral experiments and brain research (for example; the human mind processes the ability to entertain another person’s point-of-view, and a point-of-view in the future, in the same region in the brain, and this is a structure animals lack. This is exactly my definition of a “thought,” the basis for how the human intellect constructs a view of reality, the intellect as a “relativity” machine that makes it different from animal consciousness.) Hopefully I will be able to obtain some clips of the various experiments featured on the program and then I will post them with an energy reinterpretation allowing one to decide for themselves which interpretation seems the most reasonable. The “Human Spark” also emphasizes the point that it’s reflexive in the human mind to project intention into everything, even inanimate objects; a proclivity present in young infants. In my view this intellectual reflex is precisely what blinds science to the self-evidence of an energy theory: such notions of competition, survival, territoriality, genes replicating for the sake of their replication, learning by way of reinforcement; are all complex derivatives of this instinctual reflex. Because of this behavioral theory gets more and more complex and based on human reason so that it can’t connect the dots with the research that’s already in hand and which the behavior of dogs and the manner by which they learn reveals every day.

For the last six months I’ve been trying to put enough information on this site to develop the model more fully. And while this will continue because we’re just getting started, however I want to shift my focus toward creating a section that will feature a series of pictures and/or videos to put the model directly into action by learning how to see the energy through the actual behavior of dogs and animals. Also, I hope to flesh out the training/method section more fully for the practical benefit of these understandings.

However, in answer to the question posed above, why is an energy theory considered anti-scientific? in the following article and from time to time I will bring the reader’s attention to an experiment or book that’s directly speaking to an energy model, even though it might not explicitly recognize it as such. One such book that I ran across while searching the web for Darwin’s illustrations of dogs and emotional expression (the subject of a future article on the “principle of antithesis”), is entitled “With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality” by Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton. I haven’t read the book but have excerpted some important points from some on-line reviews that I think boil the book down succinctly, with the link provided below. My point with this kind of article is that the data for an energy theory is already in hand, we just need to connect the dots. One such linkage is my thesis (which at first might seem radical) that the mechanics and emotional basis of human love-making is identical to canine prey-making. This is relevant because it shows the universal aspects of emotion as the basis for a networked-intelligence, the logic of which is the basis of the animal mind and the manner by which it learns.

One of the most difficult notions for the current marketplace to accept, and which impairs the advancement of the NDT theory and method in the current climate of the modern marketplace, is the idea of sexuality as a social positive, and which I then further argue is actually information as in the form of animal magnetism that informs animals how to self-organize into social structures. Curiously behaviorism has no problem regarding sexuality in a positive light when it comes to Bonobos, but in truth this seeming openness is really in service to a political agenda (From the book notes I suspect that “With Pleasure” is going to muddle itself as well because by not being an energy theory, it will entangle itself in surface political ax-grinding as well.) rather than straight science because behaviorism and biology does a telling abrupt about turn over the issue of neutering in canines.

In 1978 I recognized the direct linkage between the prey drive and the sexual impulse through a remark that Bernhard Mannel made to me: (“The only way one can appreciate the canine prey making drive is through the human sexual drive.”). Upon reflection it then became obvious to me that sexual energy results from the predatory impulse meeting resistance and yet the individual can still perceive the preyful essence at the same time. (Whereas if it can’t perceive the preyful essence: then the feeling collapses and instincts/habits take over and that’s the end of the elaboration process that potentially could have resulted in a state of social alignment.) Thus, when the emotional energy the “predator” (anything projecting emotion onto something, is acting from the predatory aspect of its being, even a bunny rabbit, and this is also why most animals only manifest predatory reflexes and aggression in regards to breeding because that’s the only time they can hold the predatory and preyful aspect in mind at the same time due to hormones, and which then justifies the old paradigm view of neutering as socially calming) is projecting onto an object of attraction, is then reflected back to it by the predatory aspect of the object of attraction (its head/eyes), this internalized energy of stress is then converted into sexual energy by virtue of feeling grounded via the preyful essence into said object of attraction, and this energy is then internally displaced into other areas of the body so that the individual becomes sensually polarized. Now when two individuals move around each other, this animal magnetism releases a sense of pleasure in affected body parts (due to where they perceive their emotional-center-of-gravity) and this is a group circuit which will serve as a physical memory for alignment on sight. And this is not for purposes of procreation but for creation, i.e. to facilitate more and more complex manners of alignment (social structure) in order to create new energy. So the highest expression of sexuality is a sensual state of attunement with an object of attraction so that in tandem neuro-chemical energy in both brains, affects them as if they are magnetized and which thereby enmeshes them into a new emotional dynamic system, two magnets becoming one electromagnetic dynamo.

Since the primary property of energy is to do work, this electromagnetic dynamo is simultaneously the means by which the individuals attune to their surroundings, and in canines, enables the capacity to hunt a prey they couldn’t overwhelm singly or even in numbers but rather through the communication of energy, i.e. “the charge.”
This also means that the secondary purpose of sexuality is recreation, the simple pleasure of tactile contact which I suppose is the focus of the book “With Pleasure,” and which facilitates bonding for the purposes of cementing more and more complex expressions of sociability. Lastly, the business of procreation is not only, not fundamental, but rather is merely the tertiary function of sexuality which is of course necessary so that genes replicate and create the physical hardware necessary to implement more and more complex expressions of sociability.

In short, the experience of pleasure is integral to creating the group dynamic so that the many minded become but one mind.

So in 1978 because I was learning how to not project human thoughts into what dogs were doing, which means that I was developing an energy theory for why dogs do what they do, it became obvious to me that human sexuality was likewise the direct derivative of the predator/prey dynamic as well. In other words, the prey/predator module was the main conduit for the transmission of emotional energy be it between predator and prey, male and female, peer to peer, parent to offspring, child to teddy bear, and then this primal means of transfer and medium for synchronization, elaborates into complex social structures. The higher the emotional capacity of a species, the greater its sexual nature and the greater its sexual nature, the more it can project its “self” across the species divide and create trans-species emotional bonds and social ways of living, dogs and humans being the highest examples of this capacity that’s ever evolved between any two species. This book “With Pleasure” is halfway to seeing this connection, and it’s only halfway because it doesn’t yet recognize that the experience of pleasure through the phenomenon of emotional projection and the principle of emotional conductivity, is the organizing principle of animal consciousness and the basis of all behavior and so therefore precedes any genetic agenda for replication, it doesn’t follow from it. In other words, emotion and the experience of pleasure as the implementation of the principle of emotional conductivity is the basis of evolution, it did not evolve from evolution.

Nevertheless this is a huge breakthrough because for the first time that I’m aware of modern science is entertaining the premise that the foremost purpose of sexuality isn’t procreation. So dear reader if you sometimes think that you must walk the plank of intellectual rationality by subscribing to NDT theory and method, it might be helpful to remember that “Natural Dog Training” presaged not only the demise of the dominance theory, but the compelling thesis of this book “With Pleasure” by several decades. (Also note that the book cover is particularly interesting, picture of woman biting a man’s ear, i.e. “making prey.”)

I’ve included a number of blurbs that summarize the book’s thesis and to indicate that science is taking the thesis seriously, and then after these is a fuller review with link provided.

Quote from the book “With Pleasure”

“From the pristine vantage point of religious, political, and evolutionary doctrine, it is sometimes argued that the sole function of human sexuality is reproduction. As a consequence, non-reproductive expressions of sexuality are deemed illicit, immoral, or illogical. However, we believe the primacy of reproduction to be vastly overemphasized, and the insistence on procreation as the end-all of human sexuality to be inherently misguided.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=Q9Wgak5gl18C&dq=With+Pleasure+Pinkerton&source=bn&hl=en&ei=ErhZS_G6A46isgPJ6rnQBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=4&ved=0CBcQ6wEwAw

Description
Challenging everything from the mandates of the Catholic Church to the hotly debated ethics of pornography, and from the controversy surrounding gay rights to issues of gender and feminism, With Pleasure explores a new theory of human sexuality that ignites every hot topic in the public domain. What role, authors Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton ask, does sexual pleasure play in our lives? Is the pursuit of sexual enjoyment in our blood? Our brains? Our very nature? Regardless of the source, it can be agreed that the joys of sex are widely appreciated. Why, then, is pleasure so often overlooked in discussions of sexual behavior, and why do cultural, historical, and religious treatises so often fail to emphasize, or outright ignore, this obvious aspect of human sexuality?
Responding to these and many other questions about our most private affairs, “With Pleasure” provides a profoundly original challenge to the cherished truisms of human sexuality. Abramson and Pinkerton proclaim the paramount importance of pleasure, while at the same time overthrowing traditional ideas about gender, pornography, contraception, homosexuality, abortion, and much more. Supported by rigorous research, With Pleasure argues that human sexuality cannot be understood if its significance is limited to reproduction alone. The authors posit that in humans reproduction itself occurs as a byproduct of pleasure–not the other way around–and that it is the strong drive for pleasure that makes people overcome many obstacles–and even life-threatening dangers such as AIDS–to have sex. Ranging from discussions about the church to current debates about pornography, and from evolutionary theory to questions about the future of sex and pleasure, Abramson and Pinkerton argue persuasively that the pleasurability of sex cannot be restricted to purely reproductive behavior.
Stimulating and informative and written with ample wit…. The authors’ central argument is that sex is for pleasure, not procreation, because it is usually pleasure that provides the motivating force for human sexual activity.”–Scientific American

“A fresh and theoretically enticing approach to the study of human sexuality….Sure to spark intense debate among those concerned with the study of human sexuality.”–Kirkus Reviews

“Abramson and Pinkerton amass an array of evidence that sexuality in all of its myriad manifestations is inherently pleasurable. Moreover, they argue that sex-as-pleasure is primary over sex-as-reproduction as the evolutionary and psychological motivator for seeking sexual outlets. Furthermore, they insist that embracing all consensual, adult sexuality will make sex safer and perpetuate the species but with increased pleasure. Thus, With Pleasure is a scholarly, provocative, and brave book that will both evoke discomfort in the sexual puritan and instill hope in the sexual liberal as it increases the tolerance of all to the celebration of sexual pleasure.”–Donald L. Mosher, Professor of Psychology, University of Connecticut

“With Pleasure is a thought-provoking, insightful examination that takes pleasure out of the closet and challenges us to rethink commonly-held assumptions about the nature of sexuality. It is a welcome addition to my library that I predict will drive public discussion and future academic research.”–Angela Pattatucci, Associate Investigator, National Institutes of Health

Humans evolved to have sex not only for procreation but for pleasure, argue Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton, the latter a native of Seattle. As social animals, we use it to enhance love, to make peace after fights, to relieve tension, for social advantage, for recreation and for income.
“Pleasure has evolutionary advantages,” said Abramson.

Natural and necessary

This distinction is important, they contend. If sex is seen only to produce offspring, then anything that does not contribute to that goal – oral and anal sex, masturbation, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution – can be seen as morally offensive, unnecessary and subject to censure, legal prohibition or religious injunction.
The psychologists theorize that humans, as social animals who choose mates for a variety of reasons, evolved sexual pleasure. Natural selection may have favored ancestors who developed pleasure centers –

http://atheism.about.com/od/bookreviews/fr/WithPleasure.htm

Quote From Review:
“Abramson and Pinkerton discuss evidence from physiology, psychology, and culture in order to demonstrate that pleasure is not an irrelevant byproduct of the drive to procreate.”
“It is probably undeniable that pleasure originally developed in order to promote procreation — the more pleasurable an activity is, the more likely individuals are to engage in it. Those who have sex more will produce more offspring, and so the genes that make sex pleasurable get passed on.”
“That, however, is not the final word on how evolution operates. Traits that develop in order to meet one need can be co-opted to fulfill entirely different purposes. In the case of sexual pleasure, it turns out that this pleasure facilitates things such as interpersonal bonding, promoting interpersonal relationships, and reducing social tensions. These may not have been reasons why sexual pleasure developed, but they certainly helped ensure that it stayed with us and spread through the population. Today, perhaps, reproduction is simply a byproduct of sexual pleasure.”
“There is far more sex-for-pleasure than there is sex-for-reproduction, that is indisputable. It is because of this that one can conclude that, for homo sapiens at least, sex exists primarily for the sake of the pleasure it creates rather than the children which are only sometimes created.”
“It is because of this that Abramson and Pinkerton don’t merely present their observations about human sexuality; instead, they also advocate that we all develop a more realistic perspective on sexuality. We have been misled into thinking that sex is just about procreation, but once we recognize it for being about pleasure, we’ll be able to handle it better and live our lives a bit better.”

KB – - > I would like to hark back to the theory of Symbiogenesis which I mentioned elsewhere, the theory that new species are created when one organism is ingested by another and then its genetic material is assimilated rather than consumed. I believe that on the lowest forms of life this is one of the earliest physical embodiments of emotion moving through the predatory/prey module, and that this has continued to evolve into the complex emotional nature that is fully expressed in the sexual nature of animals. This distinction is important because it means that evolution isn’t a process of natural selection by way of random mutations that then produced pleasure as a function of gene replication, but rather pleasure is the principle by which genes mutate in concordance with shifts in the network and then replicate in order to implement itself.

In my book “Natural Dog Training” published in 1992, there is a chapter entitled “The Pleasure Principle.” It states:
“By grasping that pleasure in canines is defined in terms of the prey drive and is the means by which a canine can learn; we see that it isn’t a whimsical or casual state of being in the natural scheme of things. The pursuit of pleasure isn’t an act of hedonism or of selfish indulgence on the part of the individual and nor does it have much to do with trial and error. It only flows in accord with a pulse inherent in the drive to bite. It follows a specific rhythm that is time worn and deeply grooved by the genetic imprint the prey drive has etched in every canine’s temperament.”

“The group dynamic intrinsic to the pursuit of pleasure is incredibly important to us as dog owners for it is the basis of the canine’s ability to learn to cooperate.”
“However, in dogs and wolves there are other and more elaborate releasers which permit action than are to be found in frogs and perhaps any other species of predator – save man. For example, the form of a body, with a bulbous shape and a horizontal back line rather than a vertical line, attracts the drive to bite. And then finally, in the canine species there is available an additional class of emotional releasers which through domestication have been emphasized even further in the modern dog. Without these, which we’ll consider below, the wolf and the dog would be much less flexible in their range of responses to the outside world.”

“When canines are emotionally attracted to one of their own kind and yet there isn’t a releaser of motion to permit biting, they nevertheless remain attracted. The attraction doesn’t just dissipate and go away on its own. As they go forward through the impulse to bite, and they encounter resistance because the object of their ardor isn’t acting like prey, an amazing phenomenon occurs in two stages.”

“Right after the charge to bite is internalized, and right before it has the chance to shock the individual out of his biting impulse, the next phase occurs whereby the charge can next serve to arouse the individual sexually. As a result, emotional energy is diverted away from the jaws and radiates into the body arousing it, particularly of course in the genital area. Therefore, two canines interacting socially, even though they are attracted to each other through the prey/predator impulse, because it can’t come out through its primary avenue of expression, i.e. bite and grip, it is displaced into the sexual circuitry. Their bodies grow “polarized” so that they will position and realign themselves in response to this more complex urge quite like stacking batteries positive to negative ends in a flashlight. When so polarized, dogs studiously smell each other from top to bottom trying to ascertain where and how to “plug in.” A sexual attraction is a latent charge to bite, internalized and stored when the flow of raw emotion is deflected into social activity. This in turn produces all the leg lifting, nasal investigation, and sexual posturing to be observed within the wolf pack and between dogs. The sexual mechanism is how the simple prey instinct becomes the complex prey drive, sexual/sensuality being the means of making contact. The many become integrated into the one, a complex integration which it is vital to note, includes the prey animal as well. In other words, the sexual nature of canines allows for emotional energy to cross the species divide.”

“Often when puppies play and are observed mounting and thrusting with a pronounced pelvic action, it is interpreted in the Pack Theory as being a reflex occurring out of sequence in the normal adult context. It is recognized as a hallmark of immaturity. Presumably the puppy is working the kinks out of his instincts and when he’s an adult he supposedly learns to put the sexual reflex into its proper place in his repertoire. But the reason puppies vigorously mount well before they are able to breed is precisely because sexuality is directly linked to the prey drive and they are responding automatically to this alternative and more complex means of prey making. When they go towards something to bite, and they then meet with a degree of resistance, (the object of their attraction doesn’t act like prey) a puppy will become sexually aroused as his nervous system, being highly stimulated by the prey instinct, will then trip on the sexual circuitry through a feeling of vulnerability. This reflects that the simple urge to bite is being channeled into a new and far more complex avenue of pleasure. And if the other individual if of the same mind, it will be receptive to becoming the prey and the two will play as this complex integration is now the only way either of them can fulfill their complex pleasure circuits.”

“Sexuality in canines is primarily concerned with alignment for the purposes of hunting and only secondarily does it have to do with procreation. It is fundamentally concerned with the processing of resistance encountered in simple prey making into group and pack behaviors: the complex aspect to the prey drive. Because the prey drive has a sexual component, and because the prey drive was amplified through domestication, in my view is why the modern breeds of dogs are so much more sexual than the wolf. Wolves breed once a year and in general are not sexually active until about two years of age. Sometimes they even mate for life. Dogs on the other hand will breed promiscuously, they can breed when as young as six months, and females come into season twice a year. Sexuality in the domestic dog is quite detached from the natural rhythm of the earth’s cycles as it is more attuned to the magnetic attraction between animals inherent in the simple prey instinct. The emotions of dogs are more weighted towards the active aspects of prey making, searching, chasing, and biting. Whereas the wolf’s nervous system remains more attuned to the seasons of the earth and to the migratory patterns of the prey species which themselves are responding to the earth’s magnetic field and influences of the sun, moon, and perhaps stars. Wolves are more limited by instincts.”

“Traditionally, sexual behaviors have been misinterpreted as a drive to dominate, or to submit, or to claim territory, and have been seen as causative and the means by which a pack is formed, but that is far off the mark because it merely reflects the projection of human concepts such as survival, territoriality and dominance onto the behavior of animals. The alignment of the group into the structured order of the pack is due to the influence that the simple prey instinct has on the nervous system and temperament of the individual. When the individual is deeply aroused to bite, he is vulnerable and uninhibited. If in sync through the prey drive, he is freed from stress and able to align. Cooperation and order isn’t created as the Pack Theory has suggested through a dominance hierarchy.”

Natural Dog Training failed to shift the fundamental thinking on dogs because this notion of the prey drive as overarching mechanism for a group dynamic was criticized as being too simplistic, and of course it contradicted the modern notion of dog as learning machine, or dominance/submissive automaton in the opposing school of thought, the tendency toward neutering and just about every other dogma as well. However today, revealingly, absolutely every high end system of dog training is moving toward training by motivating a dog’s prey drive. Perhaps taking stock of the direction mainstream science and conventional training is moving, with such articles as this, it will become easier to consider how Predator/Prey – - > Male/Female – - > Social follows one from the other via pleasure as the group circuitry.

KB: I think we are using emotion and feelings in two different ways, and I think this is because I’m seeing emotion as the operating system of a networked-intelligence without any thoughts whatsoever being ascribed to the nature of emotion and feelings. I’m treating them solely as energy as I shall attempt to explain below.

I do think feelings can be likened to colors, especially in regards to an electromagnetic wave form, but emotion exists on a far deeper plane, which is why I prefer to say emotion is like gravity, a virtual force of attraction, a field wherein all objects of mass are responsive to all other objects of mass, whereas feelings are more sophisticated (from our point of view) as are the wave functions of the electromagnetic variety such as light. Emotion evolves into a feeling as consciousness’ resolution of the unified field problem. What we perceive of as time; is consciousness’ connection to all the physical energies. In other words, consciousness apprehends how all things are connected even though we don’t.

Feelings (which inform organisms how to evolve) evolve from emotion just as animals evolve from emotion because I see emotion operating on a plane far deeper than our sense of awareness. For example, I go to the store to buy a variety of things and I look at the money I spend, the goods I receive as well as the work I perform in terms of my own particular frame of reference. But as a consumer I’m just one charged particle of the economy and in a way unbeknownst to me, my economic activity contributes quantitatively to such things far beyond my awareness, such as the trade deficit between American and China and the exchange rate between Iceland and Lithuania. All this deep “network” information is embedded in every transaction and exchange of goods and services that I am part of, and yet it exists far below the awareness of any participant in the economy and ends up affecting me so indirectly I (and apparently most economists) can never connect the dots. A feeling is easier to be aware of, but emotion as its organizing principle is far more subtle. If I’m Xenophobic, I have no idea I’m attracted to foreigners. I think I hate them and then I think of all kinds of reasons why my hatred is justified so that I can mitigate my fear which is based on a layer of unresolved emotion held deeper still.

In my mind emotion is a medium that physiology and neurology evolves from so that all organisms are attracted to each other and in order to implement the principle of conductivity so that no matter what they do it will end up in service to the network. In other words, if information only arises from the network, it’s not possible for any organism to generate information that is in contravention to the network. Nature doesn’t leave evolution up to individuals to decide on their own any more than an economy lets consumers print their own money and so emotion can’t be understood as a self-contained phenomenon in isolation from the whole of the network and that arrives at meaning by virtue of what it comes to mean to any given participant. I’m arguing that organisms didn’t evolve to have emotion anymore than they evolved to have gravity. Organisms evolved in response to emotion just as they evolved in response to gravity. Emotion enforces a thermodynamics on every individual, just like an economy puts everyone in debt just by being present in it, and so they must contribute or else, and so emotion works on us in ways far deeper than we can be aware since it’s the principle on which our very viscera is founded.

Emotion has three phases that serve as the logic to the network, Emotion – > Unresolved Emotion – > Resolved Emotion and feelings evolve from this medium to become the message, i.e. how to resolve unresolved emotion by networking with others.

One problem with the color wheel analogy, at least as far as I’ve seen it represented, is that there’s no place for sexuality or personality. Lust is on the same wavelength as love (as in more intense-and yet incongruently at the same time more shallow) but then aggression doesn’t fit in with sexuality on that same color wavelength. We can’t get away from the linear systems of relationships.

The other problem with current ways of looking at emotion is that there’s actually no such thing as emotion, it doesn’t exist as something that can be measured in isolation from the whole body/mind as it’s the confluence of physical and nerve energies into a state of tension, the release from which is emotion, so it’s not actually present as anything tangible. We have to take the whole of the organism to understand the presence of emotion. This is why (according to Jerome Kagan: “What Is Emotion?” his answer to his title being: no one knows) no philosophy, psychology, neurology has a whole model for emotion, especially one that can accommodate animals as well as humans, sexuality, animal behavior/learning, etc.

QUOTE: “William James, in the article ‘What is an Emotion?’ (Mind, 9, 1884: 188-205), argued that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The Danish psychologist Carl Lange also proposed a similar theory at around the same time, so this position is known as the James-Lange theory. This theory and its derivatives state that a changed situation leads to a changed bodily state. As James says ‘the perception of bodily changes as they occur IS the emotion.’

KB: I agree that emotion on the level of the individual is affiliated with bodily changes, but this is indicative of how change is emotionally ionizing the organism in a network coherent way, i.e. formatting the emotional battery. So in my view perceptions don’t arise from a purely subjective interpretation of what’s transpiring because there is always a heavy network agenda freighted with every interaction. If emotion is how we “explain and organize our actions,” then it seems James is meaning that it’s a mental phenomenon and then there are two possibilities which I could not concur with: either, animals don’t have emotion, or they think and thus are capable of emotion.

“James further claims that ‘we feel sad because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and neither we cry, strike, nor tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.”

BURL: This theory is supported by experiments in which by manipulating the bodily state, a desired emotion is induced.[4] Such experiments also have therapeutic implications (e.g. in laughter therapy, dance therapy). The James-Lange theory is often misunderstood because it seems counter-intuitive. Most people believe that emotions give rise to emotion-specific actions: i.e. “I’m crying because I’m sad,” or “I ran away because I was scared.” The James-Lange theory, conversely, asserts that first we react to a situation (running away and crying happen before the emotion), and then we interpret our actions into an emotional response. In this way, emotions serve to explain and organize our own actions to us.”

KB: We’re arriving I think at some good points of distinction. So in my view of emotion as energy that works as a “force” of attraction, I’m not attaching any thought to the pure emotion or to a true feeling. Also, I’m suggesting that the phenomenon of perception is involuntarily and subconsciously shaded by the emotional battery well before the thought process (in humans) can get going. As a matter of fact, by the time the “charge” reaches the brain, the real show is over. Something is happening in a discrete patterned way well before the higher processes of the nervous system has anything to deal with. First, the body/mind is displaced by change and there is an involuntary rising of the degree of tension effected upon the individual. If a preyful aspect can be sensed, then the individual senses a release from tension and this is what we perceive of as a “current” of emotion. If a predatory aspect is sensed, then there is a gap in consciousness, this disconnect triggers a fear and accesses a physical memory. Either way, the animal will feel attracted to the source of change, but already its perceptions have been organized in service to the network.

If the individual can still sense the preyful aspect through the influence of physical memory, then a feeling will evolve in order to make contact or connect with this stimulus. The stronger the arousal through hunger (sensing preyful aspect) circuitry then the stronger the feeling and more fully it can manifest as a pure force of attraction (recapitulating the underlying emotion) that simultaneously can facilitate flipping of polarity to fit with object of attraction or magnetic deflection of energy of attraction to calm the object of attraction. If at any point during the experience there’s more energy in the system than the emotional capacity of that individual can handle (and here in regards to carrying capacity is where a feeling of being connected to the network comes in to shape the nature of the perception) then ingrained habits or instincts take over, and even this can happen well before thoughts can make sense of what’s going on, and in this latter case a feeling does not even evolve into being.

In regards to crying, in my model this happens because there’s more energy going through the system than the individual can handle, which is why crying can occur throughout all kinds of states, fear, joy, laughter, pain, sadness. The crying individual is becoming more prey-like, melting the boundary between its form and others, its persona and personality are dissolving; they are moving their basic physical essence, becoming conductive and thereby attracting the emotion of others. People seeing someone crying concentrate on the vulnerability of such an individual (preyful) and this helps them get past the predatory aspect of that person and they divine a new being with whom they can attune; they feel capable of going up and connecting. When dogs smell each others saliva and tear ducts they too get past the boundary erected by the central nervous system as well as physical memories of resistance they are carrying.

Striking out (breaking one’s fall due to the violence of the emotional collapse) or trembling (radiating a lot of energy) are also overloads of the emotional capacity and a true feeling hasn’t been able to evolve into existence in order to channel this energy. Notice how when a football player gets hit on the opening kickoff of a game their nervousness (and perhaps even trembling) immediately dissipates. By being struck they are “back” in their body and their mental perception is wiped clean so that a feeling can begin to evolve. Their will, i.e. a faith in a feeling, can take over.

Since the Big-Brain can harbor mental memories of emotion, and because it is the only agency that can execute physical action, therefore everything about the emotional process is mirrored in nerve function, but that doesn’t mean it is therefore the source of emotion or what renders the deepest sense of meaning. Criminals and psychopaths are able to mimic emotion because they have the math of it in their brains (as do insects, bacterium, and viruses in their manner of organization) and they are able to convince others of the validity of their state, but it’s just the mental mechanics, they aren’t feeling a thing. So I can see how manipulating body states can induce these mental memories of emotion as can an electrical stimulation of some ganglion or brain structure. But other than therapeutic approaches that are designed to keep someone rooted in their body and cultivate their will, I believe these prove to be artificial and short term, like taking a drug to get high and artificially inducing the feeling of weightlessness, but out of context with the E->UE->RE template that must be serviced over the long haul, and therefore drugs prove transitory and self-destructive because it’s not part of a natural, organic process by which true feelings evolve. It’s akin to electrically stimulating a muscle and getting it to react as if by conscious direction, but it’s just an artificial stimulation that isn’t part of a coherent pattern of movement. In the dog world we see owners doing all this technically correct learning theory but it’s out of context of group purpose and the puppys emotional circuits are fried: too much stimulation without grounding.

Also, because emotion is the operating system of consciousness, even thoughts, no matter what they are, always contribute to the force of attraction in the system. On the deepest level of emotion, from the network’s point of view; it doesn’t matter how the individual perceives or interprets the experience. From the network’s point of view, the fundamental question, and this is the one that the individual’s very physiology and neurology is organized around, is: was more unresolved emotion acquired, or was unresolved emotion resolved? Other than this it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things what the individual does with this energy because no matter what happens the individual has been energized and one way or another, sooner or later, maybe not even in his lifetime; it will evolve into a feeling. Humans may hate but that’s merely an incredibly intense form of attraction that has overwhelmed the emotional capacity of the individual thus charged, however from the networks’ point of view: nevertheless there’s more energy (force) available to the system and when it becomes aligned in a more complex manner it will then be able to accommodate the movement of that energy and unresolved emotion will be resolved.

And then there’s another very important consideration here to return to James famous example of being frightened by a bear. Because unresolved emotion potentiates the higher centers of the nervous system, (which means that how we respond to how unresolved emotion makes us feel determines how we construct our network) where we are in the emotional process, in other words where our feelings plug us into our network, another way of saying this is where we feel we are on the circle, are we at the prey or at the predator polarity, predetermines how we will perceive the bear and interpret the experience and this is happening well before any thoughts can be thought. So in my model, a person having been scared by a bear is nevertheless first and foremost energized and thereby attracted to the bear, but in this case, with a force that is more powerful than their capacity can handle and so they run (attraction collapsed into fear). If they cry their tears are an involuntary “appeal” so to speak to the mercy of the bear’s predatory aspect. (The bear as a “being” triggers a physical memory, most likely of an intimidating father figure.) Now on the other hand, to an unarmed Indian Warrior counting coup, because of where he feels connected to his circle, his tribe, he feels an arousal in his attraction to the bear that is stronger than his balance/fear of falling and so he acts like predator going toward the bear as he tries to touch it. By acting like a predator, he can reflect the energy of attraction the bear is projecting at him, right back to bear and this might be more than the bear can handle and so we observe flipping of polarity between them happily increasing the odds of said warrior returning to his people as a hero, with bear alive as sacred totem.

If “emotion is the subjective form of physical feelings;” then this seems to me to be in contravention to the infectious nature of emotion that is such an overwhelming feature of emotion. For example, someone throws up because they have either eaten something noxious or have just learned something violently noxious to their well being, that’s their subjective perception of their bodily changes. Yet others, observing them, and who have no such subjective experience of an internal discomfort be it physical or psychic, nevertheless feel an irresistible urge to vomit. This is because by default as highly social beings they have projected their e-cogs into that individual and so when energy moves in that individual, they feel a corresponding virtual movement within their own bodies that predetermines what they will perceive; their body will change in conformance to how the network has constructed its constituents and this predetermines their subjective experience.

Similarly, we can also note that there are musical chords of universal emotional content; or a universal mathematical expression of symmetry that defines the emotional attraction to beauty in every race and society (a sense of beauty equals release from the specific kind of unresolved emotion that is caused by the instinctual aspect of the human intellect) and again these operate beneath the level of subjective interpretation. So there is a universal principle of emotional conductivity implemented through the nature of every organisms emotional make-up and which determines that all change that is experienced will become part of consciousness as a monolithic force of attraction. Feelings are the auto-tuning/feedback dynamic by which all the elements of the network will end up self-organizing so that this force will ultimately be harnessed to create new energy.

ENERGY: An action potential, a differential of force between two poles. Energy in animals builds up by virtue of a bipolar, two-brain makeup each with its own divergent agenda just as if they are two terminals in the body/mind as an emotional battery attracting ionized charged particles. The tension can be defined as such, the Big Brain seeks stasis; the little brain seeks input. (Thus, all physical, hormonal and neuro-chemical energies are funneled through this divergent agenda into a whole body state of tension. The body/mind is displaced by stimuli which thereby augment the underlying state of tension that must seek release. This means that the confluence of all this energy functions as a virtual “force” of attraction toward that which can render relief/release. The body/mind becomes a displaceable medium, like a standing pool of water, an elastic membrane or like the space/time continuum. Thus whatever one can say of gravity, one can say of emotion and vice versa.) The Big-Brain-in-the-head projects energy, the little-brain-in-the-gut absorbs energy. The B-B is the predatory polarity; the l-b is the preyful polarity, two halves of one circle.

CONSCIOUSNESS: Energy that reliably repeats itself by reflecting back on itself. It is therefore a circle, a circle is the means by which energy becomes information (energy traveling in a circle, or wavelength, is energy coming-into-form – - > in-form-ation). This is not as simple as it first appears because since consciousness is energy that reliably repeats itself, it must therefore create circuits with the external surroundings and therefore, given the reality of friction and fractiousness on planet earth, these circuits sustain themselves by always adding energy to the network. Thus we observe the evolution of complexity and ultimately, self-consciousness and self-awareness as the highest expression of energy reflecting back on itself.

INFORMATION: Nobel laureate Dr. Gell-Mann in his book “Quark and the Jaguar” states: “Basically, information is concerned with a selection from alternatives, and it is most simply expressed if those alternatives can be reduced to a sequence of binary choices, each of which is between two equally probable alternatives.” However I feel this is a classical view of information. The most basic definition of information is that because consciousness requires energy to reflect back on itself, the easiest way to do this is to create a field of mutual attraction around a midpoint so that all entangled particles are part of an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic to sustain the circle. Therefore all animals are motivated first and foremost by a virtual “force” of attraction so that they revolve around a midpoint. The most basic form of information is the network that sustains and regenerates itself by constantly adding new energy. Information requires a network because the easiest way to create a field of mutual attraction is by virtue of components being attracted to each other. Organisms attracted to each other in such a way that adds energy to the network is the most fundamental definition of information. Thus we see that animals are always attracted to energy in consonance with the fundamental motive of the network to add energy, and are self-organizing into complex social structures in consonance with the fundamental definition of information. Energy is motion. Form is motion that repeats itself. Consciousness is a form of energy that reliably repeats itself. A circle turns energy into form. It takes a network to make information.

EMOTION: A monolithic (dull) “force” of attraction caused by a release from a state of tension instituted in an animal’s constitution by virtue of an animals’ two brain makeup. Furthermore, it is a source of momentum that requires a discrete amount of motion in order to render a null value. Emotion comes first, and then the physical aspects arise on its template. Emotion is consciousness’ interface with the physical dimension. As the physical embodiment of the laws of nature, it is the operating system of animal consciousness so that life forms can respond coherently in the natural realm, which is likewise organized according to the laws of nature. As a “force” of attraction, emotion is always positive.

UNRESOLVED EMOTION: Energy is always conserved, it cannot be destroyed; it simply changes form. This law of conservation in conjunction with the principle of conductivity means energy can be the basis of memory because if energy moves according to a principle of conductivity, then the byproduct of resistance to such movement can serve as a record of such an event. Unresolved emotion is a physical record held in the body of the resistance experienced (no matter how slight) to the expression of emotion. The body of every animal serves as a data bank of resistance in regards to every experience it’s ever had, a track record of how things rate according to a standard of emotional conductivity. So while pure emotion as a current of energy can be likened to a current of water which requires a constant source to sustain its flow: unresolved emotion can be likened to water in its solid state, ice, and unlike emotion, it is cumulative. One can not hold on to emotion, but one can hold on to unresolved emotion. Unresolved emotion is how information of an emotional content is transmitted reliably through time, and is how animals receive information over distance. By this I mean, one animal can observe another animal that is acting prey-like and this can release unresolved emotion in the observers’ body and render it sensual over a distance just as if energy had been transmitted over distance as a wave.

RESOLVED EMOTION: The resolution of unresolved emotion is facilitated by becoming aligned and synchronized with a triggering agent of unresolved emotion. Resolved emotion can be likened to water in its gaseous state, a feeling of contentedness and well-being that is ephemeral and the most fleeting form of emotion. Unresolved emotion can only be resolved by a feeling, not by a thought. Only the heart can resolve unresolved emotion.

TRAITS: Emotion moves from a place with a higher concentration of energy to a place of a lesser one just as heat radiates from a warm object toward a cooler one. The relative heat values of two objects are their most primordial “traits.” The predator trait reflects the projection of emotion, and as an external influence on other animals, resists the expression of energy toward it thereby reflecting energy back at it, whereas the preyful trait absorbs the projection of emotion and conducts the expression of energy directed toward it. All complex traits (even personality) elaborate upon this primordial platform.

DRIVE: Emotion plus stress (triggering of physical memory) strengthened by sexuality and guided by Feeling is Drive. Drive seeks to make contact with object of attraction and resistance to contact is converted to a stronger force of attraction by Temperament, or Heart. Drive follows the path of highest resistance, whereas instincts, habits, fear follow the path of least resistance. Drive is how the animal does nature’s work of evolution.

THOUGHTS: The capacity to compare one point of view to another; or one moment to another: and all the concepts that follow from such a platform.

EMOTIONAL CENTER-OF-GRAVITY: When emotion meets with resistance, unresolved emotion (stress) is formed and this accretes around the physical center-of-gravity as the physical memory of an emotional experience. The e-cog is projected onto complex objects of resistance in order to induce a feeling.

FEELINGS: These are the emotional circuits. Emotional circuits are not contained within any individual. (Note that autistics have trouble with eye contact because this accesses the e-cog and so they have difficulty creating emotional circuits and going by feel. Autistics work off the mental aspects of emotion that are part of how the higher aspects of the nervous system execute the emotional phenomena.) When the emotional center-of-gravity is projected onto objects of resistance because the emotionally entangled parties recapitulate the principle of emotional conductivity in each other through their synchronized actions and mannerisms, (as object of resistance they first triggered each others’ unresolved emotion and by virtue of being prey-like they simultaneously attract each other’s emotion, in other words, they cause energy to reflect back onto the other and then give it the opportunity to move toward them, this is the circle again), all motion of affiliated parties eventually average out into a state of suspension, a wave function, and this FEELING when fully formed takes up residence in the heart. (This is why our hand irresistibly moves to the middle of our chest when we feel moved, whereas meanwhile emotional researchers are always focused on the brain.) All true feelings feel good because they add energy to the network. Feelings are an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that implement the principle of emotional conductivity.

HEART: Heart is a circle; it is the source of a true feeling. When a feeling is fully formed; the movement of entangled “parties” thereby inflects and add energy and nuance to the original feeling just as if it is a chord being plucked and so that the feeling continues to elaborate and evolve into complex social structures. In other words, there are quite literally, heart strings. Feelings elaborate like light waves propagate. In other words, the heart pumps waves. Heart is an engine of light.

EMOTIONAL CONDUCTIVITY: The Brain-to-gut connection creates a “virtual” action potential in the body/mind so that on one fundamental level, consciousness functions as an emotional battery. Composed in this manner, the body/mind turns environmental inputs into emotionally ionizing events, in other words, physical energy becomes consciousness subject to the principle of emotional conductivity. A stimulus energizes the Brain in the head and this sensation of disequilibrium then needs to be “brought to ground” by being absorbed in the gut, i.e. converted into a smooth, wave action of the intestines, peristalsis. This is the principle of emotional conductivity: nerve energy of the Brain “grounded” internally within the digestive system by bringing external objects of attraction “to ground” and which thereby calms the physical organism. All complex objects of attraction either amplify or short circuit this internal connection.

SEXUALITY: The processing of the emotional center-of-gravity so that it can be reflected back and forth and onto a common object. In other words, two individuals are sensualized in a complementary way so as to form a circle in their behaviors and in their manner so that feelings can evolve between them because their mutually complementary mannerisms and actions recapitulate the principle of emotional conductivity.

TEMPERAMENT: Behaviorally, it is the mechanical aspect of heart, just as physiologically the heart organ is the mechanical pump of blood. Temperament is the capacity in an animal to perceive the predatory aspect relative to the preyful aspect and hold both in the same frame of reference around a midpoint, e-cog, in order to perceive a being composed of primordial traits, (Prey/Predator) and magnetic traits, (E,W,N,S). In the absence of this, instincts, habits (and in humans) thoughts end up running the show.

PERSONALITY: A defensive response to the movement and/or vibration of the emotional center-of-gravity.

FEAR: Fear is not emotion. It is a nervous sensation that results from the collapse of an emotional state of attraction. It is as close as the central nervous system can get to emotion and so it has been confused as such. Fear serves as a registration tag for deposits of unresolved emotion in the body/mind as an emotional battery.

SOCIABILITY: The purpose of sociability is to externalize the internal wave functions of the body/mind into an external wave function which is observable as a current of synchronized actions. This reconstitutes a wave function which is a circle, and motion along a circle becomes information so that any physical material object or environmental energy that is incorporated into that wave function is now part of consciousness in service to its evolution. Physical objects and energy thereby become information and thus are capable of causing motive, i.e. creating an external action potential between beings that seek to possess such objects. Social behavior is a wave function that repeats itself by constantly creating new action potentials as psychic motive.

HEART: The third self-contained, electro-chemical dynamo within every animal, the seat of the auto-tuning/feedback dynamic itself: the faculty of adaptability, sociability, the place in the body/mind where the energies of balance and hunger confluence and the divergent agendas of the two brains are reconciled by feeling the midpoint (the null or averaged-out value of all motion) around which all emotionally entangled parties orbit and thereby recapitulate for one and the other the principle of emotional conductivity so that unresolved emotion can be resolved. In this state, heart beats synchronize individual actions.

Be sure to take a look at these beautiful images, – and read the captions written in collaboration with NDT’s Kevin Behan, – by visiting animalprintsbyshaw.com. The prints are also available for use as part of charity work relating to animals.

For more details, please contact Trisha at
animalprints@markshawphoto.com
or (802) 376-9020.

]]> http://naturaldogtraining.com/news/news-from-trisha-selbach/feed/ 0 http://naturaldogtraining.com/videos/dog-predicts-earthquake-caught-on-camera/ http://naturaldogtraining.com/videos/dog-predicts-earthquake-caught-on-camera/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:25:40 +0000 kbehan http://naturaldogtraining.com/?p=861 I can say that the ability of a dog to feel an earthquake before it happens, often hours, is the same capacity of a dog to feel an impending epileptic seizure or diabetic attack in an owner, hours before it happens. Its sense of continuum is picked up through its balance circuitry and when there is an energetic disturbance, this destroys its sense of flow and hence the panic.

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.

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.

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.”

As certain laws become clear I keep my eyes open for scientific evidence to attach to such principles. I know it has to be there because I’m convinced that emotion is energy and its principles of movement are the basis on which physiological systems and organs evolved. I’m confident in this conviction because this is the most conservative interpretation of evolution, the formed arising from the unformed, matter from energy. This means that various aspects of the emotional dynamic are mirrored by specific organs, systems and physiological adaptations because as hard as it is for our linear intellects to apprehend, the latter are based on the former.

Unfortunately I’m not able to mine the research directly because I would have to understand its technicalities and in all its intricacies in order to pull out what I’m looking for. Rather I have to wait until a scientific journalist, or a scientist trying to reach the public brings out some finding or paradox from which I can glean its network implications. Often what I’m looking for comes out in a throwaway line of no seeming consequence. For example, in his book “Balance” Scott McCredie observes that camel jockeys and elephant drivers, no matter how experienced, often experience motion sickness whereas equestrians no matter how novice, never do. It was mentioned as an interesting but inconsequential factoid whereas it hit me like a ton of bricks because I realized that the horse shifts its emotional center-of-gravity to include the rider, unlike any other animal, and therefore even the rank amateur on their first ride at a dude ranch is no more likely to experience motion sickness than were they walking on foot. And this explains the incredible connection between man and horse, the only animal other than the dog of which we can say is “all heart.” The horse can feel in its heart the rider-plus-its-self and then move accordingly, two beings composing one emotional body via a common wave function.

Finding just such a scientific correlate may have happened yesterday when reading the comment sections on the NPR story concerning the dog experiment I wrote about. While we should for now remain skeptical about the source until the information is fully verified, the author Margaret Hyde seems knowledgeable and credible and so I feel comfortable quoting her remarks below. I hope this exchange can prove an opportunity to vet the remarks.
It appears to be a very promising confirmation of the model of how emotion becomes unresolved due to resistance and then this physical memory is projected onto complex objects of attraction, i.e. other social beings, by way of piggybacking on primal and seemingly unrelated systems.

It’s been my experience that the most vital clues are most often seen as meaningless (junk DNA) or as accidents. For example, mainstream biologists interpret the fact that since the organs of sexuality also double as organs of elimination this is evidence of unintelligent design, nature as a haphazard random cobbling together of parts, rather than as perfect telescoping of network functions from primal systems. (See the article http://naturaldogtraining.com/blog/why-do-dogs-investigate-the-eliminations-of-other-dogs/ )

In her passage, I’ve added emphasis to what I find especially compelling.

Margaret Hyde: “Just for your information about how this part works. At 3 years of age, the frontal lobes complete the formation of the pathways that go from the frontal lobe to cells deep in the anterior medulla’s reticular formation that are responsible for informing the temporal lobe that there are changes in the baby’s external universe (these cells are mentioned below). The anterior medulla houses clumps and scattered cells all over it (reticular formation, cranial nerve nuclei, metabolic, satiety, and emotion centers). THESE STRUCTURES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR RELATING OUR EMOTIONS TO OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH FAMILY AND OTHER PEOPLE AND PLACES FROM THE PAST AND TO THE FUNCTION OF MUSCLES, BONES, LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS. (Why are emotions linked to the latter? An embryological accident-the mesoderm giving rise to the latter lies directly over the part of the nervous system that will develop the anterior medulla and thus is segmentally allied with it at the start). The anterior medulla also houses the pons which executes commands and sorts incoming sensory information from all over the body. Critical to the functioning of the anterior medulla is our external and internal universe–a map of what we see, hear, smell of the world around us.”

In other words, physical and psychological systems are predicated on emotional systems. What’s happening within the body and brain is a direct extension of what’s happening in the invisible emotional mind because the emotional mind requisitions these systems by virtue of how they are composed so as to interrelate in a network coherent manner.

The body’s means of registering resistance to physical movement is directly linked to family and social relationships (and I can think of no greater source of resistance to emotional movement than a family member). This linkage is no accident. When the infant experiences physical resistance to movement toward an object of attraction, she experiences stress; and this is stored in the body/mind as emotional battery, the core repository or densest layer being what I call the emotional center-of-gravity, and this core composes the animal mind’s sense of its “self.” This is that aspect of consciousness displaced by eye-contact and deflected onto where another persons’ focus is directed.

This e-cog is then projected onto complex objects of attraction that offer resistance to emotional expression in order to divine and break down the energetic signature of that complex being. This then allows her to become the equal/opposite in order to fit (two beings aligning around a common emotional c-o-g) with this complex object of attraction, and this subsequent mutual interlocking then allows the group they thus form to overcome greater challenges by virtue of being able to work together (i.e. create an overarching feeling or bond, a.k.a., a wave) that can entangle others and other objects into its function.

Two beings so aligned comprise one emotional body and the emotional body works according to the same principles as the physical body. The emotional body has a backbone (axis of connection between A and B), a center-of-gravity common to A and B, and a brain (the heart as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that serves as a synchronizing meter between A and B). And just as every physical expression of a body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the body’s physical center-of-gravity, likewise, every physical expression of the emotional body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the emotional center-of-gravity. The physical body generates rhythms over distance; the emotional body generates rhythms over time. In some behaviors the symmetry can take days, months or even years to manifest.

Unfortunately we miss this symmetry because to our intellectual eye we think we are seeing two separate entities of intelligence endowed with two separate brains as sources of their separate and distinct intelligences. We then read thoughts into their behavior because we’re so impressed with their capacity to synchronize over time. Whereas I’m arguing that the physical body with two poles at either end (Big-Brain/little-brain) composes the animal mind as a collective intelligence rather than just the Big-Brain in the head.

Emotional resistance is processed the same way that physical resistance is processed. But of course we should say physical resistance is processed the same way emotional resistance is processed.

Just as the Brain can’t feel a thing, Heart can’t move a muscle because it doesn’t exist within any one being. It takes two to make one Heart. (No animal is an island) Heart must evolve into existence in real time; it cannot be genetically encoded because genes are too static and also because the function of genes is to receive information that Heart generates and then reliably transcribe this, genes don’t create information.

In this interplay within the body/mind, Heart cannot communicate with the Big-Brain directly; it must go through the little-brain in the gut. This implements the principle of emotional conductivity. Hence we have “gut feelings” as precursors to integration. So I call the Big-Brain in the head the executor of action, I term the little-brain-in-the-gut the social brain, and Heart is the network brain. At the moment the Big-Brain gets all the credit and seemingly is the source of all the information but I believe a proper reading of animal behavior will ultimately prove that this is as sensible as saying that what comes out of a radio, or what is on a computer’s screen logged onto the internet, was generated by the radio or by the computer’s CPU. I’m proposing that we likewise turn our attention to the invisible waves that animate and inform such complex electro/magnetic devices. I’m proposing that animals are picking up a signal that they collectively generate.