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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

Because they are orbiting within a field of mutual attraction.

Animals are emotional and emotion acts as a virtual force of attraction that due to its universal effects on the animal mind thereby creates a virtual field of mutual attraction. This means that every animal is attracted to every other animal just as every object of mass in the universe is attracted to every other object of mass. Anytime two animals are observing each other or are proximal to each other, or even when a physical memory of another animal is triggered by external factors, even though another animal isn’t actually present, it’s just as if the animal is moving within a field of mutual attraction. Like planets moving within the gravitational field of the solar system.

However, if it is true that animals are universally attracted to each other at all times, what keeps them from coming together into one big lump? Answer – the same thing that keeps the solar system from collapsing: the force of attraction that is pulling everything together is simultaneously deflected by the inherent momentum of the planets. In other words, planets are constantly falling toward the sun due to a gravitational pull but will never arrive because of their forward motion. Thus each planet moves in an arc along an orbit.

How then does emotion generate a constant source of motion while simultaneously serving as an ever present force of attraction? Answer: an internal state of conflict.

Emotion is composed of one part arousal to one part vulnerability and this internal paradox institutes a constitutional state of conflict in an animal’s makeup. Conflict is important because it generates energy and that’s important because energy demands motion. In other words, the internal contradiction between arousal and vulnerability in the animal’s makeup makes for motive in its mind, i.e. a compulsion to move. So an animal gets hungry and it must move because it feels vulnerable in that particular spot. A hungry deer is not fundamentally setting out in search of food, it’s fundamentally moving from a place where it feels vulnerable. And then even when feeding (and this is especially pronounced in herbivores) it will begin to feel vulnerable by staying in one spot too long which works out fine in the natural scheme of things so that animals don’t overgraze their range.

This became obvious to me once on an outing to a “Pick Your Own” blueberry field. There I was standing before a bush laden with thousands of plump ripe berries, but beyond this bush stretched rows of hundreds more and curiously, they beckoned to me even though I could have easily filled my buckets right there without even having to bend over or reach far. Nevertheless I felt an ever present urge to keep moving.  I could always feel this subtle and yet overwhelming sense that I was immersed in a current of flow, like I was on a canoe on a slow moving river and holding myself to shore to pick at a berry from a bush on the bank. And it wasn’t just me. Everybody in the berry patch was moving along as well. The children were especially interesting. The more excited they were about picking berries, the faster they moved, one boy even ran from bush to bush. (Although I noticed that women were far more focused and centered on the bush at hand than the men. Boys just want to have flow.)

So the deer isn’t actually looking for food; rather on the deepest level of consciousness it is literally being pushed from a spot that is perceived as being of an intensifying degree of vulnerability and this will ultimately habituate into a constant urge to move, not to mention that it will be reinforced when the deer does of course find food. We should also note that this constant urge to move increases the prey’s exposure to predation, and from a wide-angle lens of evolution that makes sense as well, – predators have to eat too. Animal consciousness is akin to the consumer’s dilemma whereby being part of an economy puts one immediately in debt (and thus in conflict) simply because it requires money to have food, shelter and comfort. People in an economy are constantly searching for money and often exposing themselves to unnecessary risk when they have plenty of it. Thus the default setting of the consumer’s mind is a state of tension and this creates psychic energy in the form of the motive to always be on the hunt for new money.

The more arousal, the greater the sense of vulnerability–consider the expression of abject terror on an infant’s countenance when she feels the pangs of hunger and yet is unable to move on her own–and therefore the greater the motive for motion. However this is also information because the interplay between arousal and vulnerability simultaneously serves as a force of deflection. For example, the faster one drives their car, the greater the sense of vulnerability and so the the stronger the force of deflection—i.e. the bigger the distance—we keep from other cars around us. We insulate ourselves in an imaginary bubble and we moderate our driving in order to avoid other cars and swerve around hazards, we’re trying to not “pop” this virtual bubble. This is the very same mechanism that creates social distance and critical distance between animals.

At some point an animal may experience more energy than its emotional capacity can handle and this is the precise point at which the sense of vulnerability collapses into abject fear, and arousal is knocked off line and an instinct takes over. This limit on the capacity to creatively adapt to circumstances is what locks the various species of animals into their specific network niche and so we see a level of organization in an ecosystem (speciation) akin to the planets entrained within the solar system along specific orbits.

In other words, a feeling is a circle because a feeling of vulnerability, if it doesn’t collapse into an abject state of fear, deflects the straightforward force of attraction into a circular, circumspective way of making contact with the object of attraction. And so when guided by arousal/vulnerability as an auto-tuning feedback dynamic, a dog falls into orbit around the object of its attraction, and if the interaction can continue to evolve according to the principle of emotional conductivity, the individual feels connected to what it is attracted to. This feeling of connection then takes on a life of its own and happily, it can even be supported by the higher processes of the central nervous system because there is indeed a payoff, to wit: an individual can realize a far higher rate of return on energy it expends by being in sync with others as opposed to working according to its instincts (or a high-powered intellect) which evolved to keep it separate from others.

So given the universal characteristics of an emotional makeup with arousal in direct proportion to vulnerability in order to create tension, animals operate at all times as if they exist within a field of mutual attraction and yet at the same time as if each is invested with an innate momentum that keeps them from just running into each other like an asteroid slamming into a planet. Arousal keeps them attracted and vulnerability keeps them deflected. Animals then self-organize by feel according to their emotional capacity. This auto-tuning/feedback dynamic can account for all relationships: predator and prey, parent and offspring, male and female; peer-to-peer, man and canine. And because dogs go more by feel; less by instinct (and not at all by thinking) than any other animal on earth, everything they do is along an orbit, i.e. as a circle. And because dogs have such a high emotional capacity, this circular stereotypical pattern, while discernible in all animals, is easiest to see in dogs.

This then allows us to define sociability in the following way. Social behavior is a circle because energy moving along a circle is the easiest (not to mention only) way to get energy to reliably repeat itself and by so doing thereby become information that adds new energy to the system. (This is necessary because unlike planets moving through the vacuum of space, life on planet earth is characterized by friction and a winding down of complex systems due to entropy and this degradation must be offset by a constant replenishment of new energy.) Emotion and a high emotional capacity is the basis of altruism because individuals become linked into a collective network and once entrained and bonded as one “emotional being,” one such individual can’t feel good unless the other with which it’s emotionally entangled feels good as well. They are innately inspired to work together so as to focus their collective energies on greater and greater challenges and this constantly adds new energy to the network so as to sustain the perpetual motion that is invested in every animals’ consciousness.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Love Car Rides?
2. Why Does the Universe Do Everything In A Circle?
3. Why Are Dogs Attracted to Human Beings?