For example in Billy’s statement — “The first domesticated dog’s would have responded much the same way dog’s do now, and that is mostly from a hierarchical pack mindset. All it has to do with feelings, is where the dog feels it fits into the pack.”—is blending feeling and thinking into one thing. If a dog feels its way into some kind of order then it cannot be thinking and therefore this can’t be a pack that is headed by a leader. So is it feeling or is it thinking its way into its place within the pack? Is it overriding a feeling in deference to a thought, if so then what about the instinct component? Is it overriding the feeling plus an instinct with a thought? That would mean you can’t say dogs are pack animals according to a dominance/submissive instinct because with the injection of thoughts into the formula the pivotal issue now becomes whether the dog or wolf is thinking about overriding an instinct or not, and in that case therefore thoughts are preeminent over instinct. So if Billy is arguing that it’s thinking about the prospects of achieving dominance relative to settling for submissiveness, and then choosing between these alternatives, then why can’t a group of dogs or wolves all choose to be submissive like African Wild Hunting dogs? Why can’t they choose to be neither, is dominance and submission all they can think about? In these thought-centric models we’re presented with endless self-contradictory logic loops. The biggest one being the use of the term energy everywhere in the discussion on dogs on the web, be it pack theory or positive camp, but which apparently no one actually believes.

The presumption that Billy is working from, and yet without a critical examination of this assumption, is that there is not a universal operating system to animal consciousness, which would be odd in the natural scheme of things because for example we find photosynthesis is the universal operating system of all green plants, a pretty broad range of diverse life forms occupying all environmental niches, and we find that all genes of every organism are composed from the same two pairs of amino acids, and here we are on the internet communicating because all computers no matter their make or model run on the same binary digital system. So if Billy believes in making an argument for animal behavior based on evolution by way of common descent, then he is going to have a tough time coming up with a consistent model for animal and human consciousness without a universal operating system because that is the only possibility logically consistent with the fundamental tenet of modern evolution by way of common descent. This logical shortcoming is why in modern behaviorism/biology there isn’t a coherent explanation for sexuality, personality or the nature of emotion, it’s constantly tripping over its thought-centric interpretations of behavior since it hasn’t critically examined the notion it has taken as self-evident that there isn’t a universal operating system of animal consciousness.
On the other hand a coherent model is immediately available in an energy theory. While I don’t claim to be an expert with any animal other than the dog, the topic of all animal behavior is germane to any discussion of dogs because I’m maintaining that there is a universal operating system to animal consciousness, the human animal as well, with dogs being the easiest specimen to examine in this regard because dogs go more by feel, less by instinct (and not at all by thinking) than any other animal. This lends to an innate capacity for adaptability because dogs are able to devolve complex situations to their primal emotional values (via the neotony/sexuality phenomena) of predator relative to prey, and therefore they are able to generate coherent responses in real time and in perfect context to the emotional nuance of any group dynamic they find themselves in. In other words, they operate more generally from the universal operating system of animal consciousness which gives them a greater emotional capacity to communicate and connect with the widest array of other species and under a very high rate of change (and thus only the dog has proliferated in every aspect of human life and civilization.)

In an energy model, all behavior is a function of attraction and always proceeds from predator to prey, from that which projects emotion to that which can absorb it, be it a Robin on a worm, a horse eating grass, two lovers, a mother and her baby (“You’re so cute I could EAT you up.”) or two blue jays looking at each other. It’s impossible to have an emotional response to something without occupying either the predator or the preyful polarity, and all you have to do is examine the intuitive use of language to see this operating system functioning within the highest reaches of the human intellect. One cannot hold a conversation without alternating between projecting and absorbing energy.
Every animal has a predatory aspect relative to a preyful aspect, just as every atom has a ratio of a negative charge relative to a positive charge. A bunny rabbit is in the overall what we call a prey animal, but it still has a predatory aspect (just ask Jimmy Carter). So blue jays have both a predatory aspect relative to a preyful aspect.

Billy states that predatory energy is only concerned with procurement of food — ” The blue jay has NO predatory “energy” unless it is actually in the act of seeking food.” — this is an illogical statement if one has ever worked a protection or police dog. The strongest urge is to bite, not to eat. Dogs don’t chase cars in the hopes of eating one and neither do wolves kill the moose with the intention of eating it. To grasp the overarching importance of the prey drive one might want to reexamine the nature of sexuality, it’s too ribald a discussion for these pages but it sure looks like prey-making to me. Consider that the oldest relationship between living things on earth isn’t parent/offspring, male/female, peer to peer, but predator to prey, as in an amoeba, protozoa, bacterium, or virus making prey on other amoeba, protozoa, bacterium and ingesting something. Again if your argument is based on the evolution of animal consciousness by way of common descent, you might want to consider that the predator/prey dynamic is the only logical overarching template for all subsequent relationships that then evolved from simple organisms to complex ones, such as parent/offspring, male/female, peer-to-peer.

Billy said: “Corvids (such as Jays) use tools to solve problems, acting like a hawk would be a very useful tool.”
I’ll venture an opinion on tool use in birds in a later article, but consider the logic of what you’re saying. If a jay can use tools to solve problems by way of thinking, and can mimic a hawk to scare off its fellow jays in a strategy of subterfuge, how do you keep that thinking genie in its bottle? The only logical response is that the thinking, problem solving bird is constrained by its anatomy and physiology so that it can’t think its way outside its niche box because of physical constraints. But that argument immediately contravenes the central tenet of evolutionary biology that every component of the system has to pull its weight or else it’s discarded due to an unnecessary drain on its resources and ultimately losing out to its competitors. According to mainstream evolutionary theory, if the organism can’t expand its niche by developing an adaptation, then it doesn’t need the adaptation. In the eighties the evolutionary mantra of mainstream science was the big brain, the big brain, the big brain: and also all the dog experts and scientists were looking for the genes for aggression. (Natural Dog Training is the only model not predicated on gene-centric theories, anticipating epigentics) But now modern biology confronted with the problem that bigger brained species than homo-sapiens (Boskopf and possibly Neanderthal) went out of existence, are postulating the evolutionary advantage of the lesser sized brain over the bigger brain since it’s less a drain on physiological resources. It’s constantly contradicting itself because it has no model for animal consciousness when it should be saying, “Uh-Oh, if birds with a brain the size of a walnut are using tools, maybe the use of tools is a no-brainer. Maybe Birds aren’t actually “solving problems” in the way the human intellect reflexively thinks of such instances. Maybe we’re seeing what we think we should see just as one it sure did seem self-evident that the sun goes around the earth.
Prey drive IS the most important thing to a dog, it’s why we call them “canines” after the teeth for holding onto the prey. The purpose of sociability is to facilitate the hunt, not companionship. No other interpretation of the canine nature can encompass the phenomenon of canine evolution, the domestication of the dog, the nature of canine service in the employ of man, the adaptability of the modern pet dog to the emotional nuance of its family so as to render companionship. Natural Dog Training is an intellectually rigorous synthesis of the evidence and the criticisms of NDT and an energy model are never substantive, merely declarative. To substantively critique this energy model one must define emotion, sexuality, neotony, personality, drive, sociability, evolution, domestication, consciousness in a straight line synthesis of the evidence.

Dog training has indeed changed over the centuries. The domestic dog evolved through the hunt. Then the modern dog training industry in the sixties lost sight of it, and now all training systems are migrating back to the prey drive while simultaneously resisting the logical conclusion of what this reveals. A self-defeating logic loop.

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Heather: “The two-brain makeup, would you say that is also virtually present in humans?”

KB: Yes, all mammals have two brains, the central nervous system (Big-Brain) and the enteric nervous system (little-brain.) The reason animals have two brains is so that their mind will be an action potential, a state of dynamic tension which is a source of energy. Thus, their front end isn’t connected to the hind end unless they complete this internal circuitry with an external connection.  And because the front end isn’t connected to the hind end, the front end can go faster than the hind end, and the hind end can go faster than the front end and this will cause the animal to act just as if it’s either an electrically or a magnetically charged particle. For example, if the front end is going faster than the rear end, there will be an electrostatic pressure and the dog will work on a load/overload type of static discharge kind of behavior. Whereas if the hind end is going faster than the front end, then this hunger will be a sexual or a magnetic kind of orientation wherein the dog will move circuitously and be readily deflected. This two brain makeup inculcates a principle of emotional conductivity whereby the individual either goes the path of least resistance (electrical frame of reference) or couples with another and is attracted to the path of highest resistance (magnetic frame of reference.) This is adaptive is because emotion and the principle of conductivity is the embodiment of the laws of nature, and since nature changes in accord with said laws, then if the physiology and behavior of an animal is predicated on these laws it will be able by dint of its constitution to “predict” where potential energy is going to be. In other words, social structures are a computation of change which inspires the group to position itself to capture and harness potential energy.

Heather: “When re-reading your description above, I thought about how accurately it described my behavior last night – I took Happy out for his last bathroom break of the night, and he started woofing at something in the yard (it was dark, I couldn’t see anything), and was more persistent about it than his routine boof-boof-boofing he does to scare away any boogey men lurking in the woods before settling down to his business. So I went to check it out, and I saw what I thought was a light moving around – at first I was moving in a straight line (slowly) and I was really “charged” as I approached and felt enough pressure that at some point I didn’t want to go forward anymore, but as I got closer and saw that it was indeed something non-threatening but I wasn’t sure what, I began to circle around, and in the circling I realized that it was the deck light reflecting off of the handle of the pool skimmer, which had been left leaning against the fence (normally it’s put away).”

KB: Things that reflect energy are predatory aspects and these interrupt the sense of flow and trigger physical memories of resistance/stress/shock.  And then something upright (leaning against the fence) thereby fits the form of a predator as the physical memory in the emotional battery potentiates the higher processes of the nervous system so that the mind construes variables of the present in terms of forms from the past.

Heather: “Also the quality/quantity issue – I can see how different temperaments could be tuned differently to different objects of attraction with different perceived prey/predator values (so for eg Happy, he will notice a squirrel but for him he readily perceives playing tug with me as the displacing of more emotional energy, because the emotional mass of the squirrel, and thus the force it induces in Happy, is not very large compared to mine.) Things that are very prey-like to him do not move a lot of energy, he is tuned to a higher predator/prey ratio.

Very cool, I am excited to start really looking at things in this manner and making my own observations.”

KB: Exactly, the higher the prey threshold of the temperament, the more it takes to displace the dog and the more physical tactile contacting it requires to feel grounded. Thanks for the observations. You can completely deconstruct the dog’s mind by paying close attention to your own emotional experience without injecting thoughts. Keep On Posting!

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“My first contribution is a scenario:
A few years ago my family was out at camp. My sister brought her dog “Happy” a very nervous and high-strung beagle mix. The first thing she did was to bite Duncan in the face! Duncan did not retaliate but later in the day, she and Duncan were hitched up opposite each other but not within striking distance. We were all sitting in the sun room and watched this scene unfold:

Happy was barking (obnoxiously) in Duncan’s face and wouldn’t stop. Duncan stood facing her and would look left and then look right, he’d turn around with his back to her and turn to look at her. All the while, every movement he made was slow and seemingly deliberate. As this scene played out, Happy stopped barking and watched Duncan intently. Before long they were standing in parallel both looking in the same direction and Happy was much calmer. At the time, this seemed to confirm Turid Rugaas’ explanations of Calming Signals. I’d like to hear Kevin’s explanation of NDT.

My first ‘Stump the Chump’ question is: Why is it that some dogs wait until their people come home before they will evacuate their bowels? (That is, for those dogs who are not crated all day and are let out by other people or are free to dump during the day.)”

~

Once we understand that a feeling is a wave, and that a wave is composed by two beings as equal and yet opposites relative to the other we can see that the two incidents {a) Happy and Duncan and (b) a dog waiting for the owner to come home in order to poop} are in fact variants on the same phenomenon.

a) The direct and intense expression of focused energy by Happy biting Duncan was an electrostatic discharge and so Duncan migrated to the magnetic polarity whereby he would be induced to express his energy via a deflected manner. And because he wasn’t matching her intensity with his own intensity, Happy couldn’t find any traction in his feedback and so she began to feel she was wasting energy and began to be tired as electrostatic discharges easily dissipate. By experiencing that she was losing energy by pushing out so much intensity, this gave Duncan a window to look directly at her with small looks, which then began to give her the experience of displacement and hence a strengthening of attraction toward Duncan from a more sober perspective of not wanting to waste any more energy. Meanwhile Duncan was moving side-to-side mirroring her energy (acting prey-like) which induced Happy to align with him along a central line of focus. So this back and forth and then mirroring is indeed calming, but it is not a signal in any way shape or form in regards to displaying one’s intentions relative to another. The two dogs are not two self-contained entities of intelligences, separate agencies of being, they are beginning to become one wave function, Duncan basically absorbing and smoothing out the electrical spikes of “Happy” until they collectively can describe one wave function. Duncan has a stronger temperament and so he will orient to the magnetic to balance Happy but he has no cognitive understanding of what he’s doing, he’s simply feeling more and can thereby feel the open magnetic polarity since Happy is occupying the electric one.

b) What’s going on between any two dogs is but a macroscopic extension of what’s going on within any dog via its bipolar, two-brain makeup. Big-Brain neuro-chemical electrical activity has to be grounded into little-brain smooth muscle peristaltic action in order for a dog to experience that it is emotionally digesting its surroundings and what’s happening to it. So to a dog, a feeling is a wave and the strongest organ of wave generation is the systemic rhythmic action of the stomach and intestines. In other words, a dog doesn’t make a distinction between a bowel movement and a feeling, which is why they turn around to inspect their own elimination since it is the only object available to account for what “touched” them. So when an owner praises his dog for eliminating, then the owner is associating himself with that wave function of a bowel movement, the owner is becoming the object of that feeling (which is why it’s even possible to housetrain a dog or cat in the first place) and thus becoming a component to this wave function. This means that a dog is attracted to his owner with the feeling of a strong intestinal contraction, the dog is emotionally “digesting” its owner, and because the peristaltic involuntary action of its deep smooth muscles is rhythmic, it’s pleasurable. So the dog gets excited to see its owner, and earliest physical memories come to the surface and the entire system gets revved up. For this reason when I work aggressive dogs, I contrive for them to relieve themselves next to another dog so that they give the other dog credit as the object for what made them feel good. If I can get them to synchronized pooping, I know it’s only a matter of time until they will want to play with each other because that’s the ultimate experience of emotional digestion.

*Please feel free to use the comments section of this post to pose your own Stump the Chump challenge!*

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Furthermore, this distinction reveals that two concepts integral to behavioral science 1) animals learn by reinforcement, and 2) the notion of “high value” rewards actually represent an inherent contradiction in terms because it entertains that there is a system of value which accords motive to a dog, and that this can be discerned by observing that which reinforces. Yet there are countless examples wherein something unpleasant happens to a dog and yet the behavior persists, which means that the only possible interpretation is that the underlying motive is in contravention to the consequences experienced. Therefore outcomes can never serve as an adequate metric for motive. NDT maintains that motive in animal behavior can only be discerned by a law of nature, i.e. a state of energy, and not by a psychology of reinforcement.

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Science understands energy as an “action potential,” as a differential in concentration of “charged” particles between one place, or pole, and another place or pole, as for example when water is held behind a dam or there is a concentration of electrons at the negative terminal of a battery. A charged particle transmits the action potential, the force that’s built up, but it isn’t energy itself.

The only meaningful way science can discuss the notion of energy is in regards to how much work this force can do as the action potential goes from a charged to a neutral state and we can content ourselves with this understanding as it will not prove any more limiting to our inquiry than it is to the utility company’s ability to charge us for whatever it is that is running through our meters and jiggling the electrons in our homes and toaster ovens thereby making every appliance and electrical device hum with “energy.”

One can also say there is a universal motive in everything a charged particle might do, whether it’s running a computer, a refrigerator or driving a water wheel set in a stream. Charged particles “want” to move so as to return the system to a neutral or discharged state. So an action potential creates “like-minded” charged particles, like-is-attracted-to-like in order to return the action potential to neutral. Furthermore, when charged particles move they create a field of energy, like a standing body of water that pools between an inlet and an outlet, or a magnetic field that surrounds an electrical current, or the gravitational field that envelops our solar system. (These fields are social systems.)

This phenomenon of an action potential that results in a current and a field is exactly how I mean the term energy as it applies to emotion, consciousness and animal behavior. By observing behavior without projecting any thought, intention or reason onto what’s going on, we can observe a “current” of emotion running within an animal (two-brain makeup) to bring an internal action potential “to ground” and which is the source of any and all behavior because it is the substrate of animal consciousness, it is how physical energy is internalized and presented to the higher processes of the nervous system as information.

Observe a dog being held back by some restraint from something it wants. Refrain from reading any intention into what the dog is doing. Simply, consider that the dog is exhibiting energy by the strictest scientific definition of the term. The dog is manifesting an action potential, a build up of force on one side of the restraint or barrier, relative to the object of attraction which constitutes the complementary polarity of lesser concentration. This physical energy is measurable by every scientific metric, hormones, neurons firing, valves open/closed, dilation, skin tension, body movements, immune system activity; metabolic rate, muscle stiffness, etc., etc.. Meanwhile, behavioral science simply describes this as a state of excitement, agitation, aggression, frustration, fear and so on and in the process ASSUMES that the underlying animating energy is neutral, blank, and that the only meaning to this state of energy manifested in every cell of the dog’s being is derived from the higher processes of its central nervous system. This is an assumption that leads to many more assumptions all of which are taken as self-evident and therefore remain untested and which then compels the behavioral scientist to take the dog’s brain and body apart cell by cell and gene by gene trying to find the source of the meaning to its behavior.

Once one can see a dog as the physical embodiment of an action potential, and that the disposition of this action potential follows the laws of nature, one will next be able to see two dogs as coming to represent one action potential, and then together becoming an action potential in terms of a collectivized want. In other words, one will learn to see the action potential replicating itself. This is the real purpose of genes. They are not fundamentally concerned with gene replication, they are fundamentally concerned with building organisms that replicate action potentials. These action potentials must evolve into existence in real time and these are how energy moves through an ecosystem and creates a network consciousness as the “mother” of all action potentials and which incorporates every element of the natural world into its matrix.

Pavlov demonstrated that even neutral, emotionally sterile stimuli such as the ring of a bell, can provoke a physiological response in a dog’s very viscera and thereby turn the dog’s body/mind into an ACTION POTENTIAL. In other words, the dog ends up FEELING physically connected to its surroundings and feels incomplete in terms of the object of attraction. Even the neurons in the dog’s brains function as an action potential and this is the organizing principle of its mind as well. A state of conflict is an action potential that animates an animal. And it also INFORMS an animal because energy always moves from a pole of high concentration to a pole of lower, the basic law of thermodynamics, a motive that instantly digitizes the dog’s sense of its surroundings into two values, that which conducts its energy (what we can call preyful aspects because dog becomes driven to ingest it) and that which does not (what we can term predatory aspect because dog becomes driven to avoid it). All complex behavior elaborates on this simple platform and it is easy to see this in everything a dog does. Whenever two dogs encounter each other, they begin to differentiate into prey and predator polarities. In other words, they are externalizing between them, a duplication of the internal action potential by which their body/mind is organized.

An internal action potential also polarizes the animals’ body so that its posture, movement and even its physical eliminations and secretions exhibit a bipolar signature recognizable to every other animal – internally the head region represents the positive (+) terminal {it projects emotion} and the gut/loin region represents the negative terminal (-) {it absorbs projected emotion} – just as if the animal was an electrical battery. (Visually to the observing animal, it’s the other way around. The eyes are the (-) polarity because it reflects the projected emotion back at the observer and TRIGGERS its battery, and the gut/loin region is the (+) polarity because it absorbs projected emotion.) Thus constructed, every change in the environment becomes an emotionally ionizing event that polarizes an animal. Then, its physical secretions and actions become a physical manifestation of its internal chemistry, which is a computation of an overall emotional value, like the electromagnetic value of an atom on the periodic table. (Intuitively we use the word “juice” to describe both a battery and emotion.)

Therefore, the most conservative interpretation of advanced, complex canine behavior is that the connection between a dog and its surroundings is a physical, visceral one, just as if the dog is physically connected to objects of attraction, just as if the dog’s body/mind serves and functions as an action potential. And because this action potential replicates itself, a group of wolves are attracted to each other with a force that cannot be consummated by mutual contact and so they hunt larger prey, i.e. their internal action potential is now replicated as an external action potential between the group of wolves and this large dangerous prey. This is a physical connection in that the wolf feels the moose in its very viscera and feels physically connected to it. And because this connection constantly replicates by constantly adding new energy into this relationship, it can therefore be considered an emotional circuit that incorporates the many into one. Likewise dog and owner form this same emotional circuit so that the dog can become driven to do what its owner WANTS.

Any other model of behavior without such a precise definition of energy will at some point break down, and by necessity and intellectual expediency resort to thoughts/intention/reason in order to explain complex behavior. And if a model for a natural system is not based on the energy on which such a system must necessarily have evolved upon, these rationales will always end up contradicting themselves at higher orders of magnitude.

Unknowingly because behavioral science takes so many things as self-evident, it is projecting thoughts onto the behavior of animals (although recently lately this has become overt in many scientific writings) and this ultimately is a fatal error that actually puts it in contravention of basic evolutionary tenet that the complex evolved from unformed, i.e. energy.

Energy is motion. Form is motion that repeats itself. Form adds quality to energy. Consciousness is a form of energy that reliably repeats itself. The quality of consciousness is to add new energy to the network in order to reliably repeat itself.

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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.

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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.

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What excites me about my energy model is that I believe I’ve discovered a constantly repeating fractal expression of behavior: a simple and easily recognizable module that constantly repeats itself to factor out more and more complex behaviors and ultimately, a social and cooperative nature. Since all of nature seems to be an expression of just such fractals, from the “golden ratio” that is evident in the anatomy of mollusks to human beings, the spreading circulation systems that are found in watersheds, lungs, to tree branches and root systems, the photo-voltaic effect that empowers all green plants, the two pairs of amino acids that make up every gene, I’m convinced that this must be true of behavior as well.

In my view this behavioral fractal is an expression of how energy moves in nature, from a place or pole of higher concentration, to a place or pole of lesser, an “action potential” that constantly recapitulates itself so as to realize more energy through complex social behavior. I am using the term energy exactly as science does, as an action potential, the same energetic dynamic by which our nerves and cells function and so it seems sensible we might find this same organizing principle in the behavior of animals as well. The advantage to an energy interpretation (as fantastic as this might sound) is that it allows us to see inside the mind of the dog. (We might recall that simply by studying the radiation of heat from a warm object as a function of energy, the “ultraviolet catastrophe” this ultimately allowed physicists to see inside the atom and divine the existence of the photon. And this came well before there were linear particle accelerators.)

My search for a fractal pattern for behavior came from a belief that evolution is correct, that which is complex evolved from that which is simple, that the formed evolved from the unformed, in other words, energy. I was also searching because I saw that the current models for behavior didn’t encompass all the evidence and failed to articulate just such a fractal building block.

On the other hand, and understandably, if one believes that dogs are all figured out by science, then one wouldn’t see the need for a new theory of behavior. So I postulate my energy idea, a few people see the sense of it, at least in part, because it’s very hard at first to apprehend it in its totality, it only took me three decades, but the majority in the mainstream say it is ridiculous or an over-complication of what already has been said.

I have posed a number of questions which the folks who say an energy theory is ridiculous or irrelevant have so far failed to address. For example, why does a dog sit for a cookie, or is afraid of slippery floors, or lifts its leg, and so on. On my last site I had a questionnaire that I will dust off and fix the wording so the points are clearer, but again, there is criticism without exposition. When I talk about the eye contact technique as revealing how the canine mind as an energy circuit works, the experts say this is merely operant conditioning, and yet the technique doesn’t have to be conditioned so it’s as if we are speaking two different languages wherein the same words mean different things. If something doesn’t require conditioning, how can it be Operant conditioning?! I invite someone from the dominance or Operant perspective to explain precisely why my explanation for why-a-dog-sits-for-a-cookie or looks-into-eyes-for-access (flipping of emotional polarity) is ridiculous or overly complex by way of explaining why in their view a dog, and only a dog, sits for a cookie or looks-in-your-eyes without training. In short, what’s going on inside the dog?

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