Consciousness is energy, its interface with nature is emotion, and like energy consciousness as emotion moves as a wave. These waves are physically embodied as emotional affects (butterflies in the stomach, chill up the spine, queasy feeling, wobbly in the knees, shortness of breath, sense of weightlessness, flow, resonance, etc., etc.); affects that evolved in order to compel organisms to move (and in some cases not to move) and to move in such a way so as to affect material objects in adaptive, coherent ways given local circumstances. In this way objects of resistance are imported (via hunger circuitry) into the configuration in order to improve its flow (via balance circuitry). Furthermore, such actions or inactions, collectively, will over the long run evolve to be in sync with how the forces of nature evolve so that just as nature improves according to the Constructal law, consciousness improves according to the principle of emotional conductivity, i.e. the laws of motion and principles of thermodynamics regulating the transfer of momentum, stresses and forces between the participants in any given interaction. The embodiment of the laws of nature in the minds and behavior of animals is the nature of animal intelligence. It is the logic of emotion (attraction) and feelings (complementary traits, or mirroring), which are distinct from the human capacity for thinking by which I specifically mean the capability to compare two relative points of view. Feelings are wholly in the moment, yet, paradoxically they are predicated on physical memory, the experience of resistance from the past. Physical memory on the most basic level of how consciousness is organized, serves as an emotional ballast which then serves as the capacity to absorb another individual’s momentum during an interaction and eventually convert their respective momenta into a wave pattern, one up, one down, one back one forth, one active, one reactive, one direct, one indirect.
When physical memory is triggered in the moment, it becomes the means by which the laws of motion organize an interaction and underwrite a long term relationship. Unbeknownst to the participants, they are inescapably engaging in improving the flow configuration for nature at large as per the Constructal law.
The point of making these distinctions is to equip one to make training and handling decisions so as to optimize how a dog feels. If a dog feels good, this solves behavioral and obedience problems. There is an emotional dynamic that turns physical memories into a wave and we can learn to directly manipulate this process so as to increase a dog’s emotional capacity, i.e. its capacity to incorporate an object of resistance into a feeling of flow. To do so it helps to be aware of the distinction between canine awareness and human self-awareness, the latter being Time-centric, the former being a function of flow that travels as a wave. So for example, when teaching a dog to sit for a cookie, it would appear to us, and this is the basis of all modern learning theory, that we are rewarding a dog’s behavior with a treat because we assume that the dog is thinking like we are, “If I sit my owner gives me a cookie.” But the dog isn’t framing the experience as one self relative to another self, one moment in time relative to another moment in time with all of this tied together through a chronological sequence of events that resides in the consciousness as a narrative of what happened.
The dog unlike the trainer, gives the “credit” for how it received a cookie to the internal physiological state it was experiencing when it got the cookie. This could have been a surge of momentum if the dog lurched or leaned forward to get the cookie, or it could have been the sensual feeling in its hind end that made it want to press its butt to the ground to become the equal/opposite of the one in possession of the treat. What ties all these physiological states into a coherent whole so that one action seamlessly follows into another and in a coherent manner relative to others so that it proves adaptive to external circumstances, is a wave function that all physiological states are predicated upon. All the various internal wave patterns from peristalsis, muscle contraction/relaxation, visceral motility, blood flow, breathing, brain waves, are tied together in the dog’s perception of reality via the master wave function, i.e. the breath and heart rate (this affects vagal tone). And when the dog’s motion is fully integrated with the surroundings, this state of emotional conductivity can be recapitulated by way of the breath when the dogs’ subliminal focal beam is trained on its heart. In short, the dog’s sense of acceleration by being stimulated, and then how it was breathing and how its heart was beating, were the reasons in the dog’s mind for why it got a cookie. It has no idea that the human gave it a cookie because it sat. Sitting becomes part of the wave, sitting is what tasting a cookie feels like.
How the dog experiences its surroundings relative to where it is in the wave becomes the “why” for what happened. What the dog felt (a feeling is a wave) is what caused something to happen, he doesn’t construct a chronological sequence of events as a narrative for reality. It’s just as if there is a song playing within the dog’s body which is constantly sampled by its mind and the dog then makes associations based on where it is in the song and how intensely the song is playing.
In the human mind on the other hand, an additional facet of consciousness that grabs most of our attention is our intellectual acuity, the capacity to compare relative points of view and the ability to see one’s self as-a-self-contained-self held in relief against the surroundings. This leads to the conception of Time as well as the view of a dogs’ self as a self-contained agency of intelligence as we presume ours to be. We thus experience the flow of energy primarily as a chronological narrative of events. Conceptualizing flow as Time and through narratives allows humans to gain more and more control over nature (or so it might seem) but, at the risk of becoming disconnected from nature. Many of us turn to dogs to reconnect. But then we try to put our thoughts into their heads.
To explore the distinction between a human view of reality versus a dog’s, let’s consider an owner and his dog getting on a boat to cross a lake. How does the human versus the dog construe this experience, how do they respectively perceive and understand how they began at Point A and then arrived at Point B? The human ends up with a story to tell, “We hopped on a boat and after fifteen minutes we arrived at our destination.”
Now were the dog able to express itself in verbal, intellectual terms so he could put the experience into our Time-centric way of thinking, he would say: “I moved from stable ground onto moving ground and I was being pushed every which way. So I got as low as I could and focused all my energy on my physical center-of-gravity and this made the ground slow down. When I felt in control of how I was being pushed because I could counter each shove, my shoulders began to relax and I began to stand up so that I could shift my weight even more in any particular direction to keep the ground from moving. This was easy to do once I began to mirror my owner. I then began to feel a flow of sights, sounds and smells moving through my body. The more I focused my energies on my shoulders and felt relaxed and breathing in sync with the flow of sights, sounds and smells moving through my body, the better I felt and I stopped pushing altogether. I could feel a wave grow stronger and stronger inside me and little by little this good feeling began to pull a small point closer and closer, a point which corresponded to where my owner was facing. I began to smell it when it became big enough and then I jumped back onto the same large, stable ground that was so familiar but now it felt even better than I had ever felt it to feel before because there were new smells, sights and sounds flowing through my body.”
How did the human versus the dog go from point A to point B? The owner rode a boat, the dog rode a wave. The owner remembers a narrative: We got in a boat, my dog was a little afraid at first but by the time we got off he seemed to really like it.” The owner remembers a memory whereas the dog when he sees the boat again will relive the feeling. The dog doesn’t remember what happened. He willed what happened to happen and he will never forget.
DING DING DING! The bells are going off in my MIND again…here is wishing I can feel it in my body more and more. To me the most important point to really absorb and yet the most challenging is that the dog is not an agent of self contained intelligence, that I have access to his consciousness through mine.
So if I am getting this, because his self is not separate from my self the way I get a dog to move is using a magnetic force to push and pull, like when I am swing dancing with a really good partner who can keep the momentum flowing back and forth in rhythm.
For me right now, I feel like a stroke victim looking at my arm and willing it to move and then concentrating harder and harder to think it to move but nothing happens.