Lee asked some very fruitful questions and I proceeded in their order as listed below.
LCK: 1) Why do you call it a virtual field? It seems to me that the network consciousness you talk about is dependent on there being some sort of medium connecting all things in nature. Valerie Hunt seems to have found the frequencies for this field, which it seems to me is essentially the same thing as (or is consonant with) Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic fields.”
KB –> I do believe there is indeed a real field and you see this in a dog’s knowing that an animal is outside in its yard (among many other amazing feats). I’ve seen a dog leap out of a deep sleep and run exactly to that part of the house proximal to where a raccoon was on top of a stockade fence getting ready to climb into the yard 100 feet away. The dog wasn’t using its nose or looking, it was the dead of winter the house sealed up tight, the dog could feel the disturbance in the field. However because of the special problems of evolution we should nevertheless regard the real field as subordinate in importance to a virtual field. I believe this is because the primary problem in evolution is to turn change into information, and in order to do that, the animal mind must be set up so that the emotional energy the individual projects onto objects of attraction, reflects back to it so that ultimately this mirroring process will render them emotionally different from each other (prey/predator–>female/male–>active/reactive/direct/indirect Personality traits) and yet complementary to each other. In this state, they are governed by the laws of physics rather than in terms of an evolutionary history (genes) as overwhelmingly strong as this can be, or individual life experiences (habits of mind) as overwhelmingly powerful as this can be. Therefore it’s just as if the animal is an object of mass in a gravitational field invested with an inherent momentum that then due to the interaction evolves into electromagnetic energy so that they can connect with other. Sociability is a recapitulation of the unified field. (And it might even be that there is no unified field, other than how it exists virtually within the domain of animal consciousness.)
Another way of saying this is that the nature of information is to guarantee that organisms interact in order to render sociability, this process being most visible in the nature of dogs. If animals went primarily by a real field and were exclusively telepathic, they would be infallible from the point of view of their individual self-interests and it would be hard if not impossible for individual motivation to be fundamentally dedicated to turning-change-into-information in service to the network.
2) Does the network consciousness you talk about provide the medium for telepathic communication between dogs and their owners? Or don’t you think telepathy (which is Latin for “distant feeling”) exists? It seems to me that the process of a dog picking up our feelings, of us tuning into our dog’s energy, etc., can’t be accomplished without telepathy. I’m quite certain dogs are telepathic, and humans can be too if they switch off their brains and tune into their “gut” instincts.
KB-> Yes telepathy makes sense. However I believe that in terms of the virtual field, for the most part, dogs pick up our feelings over time as our emotional currents slowly play out through our actions as we come and go here and there, as if we are a transmitter putting out a radio wave with a frequency many miles (and years) wide and moving in super slow motion. So we have an immediate-moment degree of emotional conductivity that dogs pick up in an instant, perhaps they even see it in our aura but also I believe in our body language. But this internal state can fluctuate minute by minute, hour by hour, and I believe what’s more important is that we are semi-conductors that over the long term these fluctuations play themselves out in order to render larger currents. In the long term, the decryption occurs from being immersed in our currents, as if the dog is dealing with a code nested within a code. For example, it takes my dog about eight years to pick up and then manifest my deepest stuff. Never fails. So the question we have to ask is what is the purpose of feelings from the evolutionary point-of-view? In my view it’s not primarily about point to point communication, but rather turning change-into-information. For this reason telepathy does not prove to be particularly therapeutic when it comes to training or solving most dog behavioral problems. Why can’t an animal psychic just transmit the information that if the dog keeps biting people or other dogs it will be put down? Or if it runs away it will be punished or killed by a car, shot by a hunter, and so on? Sometimes you hear of a psychic picking up that a dog is biting due to an abscessed tooth, and sure enough once it’s treated the dog never bit again. But as a reliable method of rehabilitation with the typical cases telepathy doesn’t have any impact. I believe that once the cells of the body are aligned around the heart and that the heart has effected the environment as a virtual field: then the telepathic can come into play and be part of the emotional dynamic.
LCK 3) What is the opposite of the fear of falling? And would your theory work just as well by referring to this aspect as feeling off-balance or in-balance? You certainly refer to it that way often enough. The reason I ask is because I’ve thought about the various feeling states that the human and canine body share for many years (starting after I read your book). As an actor you have to pay attention to such things, so it was natural for me to be able to project that same sort of attention onto what dogs must be feeling when they’ve got too much nervous energy in their systems, etc. Maybe I just don’t relate to the idea that seeing a squirrel would cause a dog to have a fear of falling. I certainly see it as a displacement in the energy field, which would cause the dog to feel emotionally off balance (lifted up by a sudden wave of energy), which is also almost always felt in the body as not being grounded, but I don’t think it has anything to do with a fear of falling learned from puppyhood. Maybe you could explain that more. You may be right, but I’m not sure the fear of falling is necessary for the theory to function. (Maybe that’s just me.)
KB–> The balance imperative is invoked anytime output (behavior) doesn’t equal input (stimulation). For example, we can consider every impulse of animal consciousness as akin to a young child learning to ride a bike. The child keeping the bike in the upright position and moving forward is the conductive state. There is a certain amount of energy that the child can safely channel into forward momentum and this is the system’s carrying or conductive capacity. When the energy exceeds the skill level of the child, the fear of falling comes up. Sometimes we see the child trying to “dump” energy by vibrating the handlebars back and forth rapidly as they try to maintain an upright position. This is akin to a dog’s tail being held 90 degrees over the top line, and any manner of intense bodily vibrations. This is the body/minds’ means of dissipating energy in order to satisfy the balance mandate which is the tuning component of animal consciousness as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic in order to implement the ever present principle of emotional conductivity by which any two organisms differentiate relative to each other. No matter how expert the child becomes, the balance imperative is always just below the surface moderating its conductive capacity.
I don’t believe that a binary system of on/off is enough to constitute information in animal consciousness because the fundamental issue is that energy must be made to reflect back on itself in the animal’s mind so that they become different yet complementary. So if two beings are both in a real electrostatic field, there’s no guarantee they will perceive it in an organized way that complements the others’ perspective. It must be a virtual field so that their minds will be collectively organized.
Underneath the binary system is the far more primal medium of semi-conductivity as in sometimes a thing is conductive and sometimes it is not. This is how cell membranes work; the internal milieu of the cell determines when an ion gets through the cell wall and when it will not be allowed. So hunger and balance are always inter-relating so that the animal’s mind always functions as a semiconductor so that simple binary logic can be implemented but always in response to the emotional climate that the dog perceives itself as being in. So just as two objects can’t be in the same place at the same time because they have physical mass, two animals can’t perceive each other exactly the same because they have emotional mass as a result of resistance experienced in terms of emotion as the confluence of hunger and balance. When A goes forward out of hunger, it will effect B’s balance circuitry. And then when B needs grounding via its hunger circuitry and goes toward A, this will trigger A’s balance circuitry. They will evolve to be mirror images and the virtual gravitational field will evolve into a virtual electromagnetic field.
LCK 4) I’m also still having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of the hunger circuits being about ingesting rather than just eating. I can certainly understand that when a dog chases a squirrel it’s not because he wants to eat it. Many dogs who catch squirrels don’t even bite down on the poor little critters. So what is the “essence” that’s being ingested (or have got that all muddled up)?
KB–> If the little-brain-in-the-gut can apprehend preyful aspects from visual input, then the hunger circuitry is engaged and this is the primary function of sexual energy. (I will go into this at greater length in another article by way of comparing how the visual sense of breaking-down-form via sexual circuitry, is how the sense of smell and the healing of bones are physical processes that derive from this underlying emotional process.) The hunger circuitry is the feedback loop in animal consciousness it is the means by which any sensory input, whether it is food or the sight, smell or sound of something is taken in, i.e. ingested. So when a dog is chasing a squirrel it is ingesting its essence via sight because the squirrel is emitting so many high-frequency prey behaviors and has fluffy, twitchy and supple physical aspects to its body. The sexual/sensual circuits are merely elaborations of the hunger circuits which is why beautiful models are now called “eye candy.” But were Squirrel Dog to get close to the squirrel, and since the squirrel is not likely to reflect energy back to Squirrel Dog, then the sexual circuitry will not elaborate and kick in.
The question then, is which part of its body/mind is Squirrel Dog referencing. If output-equals-input, the amount of energy it is expressing through its behavior is equal to the amount of sensory stimulation, then the balance problem is for that context addressed and the dog can begin to reference its gut and perhaps flip polarity to develop a more refined way of connecting with the squirrel. But if the output/behavior vs. input/stimulation margin is too thin, then it goes by instinct and/or habit and whatever it does will be the same old same old. We can see for example how if Squirrel Dog gets hungry enough, because every time it chases a squirrel the squirrel gets safely up a tree and also because an owner isn’t giving it a big bowl of dog food every night to subsidize its inefficiency, it will begin to reference its gut and then its heart and in this way will “figure out” the lying-in-wait possibility and end up with the squirrel for its dinner. It will become the opposite of the squirrel’s hyper-active state and get into the stalk and pounce mode in order to complement the squirrel.
Balance is essential to the principle of emotional conductivity. The balance component divides the world into paths of resistance, infinite scalability rather than just a simple binary on/off switch. The stronger the force of attraction between A and B, the more gingerly they will interact since if A acts suddenly, it instantly bounces back to A via a counterbalancing move by B. The same applies to B. Feeling the midpoint between them (where they can both safely focus their attention) and then revolving around it in order to connect indirectly as each other’s equal and yet opposite, is an auto-tuning feedback mechanism because the greater the force of attraction (hunger), the stronger the fear of falling, and the greater the incentive to self-modify to sustain forward motion. Were the appetite component to vanish, we observe the immediate activation of the fight/flight instinct as the bubble bursts and the fear of falling is all that’s left. (Note how individuals’ lose their appetite in uncertain circumstances when too afraid.) Without the hunger component, which is the basis of the imprint period of infancy, we end up with nerve sensations, memories and emotional states, not synchronized emotion, i.e. true feelings. So in effect because balance constitutes the gradient of resistance to the expression of emotion, and since all experience of resistance be it of an actual physical kind, or be it a temperamental kind from another being, these both trigger physical memories of infant experiences and so we can say that in animal consciousness, gravity is triggering electrochemical events within an animal just as light triggers electrochemical events within plants. Gravity is becoming part of consciousness and this is consciousness’ solution of the unified field problem.
Hi, Kevin. This is kind of long, and it’s mostly a matter of semantics. (Note: I didn’t say just a matter of semantics because I think words are very important.) So my purpose isn’t to criticize the theory, which I think is pretty much on the mark, but to get to the heart of how it’s explained.
KB: However because of the special problems of evolution we should nevertheless regard the real field as subordinate in importance to a virtual field. I believe this is because the primary problem in evolution is to turn change into information.
LCK: From my understanding of morphic (or morphogenetic) fields, they’re informational as well as energetic in nature. I remember you telling me years ago that you were walking in the woods one day and had an epiphany that everything in nature was a hologram of everything else. If that’s so (and I think it is), then morphic fields would be the data bank for all behavior and evolution, past, present, as well as future poetentials. Meanwhile, I don’t see how a virtual field could in any way affect actual physical behavior. There is no virtual tail-wagging, virtual leash-biting, virtual squirrel chasing, or virtual peeing on fire hydrants.
KB: in order to [turn change into information], the animal mind must be set up so that the emotional energy the individual projects onto objects of attraction, reflects back to it so that ultimately this mirroring process will render them emotionally different from each other … and yet complementary to each other. In this state, they are governed by the laws of physics rather than in terms of an evolutionary history (genes) as overwhelmingly strong as this can be, or individual life experiences (habits of mind) as overwhelmingly powerful as this can be. Therefore it’s just as if the animal is an object of mass in a gravitational field invested with an inherent momentum that then due to the interaction evolves into electromagnetic energy so that they can connect with other. Sociability is a recapitulation of the unified field. (And it might even be that there is no unified field, other than how it exists virtually within the domain of animal consciousness.)
LCK: I understand the idea of virtual gravity — it’s just as if the animal is an object of mass — but again I don’t see how a virtual form of energy or anything else could affect physical behavior. What’s wrong with just calling it emotional gravity? From what I understand there are still many, many questions to be answered about what gravity is and how and why it works. There’s string theory, torsion physics, and more. So while the general consensus in the minds of most people is that mass = gravity, that may not be the whole story. Is the behavior of a black hole due to its enormous mass or its enormous energy, or both? On a certain level aren’t mass and energy the same thing? If emotion can be stored in the body as electro-chemical energy, why does it have to be virtual?
KB: Another way of saying this is that the nature of information is to guarantee that organisms interact in order to render sociability, this process being most visible in the nature of dogs. If animals went primarily by a real field and were exclusively telepathic, they would be infallible from the point of view of their individual self-interests and it would be hard if not impossible for individual motivation to be fundamentally dedicated to turning-change-into-information in service to the network.
LCK: I don’t think a real, rather than a virtual, field would have to be in complete control of anything. It would be part of the feedback/tuning mechanism, acting both as a template and a potential catalyst.
KB: Yes telepathy makes sense. However I believe that in terms of the virtual field, for the most part, dogs pick up our feelings over time as our emotional currents slowly play out through our actions as we come and go here and there, as if we are a transmitter putting out a radio wave with a frequency many miles (and years) wide and moving in super slow motion. So we have an immediate-moment degree of emotional conductivity that dogs pick up in an instant, perhaps they even see it in our aura but also I believe in our body language. But this internal state can fluctuate minute by minute, hour by hour, and I believe what’s more important is that we are semi-conductors that over the long term these fluctuations play themselves out in order to render larger currents.
LCK: Telepathy doesn’t of itself control anything. It simply gives the animal mind access to one stream of information, emotion: tele/distant, pathy/feeling. So it’s just one part of a very real, not virtual, communications system.
Certainly the idea that dogs might be able see the human aura (something I hadn’t thought about till now) might explain how dogs are able to “sense” when someone is sick or dying. It might only be part of the puzzle.
But when you talk about fluctuations in internal states, and that we’re semi-conductors; I don’t see that as virtual, but very real, but from a purely emotional angle.
KB: In the long term, the decryption occurs from being immersed in our currents, as if the dog is dealing with a code nested within a code. For example, it takes my dog about eight years to pick up and then manifest my deepest stuff. Never fails. So the question we have to ask is what is the purpose of feelings from the evolutionary point-of-view? In my view it’s not primarily about point to point communication, but rather turning change-into-information. For this reason telepathy does not prove to be particularly therapeutic when it comes to training or solving most dog behavioral problems.
LCK: I agree that it’s not very practical to try to communicate telepathically to a dog who’s scared of thunderstorms not to worry, that “everything’s going to be okay,” or to telepathically tell a dog to sit (though I’ve done that, accidentally). Telepathy is just one informational stream. The question is, why is it there?
At any rate, if the purpose of feelings is to turn change into information — and I’m not sure that’s the whole story; I think feelings motivate an animal to take action, they create tension but they can also create, or at least foster, harmony –, then I would have to say that since telepathy is a normal biological function in animals (and in some humans if they can turn off their brains and tune into their gut feelings), it must play some role in doing all that.
KB: I believe that once the cells of the body are aligned around the heart and that the heart has effected the environment as a virtual field: then the telepathic can come into play and be part of the emotional dynamic.
LCK: You’re right, except that I don’t think it’s a virtual field. Plus not every dog owner (or dog trainer) has enough “heart” to stimulate such changes in their dog’s energy field. (Meanwhile, it took Freddie less than 24 hours to tap into my stuff; I just wasn’t paying very close attention until after I’d read Natural Dog Training.)
KB: The balance imperative is invoked anytime output (behavior) doesn’t equal input (stimulation)… This is the body/minds’ means of dissipating energy in order to satisfy the balance mandate which is the tuning component of animal consciousness as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic in order to implement the ever present principle of emotional conductivity by which any two organisms differentiate relative to each other. … the balance imperative is always just below the surface moderating its conductive capacity.
LCK: I know you’ve spent a lot more time working out these ideas than I have. I’m more or less riding on your coat tails, so to speak (though I have been thinking along parallel lines for a long time). I was also smart enough to understand that the dominance and behavioral science paradigms were flawed, and was just lucky enough to be looking for a new model of dog training that worked, and found it in Natural Dog Training. (I was also lucky enough that the first dog I tried it with reflected all his aggressive energy back to me in the form of “obedience,” which was, frankly, so thrilling it became one of the most amazing experiences of my life.) And I agree that there’s an engine and a steering wheel, if you will, in canine behavior. And I agree that the solar plexus is the driving mechanism and that the brain does the steering, and that as a whole this is a tuning/feedback loop. I also agree that maintaining one’s balance, both physically and emotionally, are important characteristics of canine behavior, and that when either the driving mechanism or the steering wheel are out of whack, that’s one way that problem behaviors develop.
It just seems to me that when you describe the need for balance in terms of the “fear of falling,” and relate it back to a puppy’s experiences of being knocked down by his littermates, there’s a subtle implication, at least for me, that the dog is “thinking” about this stuff. “If I’m not careful I might fall…” It’s too linear for me.
If two animals feel a combination of attraction and resistance, and one can see that playing out in how they interact, where does the fear of falling come into it? They may be looking for ways to achieve internal balance, both physically and emotionally, but neither is afraid of suddenly falling down, which is what I think is being implied.
KB: I don’t believe that a binary system of on/off is enough to constitute information in animal consciousness because the fundamental issue is that energy must be made to reflect back on itself in the animal’s mind so that they become different yet complementary. So if two beings are both in a real electrostatic field, there’s no guarantee they will perceive it in an organized way that complements the others’ perspective. It must be a virtual field so that their minds will be collectively organized.
LCK: We have different ideas of what binary means. Yes, in computers it’s on or off. In consciousness Eros (life, sex, and creativity) and Thanatos (aggression, conflict, death wish); they oppose and compliment each other. Besides, for any change to take place — any real, lasting change, that is — there has to be a third force acting on the first two, the way a catalyst is necessary for a chemical reaction to take place.
I also don’t think morphic fields are electrostatic in nature.
KB: So hunger and balance are always inter-relating so that the animal’s mind always functions as a semiconductor so that simple binary logic can be implemented but always in response to the emotional climate that the dog perceives itself as being in. So just as two objects can’t be in the same place at the same time because they have physical mass, two animals can’t perceive each other exactly the same because they have emotional mass as a result of resistance experienced in terms of emotion as the confluence of hunger and balance. When A goes forward out of hunger, it will effect B’s balance circuitry. And then when B needs grounding via its hunger circuitry and goes toward A, this will trigger A’s balance circuitry. They will evolve to be mirror images and the virtual gravitational field will evolve into a virtual electromagnetic field.
LCK: I agree with everything you said except your use of the words virtual and hunger circuitry. (Note: I have no problem with balance circuitry.)
KB: If the little-brain-in-the-gut can apprehend preyful aspects from visual input, then the hunger circuitry is engaged and this is the primary function of sexual energy.
LCK: Again I agree with everything except the use of the word “hunger.” Eros and Thanatos are the two sides to sexual energy. In Darwinian terms the urge to reproduce is worth nothing without a commitment to protect one’s young at (nearly) any cost. So sex and aggression are just two different forms of the same energy; one is creative, the other destructive. The two may co-exist, though, so they’re not binary in computer terms. Again, this is your theory; I’m just along for the ride. (And I’m just using Freud’s terms as a way of explicating what I mean by binary, or opposites, as opposed to on/off; I don’t think they should be foundational to your theory all.) But it seems to me that if you want to reduce this to its purest essence, neither hunger nor ingesting are the right words, just as “fear of falling” isn’t quite right.
I would say that fear and desire should do the trick, or perhaps instinct and drive. That’s because in the auto-tuning/feedback loop the nervous system is the safety mechanism (fear/balance) while the gut is the driving mechanism (desire/hunger). The third force is probably the morphic field.
LCK