Thanks for collectively straining over the puzzle as to what flocks of birds cavorting aloft, Orcas porpoising alongside boats, Orcas collectively knocking a seal off an ice flow, a horse and dog playing, and in fact we could extend it to all the things that animals do, have in common. Below is a compilation of comments and I’ve highlighted the important and necessary elements that are in play. We need to combine them in a way that reveals the universal nature of the animal mind. In other words, the phenomenon of problem solving, the collectivized behavior of the many, and the internal emotional affects within the one, are the same dynamic, and also, these are all predicated on the mechanics of motion so that as an animal moves and interacts with its world, this makes the individual feel as if it is electromagnetically charged. These feelings inform the animal how to become integrated with others as well as with its world.
(Richard) “All behavior is a function of EMOTION and all emotion is a function of ATTRACTION. So do they ALL SHARE THE SAME EMOTION perhaps?”
(Steve) “Well…I can’t see the bird video mentioned, but from the 2 orca vids & the dog/horse one…is it choosing & overcoming the PATH OF HIGHEST RESISTANCE?
The orcas chasing the boat are chasing through the turbulent choppy water behind the boat causing more resistance to drive through, so therefore MORE UNRESOLVED EMOTION BEING RESOLVED.
Likewise with the orcas hunting the seal on ice, the INCREASED DIFFICULTY INCREASES THE REWARDS?
No doubt I’m wrong though because you said the dog/horse vid is the hardest to tie in, when I saw it as the obvious one.
That wee little doggy all on his own has just ‘taken on’ (at tug of war) that big scary predator with the big eyes & teeth…. and won! (OVERCOMING THE PATH OF HIGHEST RESISTANCE AGAIN)?”
(Julie) “The seal was eventually eaten. I don’t see play. I see an all out hunt. Was it a hunting lesson? But what about the birds? They are searching for a safe place to land. I think the Orcas are FOLLOWING THE BOAT, NOT AS A FOOD SOURCE. The horse runs after the dog with the towel. What makes the birds fly in such an intricate formation? Does it have something to with ONE MIND. But what are they all doing in common? Is this a PINGING and PONGING effect? They’re all feeling great? I once watched a group of dogs doing what looked to me like the FLOCK of birds. The dogs were all “dancing” to the SAME BEAT, noses down on the ground trying to smell the same thing, tails all up in the air. ”
Physical force?? Are you talking about a DRIVE? Does it have something to do with ECHOS, SOUNDS? (Julie also mentioned WAVES.)
(Martin) “For me they all exhibit the drive to make contact. The horse and dog are making contact through a COMMON MIDPOINT of the towel. The contact is literally a WAVE in the first two and the second one the seal ends up back on the ice so the game can be replayed again…the POTENTIAL ENERGY IS MPORE POWERFUL than the “bird in hand”… ???”
(Ann F.) “There is only one force; the FORCE OF ATTRACTION. The orcas are (MAGNETICALLY) attracted to the boat as if it were prey. They are ATTRACTED TO EACH OTHER which is why they team up to unseat the seal. (Though why did they not eat it?) The horse and dog are both attracted to the white cloth, a stand-in for the one who doesn’t have it. “The orcas are HEELING the boat. The orcas heeling the boat become ONE WITH THE BOAT, ON ITS TEAM. The threesome of orcas teamed up to topple the seal, heeling with each other, as it were. The birds are one organism, a group mind. The horse might not see the towel as prey, but because the dog does, and it is teaming up with the dog, it does too.””
(Carol) I feel like we are all connected through the ENERGY OF THE LIFE FORCE that exists in and around us. (Us being all things that have life energy.) This connection…when our energies intersect, may result in predator/prey actions, sexual actions, friendship, game playing/life practice or an interaction with an item of interest along the path of life. We are capable of unbelievably wonderful things when our energies come together and function as one. (Think horse and rider team, or search and rescue dog/human teams Some beings, such as the starlings are more finely tuned to GROUP ENERGY. Each participant is an individual, communicating on a level that permits each to act as a “limb” of the larger group. It is the same energy communication that enables a wolf pack to be made up of individuals who act with differing roles, depending on the action of the prey, the terrain, and all the other variables that may be encountered. They have no need call a time out to determine what strategy to use. On the dark side, all energy is not positive. We are capable of sensing the presence of DISCORDANT ENERGY, which we generally choose to avoid. Just some thoughts, still in the process of developing. (Oh, and I think that maybe the seal was “in on” the game.)
(Sundog) I am also sensing that these examples show PREY DRIVE vs. PREY INSTINCT.”
Yes to the gist at the core of all of the above: Emotion —> Attraction, this is the Life Force, and on the most basic level of the animal mind, it manifests as the mechanics of locomotion. The wave action the body makes when it moves is experienced by the animal as if it is riding a wave (this wave experience is coupled intimately and therefore is synonymous with the breath) and this experience of a wave is the organizing principle of an animal’s perceptions and means of interpreting its experience.
In a world of friction, Emotion inevitably meets with Resistance and so Unresolved Emotion is acquired and thus from within the mind of an animal the world is etched with Paths of Resistance. The animal doesn’t look out and see a neutral vista. How then is Resistance overcome? By becoming part of a Wave. Aligning and synchronizing with like-minded others so that the simple Prey Instinct, emotion moving from high predatory polarity to low preyful polarity, can become Prey Drive, which is a more complex form of a group orbiting about a Midpoint. And by coupling the-wave-one-can-make with the wave that others can make, this makes more energy. Coupling waves is most easily achieved by aligning and synchronizing around a Common Object of Resistance, or Midpoint. (This is another way of defining hunting as well as play as both are the same emotional phenomena simply at different levels of intensity.) A Common Object of Resistance is the only thing that can resolve each members Unresolved Emotion because they are attracted to each other with a stronger Life Force than simple physical contact and companionship can satisfy. Therefore a Midpoint is tantamount to Potential Energy. If alignment and synchronization about a Midpoint cannot be attained, then the experience is Discordant and individuals seek to avoid such a state.
Animals, birds, fish, and all forms of life move from point A to point B as a wave. The body makes a symmetrical, rhythmic undulating motion as the limbs and appendages, fins and feathers generate thrust and propel the body forward. How does this all factor out–in other words—What does this feel like? Weightlessness.
By coupling with a wave the individual gets free energy as its force is amplified by alignment and timing to generate a feeling of weightlessness, this then becomes associated with a state of emotional suspension wherein the breath and the mechanics of movement FEELS effortless even though there is physical exertion involved. This state can also be called Animal Magnetism and to self-induce this state individuals Ping and Pong and then Flip Polarities in order to align and sync up and become accelerated along the pattern of a wave. The attempt to do so is particularly vivid between the dog and horse, however because they are organized on two separate emotional frequencies, one being a meat eater the other a plant eater, it’s relatively hard for them to get a wave function going and the dog is doing most of the work given its higher emotional capacity. Then we see the Orcas combining their waves to sweep the seal off the ice flow, but that is the exact same thing that is going on between horse and dog, just far more effectively in the case of Orcas because of course we are also dealing with a tangible wave that gives them such a strong material feedback. But this is not cognition in terms of intellectual apprehension, it’s cognition in terms of THERMODYNAMICS and the Laws of Motion. We mistakenly see the Orcas as figuring out the problem rationally, but combining waves is how they apprehend reality, it’s how their mind constructs a perception and an interpretation of their surroundings. It’s exactly how they connect with the boat, an Object of Resistance that can be Accelerated by a laminar (align) and turbulent (synchronization) transfer of energy so that the whole system of attractants can be accelerated. Their efforts are reinforced by the feeling of weightlessness not with the realization of some material benefit. This is how the animal mind is organized, it cannot help but approach the world and solve problems through this kind of intelligence. It is not trying to solve a problem, (or deter predators) it is trying to accelerate an object of attraction/resistance into motion by aligning and synchronizing either with it, (Orca-boat), with each other in multitudes (starling murmuration) or via a midpoint (dog-horse-towel//Orcas-seal).
As Adrian Bejan points out in “Design In Nature” no matter how an organism swims, runs or flies, it all revolves around making a wave, and first picking up a column of air, water or body weight to displace mass in order to move forward. So it looks to me as if the Orcas are actually surfing with the wave of the boat, and I also suspect that within a starling murmuration there is a powerful drafting dynamic, that in the combination of a million wing beats they are creating a vortex of wind energy revolving around a Midpoint (the dark center mass of the flock) and which greatly increases the efficiency of each bird’s flight. I would imagine that the sudden fluxions of the flock create the strongest force of suction and which is the greatest thrill for each participant.
In all these videos; given the nature of emotion and the universal emotional makeup of all life, collectivized behavior becomes the Pavlovian Equivalence of free energy and the feeling of weightlessness. This is how evolution transpires as emotion and its mechanics of transfer integrates the behavior of animals with an improvement of the natural flows of energy, a trophic cascade. One Mind.
Thanks Kevin,
This is great stuff, and reading through your explanations, I could see how it relates to dogs and there behaviors, but I still have a lot of NDT studying to do I’m afraid.:-)
Would it be save to conclude though, that when the handler is able to find that particular wave in his dog, and tune in to that wave through his own actions,(like tuning guitar strings until they “match” and amplify each other)this will result in a solid dog/handler connection?
Ah, yes, weightlessness, waves, object of resistance…I will have to re-read your explanation several times to grasp it. But this was great fun!! I wish you would do this more often. I’ll bet everyone had fun. Thanks, Kevin.
Hmmm…lots of things are starting to piece together. While your theories are primarily aimed at the animal mind, are we really any different? Learning to trust my gut feelings rather than fighting it & over thinking things has been a big thing for me.
When you mention an individual getting free energy from coupling a wave, this again is the same for humans and why we can work better in a couple or team – the sum of the combined effort is greater than the sum of its individual parts kind of thing.
A clear example of this happened the other (very windy) day with my dog whilst walking up a large hill. I was marching on up the hill but he kept stopping as if he didn’t want to keep going up. After I also stopped & we had a bit of a laid-down belly rub, a push (for a chicken wing), and a good bit of tug with a stick, he obviously felt more synched up because he then happily marched on alongside me carrying the stick with tail held high, changing from a heavy laboured walk into a weightless bounce. Great to see!
Thanks for your thoughts Kevin, but more thanks due to my little old troubled rescue dog, without him & his problems I probably wouldn’t have learnt what I needed to learn at that time in my life, and things wouldn’t have become so clear. As long as I’m aware of his behaviour, Im aware of mine, he’s definitely my mirror!
P.s. your final paragraph, especially the last two words – One Mind, reminds me of a Bill Hicks quote parodying a newsreader – ‘Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the Weather!’
Thanks again
Flocks of birds flapping wings in a wave causing suction and synchronized movement: Awesome. I’ve been wondering about the mechanics of this since reading about group mind in relation to flock movements on another blog post here many months ago. Has this air flow been measured by anyone? I attempted to google it, but that just directed me back to this page.
This makes a lot more sense than, say, animal telepathy.