Concept development-Animal Telepathy Centre by Ayesha Anthony

COMMUNICATE ? How Animals

CONTENT WHO ANIMALS REALLY ARE THE ESSENTIAL CONNECTION DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS THE LANGUAGE BARRIER THE INBORN ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE HOW ANIMAL COMMUNICATE RESTORING THE TELEPATHIC CONNECTION OPENING TO TELEPATHY PREPARING FOR COMMUNICATION RECEPTIVITY VS. PROJECTION EXTENDED SENSE CHANNELS RELEASING EMOTIONAL BLOCKS ROLE OF DIET LOVE AND TELEPATHY SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

WHO ANIMALS REALLY ARE IN THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS, WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE WERE WITH THE ANIMALS, FOR TIRAWA, THE ONE ABOVE, DID NOT SPEAK DIRECTLY TO MAN. HE SENT CERTAIN ANIMALS TO TELL MEN THAT HE SHOWED HIMSELF THROUGH THE BEASTS, AND THAT FROM THEM, AND FROM THE STARS AND THE SUN AND THE MOON, MAN SHOULD LEARN.

-Pawnee chief letakota-lesa

HE WORD Animal comes from the Latin, Anima, which means life principle, breath, air, soul, and living being. Human and nonhuman animals have in common that they are a combination of body and spirit-biological forms animated by spiritual beings or essences. Many people have a hard time accepting the spiritual aspect of animals because they carry established notions that animals are objects or less than humans, even robotic creatures with blind instincts and no thoughts or feelings or power of choice. They may use these attitudes to justify or excuse cruel or insensitive treatments of other animals. For many humans the issue is clouded in that they regard themselves as merely bodies or genetic products without awareness of their basic spiritual essence. This can foster disrespect and inhumane actions towards other people as well. It becomes difficult or even impossible for people with this viewpoint to recognize the spiritual nature of other forms of life. The proof of the spiritual nature of human and nonhuman creatures alike is that when you address them accordingly, with respect and helpfulness, you can improve the condition of the whole being. The key element is recognizing the individual animal as a spiritual being who is inhabiting or enlivening a particular form. By using this perspective in communication and counselling, upsets and behaviour problems are resolved, illnesses and injuries are more readily healed, and the individual becomes more alive, aware and happy. This would not be possible if someone took a completely behaviourist stance, regarding the animal as a complex of automatic or instinctual behaviours with little or no intelligence. Dealing with all aspects of their beingphysical, emotional, mental and spiritual-yields fuller understanding and helpfulness towards all creatures.

EPARATION OF PECIES

ow do we separate ourselves from each other? By race, sex, size, species, belief systems…let us count the ways! Differentiation and separation are analytical functions that, when used in certain ways, can cause discord. When we emphasize differences instead of unifying qualities, such as our common essence and feelings, we can end up with varying degrees of domination, exclusion, harshness, and even cruelty to those perceived as different. You’ve probably heard and been subtly conditioned by statements about the separation between humans and other animals. Until recent years, ideas about other species’ inferiority were widely accepted. Now, however, many scientific researchers are recognizing and shedding fixed ideas that had prevented open observation, and they are coming up with different conclusions. One of these ingrained ideas was that animals were not intelligent or were greatly limited in brainpower compared to humans. They could not really think or make conscious decisions, as their lesser brain mass and complexity prevented that. Recent studies have revealed complex decision-making and problem-solving abilities in many species, even in those with relatively small brains. Then there was “tool using.” Only humans were considered evolved enough to create and use tools to survive. Now this ability has been noticed in species as varied as chimpanzees, birds, and ants. Another idea was that only humans could be altruistic-that is, do things for others without any self-serving reward in sight. Countless tales of animals of various species helping and saving humans and each other, despite danger to themselves, have refuted that notion.

NIMAL INTELLIGENCE ND AWARENESS

or centuries it was accepted that only humans used language and symbols. In recent years, much to the amazement of scientists, complex languages and use of symbols have been noted in a variety of species, from elephants to birds to bees. There is still a widespread belief that animals really don’t understand as much as we do about the world, and are unable to express what we can through understandable language, but those ideas are gradually undergoing transformation, as people connect with animals in deeper ways. Many people think animals lack-self-awareness and a sense of right or wrong, as in our systems of ethics and justice. However, modern researchers are seeing self-awareness and ethical concepts expressed in animals behaviour and communication. In addition, through direct telepathic communication, it becomes clear that many animals have a deep sense of who they are and their purposes in life. They also have their own systems of right and wrong, and they deal out justice according to their group customs. While their ethical constructs may be quite different from what we’re accustomed to, compare this with the vast differences in these concepts and systems among human cultures on the earth. Animals usually do not belabour and question their awareness as much as humans do in modern societies. The awareness and acceptance of their own consciousness is presented nevertheless-different in degree or quality in each individual, but present in all species.

All over the globe, there is a vast body of experience and learning that is not yet widely known. In particular, the scientific knowledge that man currently possesses cannot begin to encompass the wisdom held by plants and animals. The utilization of this wisdom is greatly to man’s benefit, and we can expect that sooner or later its fruits will merge with the mainstream of science. -The Christian Science monitor (January 2, 1992, p. 6) What do animals think about-only food? Are they intelligent? Do they remember the past? Can they reason? These are some of the questions people ask in curious or disbelieving tones. In human history, these kinds of questions have been posed about other cultures, races, or any other groups that are considered different, inferior, or simply incomprehensible. How do the people who ask these questions judge animal intelligence? They usually expect animals to prove their intelligence by using sane language, symbols, or expressions as we do. Experiments test animal IQ according to human standards and laboratory models. But animals don’t act or see or think in the human mode. Animal intelligence or ability must be perceived and understood in its own context and on its own terms.

THE ESSENTIAL CONNECTION

he cornerstone of many scientists’ work and the positive results they have experienced with animals over the years has been the connection with them as total beings. The acknowledgment of their essential spiritual nature has formed the core of our ability to understand each other. Nonhuman animals are not some lower forms of life, living with only automatic reactions or stimulus-response programming.

es, animals are different from humans. Various species have unique bodies, genetic backgrounds, and senses, and therefore they experience the world in their own particular ways. They are also individuals, who combine their physical species nature with their own unique mental and spiritual qualities and awareness to express them and fulfill their purposes in this universe. Approaching animals as objects or biological forms does not promote the deep understanding and equitable relationship that become possible when we are able to overcome our culturally ordained perceptions and allow ourselves to become fully aware of their physical, mental, and spiritual natures. While it’s good to study the biology and behavior books to learn about animals’ general and species-specific needs and patterns, this will not tell you all about an individual’s particular personality, ideas, hopes, purposes, and dreams. You can’t separate the physical from the spiritual aspect of a living being. We need to recognize the whole being when we approach an animal of any species.

hen you make the spiritual connection, it’s almost as if bodies disappear. They can be seen as vehicles of life in the physical and individual expressions of divine creation. When the essential, spiritual contact is madebeing to being-recognition of likeness, even oneness, occurs. It is magical to feel this deep affinity and respect. It engenders open communication, trust, and understanding. This type of relationship is not based on sentimentality, nor can it come about if we treat animals as babies or dependent underlings. It is a blend of compassion and kinship. If you have experienced this kind of soulful communication with another creature of any kind (including human), you are, by your approach or attitude, acknowledging your union or commonality as spiritual beings. Even if you don’t think about it or phrase it in these terms, the animals know.

his doesn’t mean that every animal is going to fall at your feet, be calm in your presence, or even want to communicate with you. They make their own choices, and they have their conditioned fears from centuries of experience of their kind plus their own personal experiences. Their first response may be to flee or attack according to their biological chemistry and their function in nature’s pattern. Some animals will be more aware of you as a spiritual being and have more ability to connect with you. Others don’t particularly want or see the need to relate to humans or any other species. However, I have found that if you remain quiet, attentive but unobtrusive, respectful, and willing to make a connection, most animals will be interested or at least will accept you as a part of their environment.

omesticated animals who have experienced humans positively all their lives don’t view humans as predators, and so they can often communicate more easily. You may find it easier to connect with companion animals than with wild creatures you have never met. Experiencing both can be a pleasure and a privilege. To have a wild animal accept your human presence and connect with you as a kindred spirit is a deep honor.

eople don’t regard other animals as humans in furred or feathered clothing. They are themselves: Individuals with different senses, forms of thinking, means of expressing themselves, and ways of seeing life. The joy comes when you connect spiritually and share each other’s worlds. Then there is no need for categories and hierarchies that separate and lead to condescension or alienation. You celebrate the experience of differences and rejoice in the oneness of your essential nature. This opens the door for learning from one another, sharing wisdom, and growing together in harmony.

DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS

here is a vacuum in human understanding: the absence of direct and unrestricted observation, communication, and understanding of other species. Many people do not see animals as intelligent and aware individuals. Yes, other animals think and perceive differently than humans. They fulfil different functions in the world. When humans transplant animals out of their natural environments, the animals can be inhibited in expressing their native intelligence. Human modes of thinking can seem very chaotic and confusing to a more direct and less analytical way of being. Humans often ask animals to do things that are alien to their nature, which can be difficult for them to understand. Animals may also panic at human-made machines, activities, and manners that offend

iving with humans can cause a kind of culture shock to an inexperienced domestic animal. For example, some people consider horses stupid or crazy if they bolt or get anxious when they see flapping plastic, hear rain on metal roofs, or jump at things that theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen before. Horses were not designed for the confinement of human-made structures and spaces, and their vision is very diďŹ&#x20AC;erent from human sight. Nature has adapted them to open spaces. Perception of strange movement is a signal of flee. If we see things from their viewpoint, their behaviour seems logical. It is a credit to their willingness to help us that they usually adapt to and do well in the alien situations to which humans expose them. We can demonstrate our intelligence by stretching out of what we are conditioned to see. Rather than looking at animals as dumb cows or birdbrains, we can stop and see what is actually there in front of our eyes, our ears, our minds, and our open hearts.

It takes clear observation and receptivity to appreciate the intelligence and expressions of another culture, group, or species, without trying to measure it by our own standards. The same behaviour that people evaluate in humans as rational and conscious is often regarded in animals as instinctive or unconscious. Dongs lift their legs and urinate and bark to mark their territory and announce their presence to other canines. People may view these behaviors as automatic stimulus-response mechanisms, over which dogs have no control

hen humans build fences, mark boundaries, or fight over territory, it is considered laudable or at least acceptable as a right to private property or expressive of individual or group identity. Dogs and other animals are assumed by many people to have no conscious reasoning behind their actions, while humans are considered to understand, or at least be capable of understanding, their own behavior. We limit our communication with animals to our own awareness and ability to understand. Animals watch and learn to communicate on a level thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s real or acceptable to us. Whether by body language-such as barks, nudges, scratches, tugs-or by transmitting emotions or intentions, or through deep spiritual communion. Many behavior books show not what the animals are capable of but what the bottom line is for humans in communicating with animals. When your animal companions resort to peeing on the bed or barking incessantly to communicate, you have probably missed the subtler levels of thought and emotion that convey their concerns and needs. Animals have to communicate on the level that you can perceive.

ccepted thinking in our culture tells people to expect little from animals in the way of rational understanding and conscious decisionmaking. There is no concept that animals possess awareness of the deepest truths and laws of the universe. Those people who deeply tune in to other species, without the intermediary of words and cultural limitations, experience animalsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; understanding that is beyond concern for survival needs. Whole vistas of sharing and learning with animals become available when people are open to mind-to-mind and heart-to heart contact with other species.

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

erbal communication can be a wonderful human ability, enabling complex ideas to be represented, viewed, and manipulated. It is also a major contribution to misunderstanding and removal from full communion with other humans. In interpreting human language, we can weave webs or layers of misunderstanding because they are abstracted from direct experience. We become entwined in things we think happened or what we think people meant or thought about our actions and us. Words can cause us to judge others, not by experience of who they are and what they really intend, but by what they say or how we interpret what they say. Language can be a barrier in resolution of problems in human interaction and in counseling. With nonhuman animals, counseling is direct. Questions and concepts can be conveyed rapidly back and forth telepathically. We can usually clear problems by getting directly to the feelings or issues involved. Animals generally do not wrap their experiences or memories in veils of abstraction or considerations of underlying meanings of the experience or the beings involved. They, too, may misinterpret, but they usually donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go through mental gymnastics over what their experience means to them or anyone else, as humans often do. Resent or deep-seated emotional or spiritual problems and traumas are usually simpler and faster to resolve in nonhumans than in humans. Obvious and permanent behavioral and emotional changes can be seen in minutes-as opposed to many hours, as in the counseling of humans. Often animals quickly realize why problems developed and what past decisions are affecting them now, and then can release old patterns and change dramatically.

umans take longer to figure things out. To get to the power of simple, direct experience and understanding of profound truths, humans often spend many hours or years through counselling or other means of education. Most animals live the truths of life directly, understanding them without having to expound verbally or write volumes about them. That’s why they can be our best teachers. The human mind can entrap itself in complexities that cripple action, eliminate much joy in living, and cause endless suffering to self and others. The accomplishments of using the mind as a tool to interpret and symbolize can be interesting and exciting, but language, at its best, expressions thoughts in ways that lead us back experience the fullness of life beyond words. Animal companions are capable of understanding our verbal abstraction by getting what’s behind them to what humans really mean. Their normal mode of communication is direct transmission of intention and feeling. Most animals do not make living and interacting as difficult or complex as humans do. They generally convey directly what they feel to each other and to humans, unless through close contact they have been influenced by the more indirect modes of human communication. Human thwarting of animal companions’ needs and goals can also cause them to develop psychological complexities and difficulties that mirror their humans.

ome people think it would be boring to live life so directly, with such innate understanding or intuitive expression. They think it would be too simple or limited. They want complex mental games. That’s part of the experience of being human. But getting lost in mental complexity can make people miserably alienated from the world, from self, and from others. They may then seek-through counselling, meditation, prayer, or other spiritual practices-to be free of mental patterns which inhibit the experience of pure joy in living. When we meet animals on their own ground and drop our acculturated human ways of judging and analysing and get beyond the limitations of human language, we see animal individuals of beauty, uniqueness, perceptiveness, intelligence, warmth, humour, and wisdom. These qualities appear as if by magic, where before the animals were perceived only as labeled objects, separated into neat categories that removed any possibility of relating to them as fellow beings. When we are able to “become” another of a different kind, we expand and become more whole. Another part of the universe is experienced. Another part of us is recovered. We are closer to the true divine nature, present in us all.

ountless tales of animals of various species helping and saving humans and each other, despite danger to themselves, have refuted that notion. For centuries it was accepted that only humans used language and symbols. In recent years, much to the amazement of scientists, complex languages and use of symbols have been noted in a variety of species, from elephants to birds to bees. There is still a widespread belief that animals really don’t understand as much as we do about the world, and are unable to express what we can through understandable language, but those ideas are gradually undergoing transformation, as people connect with animals in deeper ways. Many people think animals lack-selfawareness and a sense of right or wrong, as in our systems of ethics and justice. However, modern researchers are seeing self-awareness and ethical concepts expressed in animals behavior and communication. In addition, through direct telepathic communication, it becomes clear that many animals have a deep sense of who they are and their purposes in life. They also have their own systems of right and wrong, and they deal out justice according to their group customs. While their ethical constructs may be quite different from what we’re accustomed to, compare this with the vast differences in these concepts and systems among human cultures on the earth. Animals usually do not belabor and question their awareness as much as humans do in modern societies. The awareness and acceptance of their own consciousness is presented nevertheless-different in degree or quality in each individual, but present in all species.

ll beings have the inborn ability to communicate with and understand each other. All or most young children can experience mental or telepathic communication with others of any species. It’s the main way, along with physical gesture, that they communicate before they learn language. However, when children learn to speak, they tend to inhibit their ability to communicate through thought, since the speaking ability is most validated and encouraged by adults and get the most attention. So the telepathic ability begins to fade, as any function can when it is not used. In addition, parents and other adults often invalidate a child for any statement like “the dog told me that she has a tummy ache” This is made light of as “imagination” or punished as lying or exaggeration. Obviously, most children learn quickly that the ability to listen to and receive thoughts from animals is not desirable or in fact does not exist. They soon suppress the ability, or it disappears, as you cannot retain an ability that you don’t believe exists or is impossible.

HE INBORN ABILITY O COMMUNICATE

hey may then cease to regard their fellow animals as thinking and feeling beings. Compounding this is a general failure to teach children how to handle animals gently and learn their physical needs. If children mistreat animals, they further separate themselves from wanting to know or understanding their spiritual connection with animals. Even when they are very young, children may start making fun of anyone who might mention a mental or spiritual experience beyond what is rigidly accepted as “normal”. They eliminate what they learn from adults as acceptable beliefs and behaviour. Later In life some fortunate individuals will open up to the fact that mental and spiritual qualities or dimensions beyond the ordinary do indeed exist. They can begin again to experience these qualities by following the successful methods practiced by others throughout the ages in order to recognize to regain innate mental communication abilities.

A Personal Experience from the Author of the Book “Animal Talk” - founding pioneer Animal Communication Specialist, PENELOPE SMITH

never lost the ability to communicate with animals. When adults or other children invalidate my experience of telepathically receiving messages from animals, I decided that it is best to keep these things to myself. One of my mother’s favourite expressions about me was that I had an “active imagination” and that I was “stubborn as a mule”. Perhaps both these qualities helped me to retain my telepathic communication capacity. I did not want to lose the trust and warmth and understanding I had with my animal friends or betray our mutual awareness of their intelligence and shared communication. This was too precious to me to let it to be spoiled by others’ unawareness. So I continued to curl up with Fritzi, my cat, and know that we understood each other, or enjoy Winkie, my parakeet siting on my glasses, delicately preening my eyebrows as I did my homework. I spent hours in the park quietly talking to birds and butterflies to get them to land on my hands. I let them know that I wouldn’t hurt them, and I was thrilled when they responded by getting close to me. When I grew up and left home, for years I had no animal companions of my own, since I was moving around or at college. So I didn’t pay much attention to my ability to communicate with animals. It stayed tucked under the surface, much as the knowledge of a foreign language might, until you meet a person who speaks that language. I studied the social sciences hoping to learn more about understanding and helping to improve the condition of human beings, which has always been a basic purpose of mine. In 1971, I was again in the position to have animal companions. I had also acquired much desired knowledge and practical methodology to help the human mind and spirit by training and working as a counselor.

y ability to communicate with animals took on a new dimension. Besides been able to talk and listen to animals, I had acquired tools to help them. I found that the same techniques for helping people release past traumas, relive emotional upsets, and handle problems and mental blocks helped animals also. My first animal client was Peaches, a small black and white female cat who was left with me when her person could no longer care for her. She was definitely a “scaredy-cat”. She would run and hide from people and was afraid of other cats in the neighbourhood. A few weeks after her arrival, she came in with a bloody bite on her back, where another cat had attacked her. I clean and put ointment on it, expecting it to heal with no problem. Peaches however had other ideas. As soon as it would scab over, she would scratch it open. Bandages and soothing preparations were to no avail, as she was determined to get at that wound. The bloody area was no longer the original half-inch bite, but now extended two or three inches, and the hair around the area was falling out. She looked gruesome, and my roommates were beginning to complain about doing something with that cat. So I sat with Peaches across from me on a chair and decided to counsel her as I would a human being in trouble. I asked her specific questions about the physical trauma and her feelings, and she answered me telepathically. She relayed to me many mental pictures of other cats scaring and attacking her. By facing up to these scaring incidents, she released a lot of emotional charged and felt much better. We continued with our counseling session, and she discovered that keeping the wound there and making it worst was actually a solution to the problem she felt of being afraid of people and other animals. She had figured that if she made her body very ugly, people and cats would stay away from her. It was working, though making her life miserable in the process. When she uncovered and fully brought to her awareness this subconscious decision, she visibly became very peaceful and purred happily.

he remarkable results of this session were that, by the next day, her wound had scabbed over and in about one week the hair had grown back so you couldn’t tell that she had ever been hurt. Even more amazing was that Peaches was a changed individual. No longer did she run away when anyone entered the room, but instead she curled up on their lap and purred! The cats in the neighbourhood no longer singled her out for attacks. She didn’t attract that anymore. I learnt that not only do animals think, feel, understand and communicate, but also that the principles and methods used for alleviating human mental blocks and increasing harmony in living could bring incredible improvements to other species as well. I did not immediately hang out a shingle as an “animal communication specialist”. My work as human counsellor and my own spiritual expansion continued. In 1976, I pursued an area of interest that I had long abounded, the field of dance, and began to perform and teach dance as my main occupation

owever, after doing successful animal consultations among friends, the word of this skill spread, and my work with animals became more than a sideline. In 1977, I officially became a professional animal communication specialist by charging fees for my services. Dance was still my main focus until 1979, when I travelled and trained other instructions in my movement techniques and then wrote several books on dance and body movement. As my emphasis shifted more to working with animals, and the results of my work became known, I was interviewed for hundreds of radio stations nationwide, appeared on TV programs, and in newspapers, and wrote articles for various publications. Since that time I have consulted with thousands of animals and their people and given many lectures and workshops on communication with animals.

COMMUNICATE ? How Animals

HOW ANIMALS COMMUNICATE

opular psychology promotes some common but insightful notions about animal communication and intelligence: because most animals have less complexly structured brains than humans, they therefore have less intelligence and no real emotions or reasoning power, and communicate only in rudimentary ways, such as grunts, barks, whistles and other body signals. These notions are changing as scientists continue to discover the complexity of meanings present in the sounds and gestures of creatures from bees to birds to apes. Many are beginning to observe, with less human-centered bias, the intricate and demonstrably intelligent behavioural response of animals. There is, of course, much more to learn from the animals themselves by direct telepathic communication, the universal language. That will come with increased observation skills and awareness. Intelligence, according to Webster’s dictionary, is the ability to learn or understand from experience, or the ability to respond quickly and successfully to a new situation. Using this definition, I’m sure you can think of many examples of animal intelligence, such as incidents of cats or dogs that have travelled thousands miles to find the people who left them behind when they moved, or the resourcefulness of rats, raccoons, coyotes, and other wild animals in surviving among human habitation when people have taken over their natural environment.

t does not make sense to measure animal intelligence by the often-assumed standards of how closely an animal can resemble human behavior. Animals have different genetic makeups and physical capacities. Their responses vary according to their type of body, experience and environment. One of the main physical differences that enables humans to accomplish many tasks and express their intelligence in ways that other members of the animal kingdom cannot, is extremely flexible and highly developed hands and nervous systems that allow a wide range of manipulative ability. The fact that animals cannot write letters or play the guitar does not mean that they are not intelligent. Are humans considered less intelligent because they cannot fly like birds or run as fast as cheetahs? These are the results of body differences, not mental capacity. The same spiritual being inhabited a human body and using it to design and build houses would create a nest of leaves and twigs if dwelling in a bird’s body. She or he would still be the same intelligent being, but would be using a different body according to its physical capacities. While the human body may enable more complex or varied ways to express intelligence, the complexity and diversity of other creatures’ expression are also amazing. Differences among species are definitely present. This does not necessarily imply superiority or inferiority. We are all different, which makes life so interesting.

eing develop and use their bodies according to their genetic capacities and the situations with which they are faced. Some do it more successfully or intelligently than others. Most domesticated animals have mastered the art of living with humans so well that they fit among, influence, and, in some cases control human activity. Individual animals differ from each other in levels of intelligence, sensitivity, and ability to communicate well, as do individual human beings. Some are more aware and more interested than others, and it is easier to engage in communication with them. Some are really into being a dog, cat or horse, for example, and follow the body’s impulses and genetic heritage closely. Others set their own styles as individuals in addition to how their bodies naturally tend. They are willing and able to control their body impulses and adapt to the situation in which they live, such as being more like the people around them. Most animals are willing to come into a closer relationship if they are understood as they are and approached from their level of awareness. In some cases they are more perceptive or aware than the humans who attempt to understand them. Animals obviously communicate through physical action, but they also communicate through direct thought, feeling, intention, and mental pictures, both among each other and with humans. People receive the telepathic messages to the degree they are listening, can tune in, or are perceptive to them.

hile I often use physical contact to help establish rapport and to assists animals in distress, I communicate mainly telepathically or by direct thought and feeling transmission, silently or accompanied by spoken words. Though many animals understand words, owing to familiarity with human language, they innately get your intentions, emotions, images or thoughts behind the words, even if the words themselves aren’t totally understood. Since animals are not forced into the idea that words or symbols are the only or ultimate way to communicate, they do not lose their innate telepathic sensitivity and ability as most humans do. When they communicate their thoughts and feelings to me, I get what they mean and usually translate their communication into words instantly, as that’s what I and other humans are accustomed to. When they are describing a scene or something that happened to them, I see the scene from their viewpoint, mentally perceiving and feeling the sights, sounds, emotions and other senses as they experienced them. If you have ever had the experience of knowing what some other person is thinking, perhaps even saying aloud the same thought simultaneously, or really getting another person’s mental pictures or feelings, you’ll get the idea of how I communicate with animals regularly, and how you can too.

nimals do understand what you say or think to them. That is, if you have their attention and they want to listen (just like anyone else). One of the ways some animals get away with not having to do what you want is by pretending that they don’t understand. Often humans perpetuate this by considering that their dog ( cat, bird, horse, tortoise ) is dumb, doesn’t understand anything, or can’t really feel like they do. Some people even name their animal companions “Dodo” or “Dimwit” or some other insult to their intelligence. Many animals, like many children, play the game you expect from them, and act dumb. Then they don’t have to be responsive to your demands. The interesting thing is that the more you respect animals’ intelligence, talk to them conversationally, include them in your life, and regard them as friends, the more intelligent and warm responses you’ll usually get. Beings of all kinds tend to flower when they are showered with warmth and understanding from others. I observed an interesting example of this at a boarding school I visited. There I met an Irish wolfhound, whom I immediately perceived as very knowing and perceptive about what was going on in the area. However, the consensus from the people around was that he was very stupid and couldn’t do much of anything right. This was evidenced, I was told, by his slow response to doing anything anyone told him and the way he stupidly ambled into the school and lounged on the rugs and cozy furniture, even though any smart dog would know from the number of people who reprimanded him that such actions weren’t okay.

hen they told me in his presence that he was really stupid, he flashed me with the thoughts, “Don’t let them know what I’m doing-it’s my game.” (Note that these words are my translation of the dog’s concept, Sometimes animals will transmit verbal phrases that they have picked up, but most of the time the words are an approximation in human language of the thought and feeling sent.) I laughed, as this dog was very much in control of what people thought of him and the life he was leading, doing only what he wanted to, watching everyone around him, observing and learning from their activities. Despite his warning, I felt it my duty to clear up this invalidation of his mental capacity, and so I explained that he was very intelligent and knew exactly what was going on and what people told them. He was little angry with me for telling on him, since people might expect more of him, but couldn’t bear the lie of his dumbness to be perpetuated. I communicated further with him later when he was willing to talk, and he decided it might be a nice thing to be more responsive to people and make their lives more cheerful. I still chuckle when I think of how he had everyone fooled and that’s not intelligent?

f course, nonhuman animals, like humans, can misunderstand a communication and not know what you are trying to say to them, especially if you are unclear on what you want from them. They can be distracted by what is occurring, especially by things attractive to their biological needs, like food smells or other animals, and not pay attention to your communication. You have to get their attention and communicate within the realm of their experience. Asking cats to play a piano concerto will probably not make sense to them, so they will not respond well to your request. You also need to like and respect animals and allow them to be the way they are-living beings who have their own desires and choices and are influenced by their particular genetic inheritance in varying degrees, as we all are. You can learn from your own animal friends, who usually ask from you only those things that are within your ability to provide. They like and accept you as you are. They generally love your attempts to communicate with them and really appreciate your affection and understanding. People often ask what kind of animal is the most intelligent. It’s hard to make a general statement, as different bodies have different functions. What would be considered intelligent in operating one kind of body would not be intelligent in handling another. More complex bodies with more highly developed brains seem to have more choices programmed into their “computers,” although I have experienced “advanced” communications from “lower” forms, such as insects-similar to J. Allen Boone’s experience with a fly he called Freddy, in his book (which I highly recommend) Kinship with all life.

hat animals do with the limitations of their type of body program varies among individuals of any species. In general, the larger animals and those who most easily demonstrate a willingness to communicate with humans and learn their ways are often considered more flexible, responsive, or intelligent-e.g., whales, dolphins, elephants, apes, horses, dogs, cats and other domesticated animals. However, one can also find very intelligent or wise beings in less complex forms on the body scale. For example, people have been amazed at the brightness and intensity of communication from members of my animal family, such as a box turtle, Marla, an anole lizard, Ginko, or a guinea pig, Cinnamon. No two whales, dogs, or cats are exactly alike in intelligence, communication level, or emotional response. Also, one’s own ability to perceive animals as fellow beings and to relate with them in an intelligent way might yield very different assessments. Some animals that were considered slow or stupid by some people, I have found to be wonderful to talk to, with many fine qualities that their people missed. The great thing is that we can all learn from each other. Individual people can demonstrate their own intelligence by willingness to observe, learn about, and understand animals better. People, of course, will vary in their willingness.

Opening To

TELEPATHY

ESTORING THE TELEPATHIC CONNECTION

hat is interspecies telepathic communication? “Tele” refers to distance, and “Pathy” refers to feeling. So, telepathic communication involves the ability to feel another across a distance. It is not just a test of mental agility or ability reserved for a small percentage of the population that is especially gifted or sensitive. It is an inborn capacity of all species, including humans. More than anything else, telepathy is a connection, a direct link to the soul of all beings. It’s a mindful, yet “mind-less” understanding-a knowing of what the other is thinking, feeling and experiencing, so directly that one being almost becomes the other. Such contract is based on the recognition that all beings are intelligent and that they can understand, interrelate, and communicate. It’s the experience of receiving direct thought transmission, images, feelings, and concepts from individuals of other species, repeatedly confirmed by often drastic changes in behavior and enhancement of cooperation, peacefulness, and closeness. It is not dependent on distance. Telepathic communication can occur between beings across many miles, through walls and other barriers. It is dependent on making the connection, tuning in and knowing with whom you’re communicating-similar to getting the right phone number or the proper radio station. Where Human and nonhuman beings walk together in mutual understanding, the nobility and individuality of both are called forth. Harmony, dignity, and mutual respect usually replace fear and aggression. Even skeptical people can see the difference after a true telepathic exchange wherein rapport has occurred between humans and other species.

n example of the imbalance of many human-pet relationships was brought graphically to my attention when I appeared on a television talk show in New York City. The hostess of the show had two Lhasa apso dogs who were scheduled to be interviewed by me on the show. I met them beforehand, and the hostess asked me how they seemed. She considered them her babies and desperately wanted them to be okay. Her voice and eyes were filled with anxiety as she said she hoped they would not say anything bad about her on television. She depended on her dogs for love, for life, and there couldn’t be anything “wrong” with them. I left the dogs trying to fill her need, and being totally dependent on her. She was seeking to get the wholeness from them that she lacked in her hectic, disconnected life. The interview was cut for lack of time before the dogs had a chance to communicate and “tell all” Animals can get caught up in their humans’ imbalances, because of their dependency and also their deep desire to serve and help their human friends. Sickness can result when the animal attempts to heal or take away human misery or to mirror it. Sometimes they just feel its vibration because of their proximity and devotion. “Pets” are often prevented from living a life close to their own nature. They aren’t able to release imbalances easily if they do not have access to fresh air, exercise, a whole food diet, natural exploration, and independence. Divorced from nature, they may suffer from the same “dis-eases” that their people endure. How different the relationship is when our domestic animal friends are viewed as fellow spiritual beings of different forms and allowed to live their own lives and express their own dignity, while still enjoying a mutual companionship with us and each other. Many people who meet members of my animal family notice how relaxed, happy, and independent they are. They come and go and create relationships of their choosing with their own species, humans, and other species.

hey are regarded as wise, intelligent individuals, who are cats, dogs, rats, chickens, horses and more-the “anima” in animal-the spirit, soul, life essence. They act as whole, individual characters with their own dignity, quirks, rights, needs, expressions, and understanding of the balance of our family or community. We adapt and change according to our mutual growth and understanding. We listen to each other and work out agreement in accord with our needs and environment. It’s a fun place to be for all of us. As people divorce themselves from nature, from the spiritual essence that flows through all of life, and place great emphasis on pursuing material goods for status, their relationship with their fellow creatures of different forms often assumes the shallow character of owner and possession. Without the spiritual connection, even when they profess love for their “pets,” they may neurotically try to get from them all that they have given up in their own artificial quest. The animals mirror their misery. When people give their animal friends more credit, the animals appreciate it deeply, perk up, and cooperate more. As people begin to restore their ability to listen fully to their animal companions, problems get solved without forceful and strange solutions, such as sticking animals’ faces in their own excrement or beating them. Practicing the way of connection and communion takes some effort. It represents a shift from frenetic, materialistically oriented lifestyles to calmer, more observant, caring ways of life-a profound leap in consciousness for many. The benefits are immense for all of us.

OPENING TO

TELEPATHY

s a very young child, I sensed what people were thinking and feeling, whom they were deep inside, and why they were the way they were. I observed how people closed themselves off to seeing what was right before their eyes; I knew that animal’s intelligent beings who could understand each other and me, and that we were alike, except for our physical appearance. My mother insisted that I had a very active imagination-and I did. I could “see” thoughts, intentions, and images behind words and physical forms. I felt a whole world of spirit around me-angels, guides, saints, fairies, and other disembodied spirits. I wondered why others couldn’t see or didn’t want to see. I was spirit, and I knew spirit was everywhere, in everything, and surrounding everything. Throughout my childhood, our family had a parade of animal companions: goldfish, turtles, parakeets, cats and dogs. My closest animal friends were Winky, a blue parakeet and Fritzi, a male calico cat. Winky was my companion when I was about eleven years old. Through homework assignments, he perched on my glasses and preened my eyelashes and eyebrows. We gave each other hours of loving companionship, and I delighted in caring him. One day Winky bit me hard on the nose, and I reacted in shock and pain by hitting him. I immediately regretted my action, as the blow slammed him against the wall. I tried to make it up to him, but Winky never forgot, and our relationship was irretrievably altered. Soon afterwards he began to have seizures, flailing around his cage and spitting blood. I took him to the pet store, where they gave him medication and charged me an enormous amount of my hard-earned allowance, but it didn’t help. The seizures got worse, although he acted normal when out of the cage. Winky bit me again, and we fell further apart.

didn’t have the counseling skills then to handle the emotional cause of his illness, but I knew the seizures were because of our upset. My older brother agreed to take Winky to his home and take care of him. Winky never had a seizure again while he lived for many years with my brother. I always remembered our happy times together, and along the way the wound between us healed. Our cat Fritzi liked all of us in our family of eight people, especially my father. My mother complained that we kids couldn’t really love him as we said we did if we didn’t clean his little box, in my bedroom, Fritzi and I became very close. I would curl up in bed in the same scimitar shape that Fritzi assumed, and we’d sleep together like two crescent moons. We took refuge in our bedroom to avoid the frequent parental conflicts accentuated by alcohol. Fritzi and I understood each other deeply. When I left home to enter the convent and start my college education in September 1964, Fritzi did not fare well. Beginning the first day after I left, he had several bouts of intestinal and kidney disease and he died months later. Years later I took a college psychology course, which presented animal (including human) behavior from a mechanistic viewpoint, focusing on experiments with rats in mazes and dogs salivating. I decided to adopt the materialistic viewpoint that was expresses in this type of course and in the college students around me. Not only would I take the “psyche” (spirit) out of psychology as the college courses did, but I would take the spirit out of life and assume, as others did, that all of us, of whatever species, were nothing but material forms, created by accidental particle collision and ending in dissolution of molecules. By Penelope Smith

ith spirit denied, I immediately felt the despair, the drabness of existence that many people in our culture experience. I felt there was no point to anything, no purpose, no color, no feeling, just randomly organized motion. I realized why many college students rushed to bars and filled themselves up with “spirit” from bottles. They were empty, and life was bitter and meaningless. They needed some escape, some way to release and connect with the larger picture, even if it meant oblivion. I understood why my parents, who denied themselves as spiritual beings and felt such fear and hate, were alcoholics. I understood why my mother was often so disturbed by my presence, especially my singing and dancing, which affirmed the true self that she tried to deny. I also understood what leads some people to the desperate pursuit of material success or to suicide: a perspective that made life look so bleak and unhappy. I could sustain the grim, behaviorist, materialistic attitude for only a few days. Then I returned to a revitalized understanding of myself and all of life around me, infused with spirit, love for life, and hope for harmony. This is the reason I couldn’t renounce telepathic communication with animals and other spirits. It was too true, too real, and too much fun-and I couldn’t betray my animal friends by denying their inner life, thoughts, and feelings, which they so graciously and happily shared with me. So I didn’t, and the ability never died. For those of you who have long buried the natural ability to connect with others telepathically and have accepted the cultural conditioning that this is not possible or is hocus-pocus, unscientific nonsense, it may take time and practice to renew the freshness of outlook that is conductive to two-way communication with other species. Learn from little children to open your heart and mind: learn from the love of animals and all of life around you. This spiritual path that will require change, a turning over of many socially conditioned habits and patterns. More people every day are reconnecting with their ability to understand other species, but you may not be greeted in your home or at work with jubilation over your newfound ability, in fact, others may find it threatening that you can receive other animals’ thoughts, because it may mean you will be more receptive to human thinking, feeling, and intentions and less under their control. My feeling is that we may grow spiritually-not up or down, to different levels in unending hierarchies, but by extending outwards in a circular, encompassing way, to include and understand more of life. Instead of looking down at others “below” us condescendingly as we evolve, we enfold life in all its forms with more compassion, understanding, grace and wisdom.

PREPARING FOR

COMMUNICATION

o regain the telepathic connection requires that you dismantle learned, culturally conditioned obstacles to your native ability to connect, communicate, and understand animals. Allow yourself to open the door and move along the path to your own potential for reconnection. In my workshops, we apply principles that help open that door. We will review some of them here. To be receptive and listen to anyone, of whatever species, requires a quiet attention, calmness, that many humans in our industrialized commercialized cities and revved-up lifestyles have displaced long ago. We live in an age of speed, where people are constantly being fed one jarring stimulus after another. Traffic, crowding, crimes, television, and advertisements all jam our senses, our receptive equipment, so that we shut down our sensitivity to the world around us just to survive. We learn not to pay attention. Many advertisers think that we have to be slammed with information, assertively and repetitively, because we’re so overwhelmed with incoming information. So we build psychic walls. We cease to see, hear, feel, smell, much of what around us. We listen to no one, often including our own inner selves and feelings. This is a real legacy to overcome. Animals are naturally able to tune in telepathically with each other and with any other species. They can receive thoughts, mental images, emotions, intentions, and messages when they are willing and attentive. What about humans? How can we restore our birthright, lost through social conditioning-the ability to telepathically communicate, to send and receive communication outside the confines of human language? As babies and small children, we were open to the world, eager and curious-open to the sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts of all the beings around us. Children often talk to their animal companions and know that the animals understand and can communicate back to them. What happens to adults that they stand there dully and don’t see and hear the communication of animals? Humans are the most socially conditioned of all species. In our culture at this time, telepathic communication is not generally accepted openly. We learn our verbal language, and that’s supposed to suffice. We are not supposed to know anything other than what we receive through the confirmation of words. This is odd, for if you don’t understand the thoughts and feelings behind the words-the true meaning of what people communicate-then you don’t really understand the words anyway. In true communication among people, dictionary definitions are not enough. Human language, as removed as it may be from direct thought transmission, requires reception of thoughts and feelings to be complete. Whether we realize it or not, we all, to some degree, telepathically communicate with each other. We lose or cover up our telepathic communication skills to the degree we consider it impossible or undesirable.

ince we are also socialized to believe that animals cannot think-at least, not we do-and are below us, we lose touch with them on this very direct and deep level. Other species, which are not socialized out of the ability, never lose off telepathic reception, and we are the losers, the lesser skilled. We limit ourselves, and because we don’t understand the animals, we call their behavior and intelligence limited-a turned-around state of affairs, to be sure. Modern life in general motivates us to close off our sensitivity and deny the subtle realities, the communication of thought and feeling all around us. We end up with a manic impulse to keep up with all the expectations of the culture around us, so that we rarely or never have a quiet mind, a peaceful outlook, and a calm receptivity. So the first step in learning to communicate with anyone is to calm the buzzing of thoughts in our own heads. We need to slow down, let the thoughts run through their course, and become calmly aware of the environment and the beings -in it. You can’t receive another’s thoughts if your own mind is too busy. If you are constantly analyzing and projecting your own thoughts and images, you won’t see what’s there, you won’t be able to receive and learn from others, and you won’t understand another’s viewpoint. You need to shift the hectic mode of approaching the world and come to quietude. Whatever helps you to relax and be aware-exercise, meditation, music-can start you on the road to receptivity. When you do slow down and tune in, you may find yourself much more aware of the nature of life around you-the behavior, habits, feelings, energies, and the spirit or essence of life forms. You may find, as you continue to spend time in a quiet, receptive mode with other species, that they initiate communications with you. Generally, when a person is listening, others enjoy “talking” with them.

RECEPTIVITY VS.

PROJECTION

ow for the big question asked by most people who are learning to communicate with animals: how do you know you’re getting communication from the animal and not just projection of your thoughts or feelings? First, you need to be quiet, not thinking or expecting anything in particular, but being calm and receptive with an open heart and mind. Then, when another wishes to communicate something to you, or you ask them about something, you will receive their thoughts and feelings, not your own. Your own thoughts do not intrude, but stay in their place in the background. You need to practice maintaining a quiet receptiveness. In our culture, we have been trained to use predominantly left-brain skills-to analyze, categorize, judge, and project, to keep up with the pace and be sharp-witted. For many people, these habits are not balanced easily with right-brain openness to the whole picture. This initial and essential approach is the opposite of jumping in and figuring things out sequentially. It’s backing up, letting yourself breathe deeply and slowly, experiencing the rhythms of other beings and the universe around you. Then, their thoughts and feelings come in like waves on the beach, with no resistance or thrusting back from you-just a quiet acceptance and understanding and willingness to learn more. If you try too hard to receive communication or expect it to arrive in a certain form, you can miss its simplicity and immediacy. Allow it to be as easy as having a conversation with a dear friend. Sigh like the wind-open your arms, your chest, your heart-and all creatures will hum to you. They will answer your questions about themselves and the nature of the universe. You’ll see for yourself that all of us have our deepest natures, the universal truths, and the essence of spirit in common. We can learn from the smallest creatures, whether microbe or insect, to the largest whale or elephant.

he animals are practiced in catching your thoughts, images, or intentions. How will you get what they are “saying”? Telepathic communication comes across in different ways. You may detect emotions, images, impressions, thoughts, intentions, messages, feelings, or energies in different forms, which unfold in ways that you can learn to interpret or understand. Each person has sense channels by which she or he most readily accesses interspecies communication. Many people are able to receive feelings or emotions from others and get a sense of what’s going on with them. Some people are more visually oriented and receive mental images or impressions of colors, scenes, objects, or events. Others “hear” messages, sounds, voices, words-that is, they receive auditory impressions. Some pick up the animal’s thoughts or concepts, which they can translate or express in words. Some get smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and physical feelings that they experience in the animal they are communicating with or they sense in their own bodies while in contact with the animal. Some people just “know” what the animal is feeling or thinking: they get a direct perception or knowing, which they can translate into words, images, and feelings. All modes of reception are possible, even experienced during the same communication, as a complete package of sensory impressions. As you continue to practice receiving telepathically, you may find that more sense channels are open to you, and you may receive communications in any or all of these forms. The more complete your reception of the communication from another animal, the more easily you are able to grasp its whole significance or the depth of its meaning.

EXTENDED

SENSE CHANNELS

elepathy does not always translate in the same mode from sender to receiver. If an animal is sending visual images, and you are more receptive to emotions or feeling, you may pick up the message in an emotive way and understand that. Or the animal may be sending a thought message, but you receive and understand is as impressions and sensations. Just as a radio is designed to receive signals and translate them into sound, you may perform a similar translation. It doesn’t matter as long as there is understanding of what was communicated. How animals transmit is not necessarily a function of their species’ physical predispositions, such as greater acuity in sight or smell. Telepathy is a mental or spiritual ability, not limited to bodily organs. When people begin learning to communicate telepathically, they often receive impressions that they don’t know how to interpret or that seem fragmented. Learn to take what you get, and let it gel or unfold. You can also ask the animal more about what their communication means, or for more details. As you gain experience with a multitude of beings, you become more able to make sense of what you get, and it fits better into the total picture. Every communication and every individual is unique and should not be lumped together or passed off as “just like the last one” if you wish to fully understand that moment and that individual’s unique expression. You will see patterns stemming from species or breed similarities and unity among spirit of all forms, but be careful about categorizing or stereotyping anyone’s communication. Be ever open to surprises, or you may deny yourself understanding by ceasing to truly listen.

RELEASING

EMOTIONAL BLOCKS

eople often find that emotional upsets with, or losses of, animals in their past cause them to block telepathic communication with animals now. They are afraid to get close again and worry that what the animal says will bring back pain that they have buried or not fully faced. Opening up to others on a deep and direct level is a process of growth, requiring the release of accumulated emotional baggage that is in the way. Fear of animals and what they might do to you can inhibit opening to their communication. True communication brings understanding and replaces fear. Except for a few animals who are potential predators of humans, or ones acting in defense of self, their offspring, or their territory, most encounters with animals they dislike, have an allergic reaction to, or fear seem to be drawn to them. What you fear or resist may “dog” (or “cat” or “spider”) you until you accept it. When you immediately withdraw from something, you create a vacuum that seems to attract what you are trying to avoid. Animals are very good at picking up emotions, especially strong ones like fear. Some animals will respond by wanting to comfort you and help you through your fear. Others perceive there might be some danger or something you’re hiding behind the fearfulness and want to guard their people or territory from you and may even attack. Others just accept you the way you are, and attempt to give you warmth and love.

f you are simply honest with them about your feelings of thoughts, most animals respond by being honest and helpful with you. Animals know and respond to the intention behind your words or appearance, so you might as well be honest and direct with them in the first place; and then you’ll get through your misgivings and more readily establish rapport with them. Many people have found that changing their attitudes towards animals is the first step to being receptive to what animals have to communicate. People have reported that once they changed their ideas about animals as things or underlings or babies or soulless or uninvolved or inferior-regarding them instead as brothers and sisters, with respect and appreciation-they not only related more positively to the animals, but also the animals responded more positively to them. Negative attitudes towards animals can be so pervasive and unexamined. People often don’t realize until after they hear about animal intelligence and awareness how neglectful, disrespectful, and even abusive they have been. How wonderful it is to establish or revitalize the deep communication that is possible with our fellow travelers of other species.

ver the years of counselling people and training others in telepathic communication with animals,scientists have noticed that poor diet, especially overconsumption of sugar, can block telepathic reception. Very sincere people who love animals may find that they have great difficulty in getting animalsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; messages when they themselves are improperly nourished or addicted to sugary foods. They run into exhaustion, mental blackness, or even black out when they try to deeply tune into an animal who is communicating to them. They may also feel uncomfortable about being alone or doing quiet meditation, and must keep busy. Some people think that they can concentrate on spiritual practices and advance spiritually while ignoring their bodies. They may consider the body and its impulses to be a lower or less important aspect of self, or they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like their bodies and want to deny their physical nature. These attitudes may result in a painful existence. Part of our spiritual task is to care for our vehicle, or temple of the spirit, and enjoy being incarnate on the earth. Animal lovers may find it helpful to relate to their bodies as their nearest and dearest animal companions that need loving care, good food, and physical exercise to be happy and give good energy in return. Many people may have to work with emotional or mental conditions that are affecting their dietary decisions before they can permanently change.

However, most mental and spiritual counseling does not have deep or lasting effects without first paying attention to the basic physical needs of the body for good diet and exercise. It takes knowledge of the body and personal discipline to improve on all levels. A wholesome diet geared for your particular body type and individual needs help you stay in balance and be consistent and clear in your telepathic work with animals.

ROLE

OF DIET

eople can get irritable, moody, erratic in behavior, and spaced out if they ignore their bodies and try to just focus on the spiritual realm. Perhaps you have met people who are like that. Regular consumption of a large amount of sugar in your diet is a proven way to weaken your bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s energy flows and immune system. While temporarily pumping blood sugar levels up and increasing energy, eating a lot of sugary foods exhausts the vital organs that are responsible for keeping blood sugar balanced. Energy gets blocked, drained, or dispersed in the body, which invites dis-ease. The energy current through the chakras (energy vortices) from the base of the spine to the top of the head is short-circuited, so that clear perception and reception may be impaired. Excessive consumption of caffeine in coffee or colas can restrict or narrow perception, making it difficult to get the whole picture of what animals are communicating, and who they are. Other nonnutritive substances have other effects that can be detrimental to full, grounded connection and communication.

NO SUGAR C

ommunicating fully with other beings requires the grounding of energy through the whole body into the earth and free-flowing energy through all the nerve channels, the brain, and sense organs. When you are communicating on this plane, communication is not divorced from the body. Regular ingestion of devitalized food such as sugar, over-processed products, or any food that create an allergic or clogging reaction strains your nervous system and can create negative physical, emotional, and spiritual conditions. Consistent success in the field of interspecies telepathic communication, or in any field that requires sensitivity to othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; emotional, mental, and spiritual states, requires that one take good care of oneself on all levels. Finding the right balance of whole, fresh foods that work for your body, along with exercise and contact with all the elements of nature, is vital to learning and doing this type of work well. Integrating-or feeling as one being, whole in body, mind, and spirit-is our tack. Ask animals, especially wild ones, whose diet and exercise patterns have not been altered from their natural form by humans. They will teach you how to enjoy the body fully while deeply experiencing your spiritual nature.

& TELEPATHY

hat does love have to do with telepathic communication with other species? In college I devised a psychology experiment on mental telepathy showing that spontaneous telepathy involves people who are close and that their emotional connection provides a channel for telepathic communication. The emotional bond between people and their animal companions can create a deep telepathic knowing. However, many people find, whey they are working to regain their telepathic ability, that they cannot easily receive telepathic communication from members of their own animal family. They often receive much more easily from other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s animal friends. Why is this? We get back to that word â&#x20AC;&#x153;loveâ&#x20AC;? again. Practicing love as acceptance, respect, reverence, good will, caring, brother/sisterhood, and even devotion is an important part of making a connection that is sufficient to promote the deep sensing and reception consistent with telepathic contact.

ut many people are so emotionally attached that they fear or worry about what their animals could communicate to them. Their conception and demonstration of love is mixed with emotional dependency, sympathy in the form of pity, or a condescending view of animals as poor underlings. Panicky clinging and smothering with attention of affection can demean animals and prevent them from being themselves and growing. These are among the surest blocks to clear reception of what others are really thinking and feeling. All you get back are your own fixated or unclear emotional reactions.

his dark side or neurotic aspect of “love” can make it impossible for people to accept their animal companions as independent agents: spirits who have their own feelings, thoughts, and responsibility for their own lives. So, these people aren’t quite able to consider that animals have minds of their own, or that they can make a telepathic connection with them. It may take a lot of soul searching, counseling, and inner work to get through these attitudes, to create a more balanced relationship with others in one’s life. If you are going to help others through interspecies telepathic communication, it is necessary to grow into emotional and spiritual adulthood with regard to knowing yourself as a whole being. Then you can allow that maturity to manifest in the animals you meet, also. On the other hand, you can’t be coldly detached, unsympathetic, or insensitive. You need to feel love for others in the form of respect, acceptance, kindness, and communication you receive with balance, compassion, and wisdom.

find that most people who truly love animals are very considerate and open to the rest of the world. However, many animal people mention that they are able to relate better to animals that to people, or those they don’t really like or feel comfortable with people. It is hardest to love those who reflect, most accurately, our own unresolved issues. When we see our faults, challenges, problems, and conflicts mirrored in other humans. We may criticize, feel uncomfortable, or want to reject these people and find someone to relate to who does not arouse these feelings. The irony is that animals often take on and mirror our faults or dis-ease, or we attract those beings in animal form that have the same issues to deal with as we do. We may end up resenting or feeling uncomfortable with these animals, until we are willing to help each other to face and resolve or heal these issues. One humanity’s greatest challenge is to respect, accept, and feel compassion for-to love-one another. As you learn about telepathic communication and deepen your connection with animals, you may find this capacity brings self-knowledge and understanding and even more compassion for our fellow humans. It also appears that telepathic development is not a matter of developing some new power through mental exercise. It is more a matter of opening up to love.

S C I E N T I F I C

R E S E A R C H

TELEPATHY AS A FORM OF

ARCHAIC COMMUNICATION

t is a challenge to approach the problem of telepathy from the over-all problem of communication in animals and human beings.

We are aware that civilization changes human ties and mutual relationships. The simple warning signs of animals change into the thousand-fold means of sign-relationship between men, who use sound, gestures, words-in all their minute variations-to gain mutual contact by way of these symbolic activities. Nevertheless, we are aware that, despite our more or less objective sign-system of human communications, something primary is lost. The word “communication” binds our frame of reference and way of thinking too much to our artificial three dimensional, material system of communication. We require first a physical conception of how a communication comes through as something other than that which can be sensory perceived, before we can accept it without feelings of anxiety. But the whole exploration of the unconscious, the conversation and communication between the unconscious minds of analyst and patient-especially in later analysis-carries us a little beyond this prejudice.

BY A. M. MEERLOO, M. D.

ur common fear of unexplored fields of knowledge, asks for a certain premature explanation; that is, to reduce certain mysterious facts tentatively to a more common frame of reference. We are in general blind for archaic extrasensory impressions; but a blind man can be made very well aware, intellectually, about all the processes involved in seeing and about the transport of light waves. In physics we talk about energy without having any perceptionquality for energies.

Even energy is a relation, as is telepathy. What the medium may be, only the future may teach us. We are able already to measure different electric potentials related to different moods and different functions of the brain, but whether they deal with the transport of certain messages we do not know yet. In this connection, one may refer to Ferenczi’s remark (Ferenczi, 1926) that unlimited communication is a fact in the inorganic material world. In the different structured systems of energy and energy complexes, unlimited means of communication exist through a continuous exchange and transport of stimuli, electrons, ions, waves, and so forth. In death, previously living material is again united with the inorganic matrix. The problem of life is the problem of separation and structuration of energy complexes, as it seems, against the common laws of probability. The problem of life is the problem of that structuring principle, and perhaps the same observation applies to the stabilizing homeostatic principle of psychoanalytic theory.

ommunication between organic lives is, following Ferenczi, a unification tendency-a search for the lost union. We may compare it with the principle of “entropy” from physics or “Thanatos,” the catabolic force from psychoanalysis. Ferenczi explains communication as danger reaction, just as we find this phylogenetically in amphimixis, symbiosis, conjugation and sexual confluence as reaction to the threat of life.

Anti-catastrophic confluence and symbiosis plant is never isolated from soil and matrix. The changed the aspects of organic life on earth, and more differentiated the animal is, the more the communication should be a remnant of this anti- new generation becomes biologically cut off and catastrophic need for unity. separated from the older generation. Through these remarks are no explanation Love, fear and hatred are emotional traits of at all, they connect for us tentatively the relation animals, related to the need for maternal protection between extreme danger and the increased need for on the part of the new generation, in the process of communication. individuation; that is, in the process of being born again and again. In opposition to plants, a certain system of communication in animals is needed, because of Here we also meet some roots of the relation the gradually greater individuation of the animal. between transference and communication, and of the individual’s need for regaining contact with other individuals of the same generation. The common problem is how to bridge the vacuum between two living entities. Among lower animals- as in insects and birds-we know that there exist all kinds of communication unknown to man. Some seem to be sensory, others extrasensory.

A DOG THAT SEEMS TO KNOW

WHEN HIS OWNER IS RETURNING:

Preliminary Investigations aytee seems to know when PS is one her way, by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart even when no one else does, and even when she Journal of the Society for Psychical Research returns at non-routine times. In April 1994, PS read 62, 220-232 (1998)

INTRODUCTION

any dog owners claim that their animal anticipates the return of a member of the household, typically by going to wait for him or her at a door, window, driveway, or even at a bus stop (Sheldrake, 1994). Random household surveys have shown that 46% of dog owners have noticed this behaviour in England (Sheldrake and Smart, 1997) and 45% in California (Brown and Sheldrake, 1997). In both these surveys, most of the dogs showing this anticipatory behaviour were said to do so less than 5 minutes before the person arrived home. However, some of these dogs were said to react more than 10 minutes before the person’s arrival: in England 16% and in California 19%. When the dogs react only a few minutes before the person returns, their response may well depend on hearing or smelling them, or on hearing a familiar vehicle in which they are travelling. But for dogs that respond more than 10 minutes in advance, these explanations are less plausible. A motorist could be more than 10 km away, and sometimes more than 50 km away, when the dog reacts. If such anticipatory behaviour does not depend on hearing or smelling the person many kilometres away, then how can it be explained? One possibility is that it depends on routine times of arrival. Another is that the dog picks upsubtle cues from people at home who know when to expect the return of the absent member of the household. Finally, there is the possibility that this behaviour depends on a sixth sense, psychic bond or telepathic influence from the owner even when he or she is far away. A majority of dog owners believe that their animals sometimes exhibit psychic or telepathic powers (Sheldrake and Smart, 1997). There seem to have been no scientific investigations of this kind of anticipatory behaviour by animals, which is of potential interest both from the point of view of animal behaviour and psychicial research. In this paper we describe our preliminary investigations into the anticipatory behaviour of Jaytee, a male mongrel terrier owned by Pamela Smart (PS). Over several years, Jaytee has beenobserved by members of PS’s family to anticipate her arrival by up to half an hour, or even more.

an article in the Sunday Telegraph, a British newspaper, about the research that Rupert Sheldrake (RS) was doing on this phenomenon, and volunteered to take part. PS adopted Jaytee from Manchester Dogs’ Home in 1989 when he was still a puppy, and soon formed a close bond with him. She lives in Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester, in a ground-floor, flat, next door to her parents, William and Muriel Smart, who are retired. When she goes out, she usually leaves Jaytee with her parents. In 1991, when PS was working as a secretary in Manchester, her parents noticed that Jaytee used to go to the window almost every weekday at about 4.30 pm, around the time she set off to come home. Her journey usually took 45-60 minutes, and Jaytee would wait at the window most of the time she was her way. Since she worked routine office hours, the family assumed that Jaytee’s behaviour depended on some kind of time sense. PS was made redundant in 1993, and was subsequently unemployed. She was often away from home for hours at a time, and was no longer tied to any regular pattern of activity. Her parents did not usually know when she would be returning, but Jaytee still continued to anticipate her return. His reactions seemed to occur around the time she set off on her homeward journey. She usually travelled in her own car. The first stage in this investigation was the keeping of written records of by PS and her parents. In this paper we summarize these records, maintained over a period of 9 months. We also describe some simple experiments designed to test the possibility that Jaytee’s reactions depended on routine, or subtle cues from her parents, or sounds from her car. Further investigations have involved the videotaping of Jaytee’s behaviour during PS’s absences, and the results are described in a subsequent paper (Sheldrake and Smart, in preparation). Our findings indicate that Jaytee’s reactions cannot be explained in terms of routine, sounds of familiar vehicles or knowledge by PS’s parents of her time of return. They suggest that Jaytee’s reactions may well depend on an influence from PS herself that the dog detects in a manner currently unknown to science.

METHODS

rom May 1994 to February 1995, William and Muriel Smart, PS’s parents, kept notes on the time at which Jaytee went to the window apparently to wait for PS. They were familiar with his characteristic waiting behaviour and were used to noticing when he went to wait for PS. As usual, they disregarded times he went to the window to bark at passing cats, or for other obvious reasons, and noted down the time at which he seemed to them to be showing his characteristic anticipatory behaviour. The time at which Jaytee seemed to begin to wait for PS was written down at once, before PS returned, and hence before Mr and Mrs Smart knew when she had in fact set off to come home. From May 1 to July 6 1994, PS kept a record of where she was coming from, her means of transport and her time of arrival at home. From July 7 onwards she also recorded the time at which she set off to come home. PS travelled by car to a variety of destinations between 0.5 and 51 kms away as the crow flies, and also returned on foot or by bicycle. Since PS was in her 30s and had led an independent life for many years, her parents did not feel the need to know when she would be coming, nor worry about her when she was out. They did not usually know when she would come home, nor did she telephone to tell them. If she was still out when they went to bed, usually from 2300-2330 hrs, they put Jaytee back into PS’s flat. There was no one to observe him there, and hence all the recorded observations concern returns before 2330 hrs. PS’s returns took place at a variety of times in the morning, afternoon and evening, ranging from 1015 until after 2330 hrs. Although she usually travelled in her own car, on some occasions she came home in friends’ cars, her sister’s car and also by taxi. In some of the experiments decribed in this paper, PS came home at randomly-determined times, which were of course unknown to her parents. In some she returned in taxis. She took care to select different taxis on each occasion.

RESULTS

First series of observations: May-July 1994

n the period May 1 to July 6 1994, on 33 occasions PS went out and left Jaytee with her parents, when who noted down the time at Jaytee reacted, if he did On all but one of these occasions, PS went between 6 and 51 kms away and returned by car. On the remaining occasion she went 0.8 km away, and walked. Jaytee reacted 10 minutes or more in advance of PS’s return on 27 occasions, and showed no noticeable anticipatory reactions on 6 occasions, 3 of which were in the afternoon and 3 in the evening. In other words, Jaytee seemed to anticipate 82% of PS’s returns, and did not seem to anticipate 18%. When Jaytee did seem to anticipate PS’s return, he usually reacted 10 to 45 minutes in advance. However, on 3 occasions his reactions began much longer before she returned. On one of these occasions, he reacted 90 minutes in advance, but she was on an unusually long journeuy, taking about 120 minutes, so she was in fact on her way home at the time. But on 2 occasions, his reactions were 75 and 120 mins in advance, and her journey time was around 20 mins. So these reactions seem more in the nature of false alarms than reactions to her setting off. There was a statistically significant tendency for his reaction times to be shorter with shorter-distance journeys, and longer with longer-distance ones, even when the “false alarms”were included in the analysis (p=0.01 for the linear regression between reaction time and distance). However, for this series of observations, there was no precise record of when PS set off home, and the distance she was travelling was not an accurate measure of her journey time because some journeys were on busy minor roads, others were on motorways, and some were protracted by traffic jams. This made it hard to estimate how closely Jaytee’s reactions corresponded to the time she set off. In the following series of observations, this difficulty was overcome by PS noting down the time at which she set out.

Second series of observations: July 1994 February 1995

n the second series, as before, PS’s parents wrote down the time at which they thought Jaytee began to show his anticipatory behaviour. PS kept more detailed notes of her journeys, including a record of the times she set off to come home, and any comments her parents made about Jaytee’s behaviour. The journeys in this series were to destinations between 0.5 and 51 km away, and were made by car. Most (51 out of 63) were in PS’ own car (a Rover 213 Saloon) and12 journeys were in her sister’s car (a BMW 316). Some of her returns were in the moring and afternoon, but most were in the evening, between 2100 and 2300 hrs (Fig. 1). As before, she did not inform her parents at what time she would return.

In 20 cases Jaytee reacted at the time PS set off, or within 2 minutes of this time (Table 1). In 9 cases Jaytee reacted more than 3 minutes early. On one of these occasions, on 4/8/94, he was very unsettled owing to a thunder storm; on the other 8 , no special circumstances were noted. In 26 cases he reacted more than 3 minutes late. On at least two occasions, on 4/9/94 and 31/10/94, PS stopped to chat on the way home, so her journey took longer than it would have done otherwise. Figure 2 shows a plot of the dog’s reaction time against PS’s journey time. There is a clear tendency for Jaytee to react sooner when the journey is longer. In other words Jaytee’s reaction were related to the time that PS set off, as if he knew when she was she was on her way home.

As a linear regression, this relationship is highly significant (F= 43.3; p<0.0001). This analysis excludes the 8 occasions on which Jaytee did not react. When they are included, the relationship is still highly significant (F=39.1, p<0.0001). The residuals from the regression shown in Fig. 2 were plotted in a further linear regresion against the PS’s distance from home (as the crow flies) when she set off on her homeward journey. There was no significant relationship (F=0.827, p=0.4) between the residuals and distance, indicating that Jaytee’s reactions to PS setting off did not depend on distance, at least in the range 0.5-51 km.

DISCUSSION The dog’s anticipatory behaviour

he observations described in this paper indicate that on most occasions when PS returned home, her dog Jaytee seemed to know when she was coming. His characteristic anticipatory behaviour, sitting by the window as if waiting for her, was related to the time she set off to come home (Fig. 2). The statistical significance of this effect was very high (p<0.0001). From July 1994 to February 1995, on 20 occasions Jaytee’s reactions began within 2 minutes of the time PS set off. On 26 occasions his reactions were more than 3 minutes late, and on 9 occasions more the 3 minutes early. Is this variation merely a result of chance factors? Or is some of this variation due to biases in the way the data was recorded? Perhaps it is. At least two kinds of bias are likely to have influenced the data. First, some of the data on Jaytee’s behaviour be biased towards lateness. If Mr and Mrs Smart were not in their sitting room, or if they were distracted, for example by visitors, by telephone calls or television programmes, they would not have noticed Jaytee’s reactions immediately. Thus on some of the occasions when Jaytee’s reported reactions began after PS set off to come home, he may in fact have reacted earlier, closer to the time she set off. Second, on some of the occasions on which Jaytee reacted early, this earliness could be an artefact arising from the way in which PS’s time of setting off was defined. The setting-off times recorded by PS were those at which she actually began her journey. But sometimes she started getting ready to go10 minutes or more beforehand, or took time to say goodbye to the people she was with, or chatted as she was leaving. And sometimes she was thinking about leaving before she made a move to do so. For example, this was the case when she was travelling by bicycle on 13/7/94, as described above, when the heat of the day and the long ride ahead made her unusually conscious of her impending departure. The way in which the data could be biased in such a way that Jaytee appears to react early is illustrated precisely by Experiment 3. Jaytee’s reaction clearly coincided with PS first making a move to go home, as recorded on the video. But this first move and Jaytee’s reaction occurred five minutes before she reached the taxi, and nine minutes before the taxi actually set off.

Thus, if leaving in the vehicle had been taken as her setting-off time, then Jaytee’s reaction would seem to have happened nine minutes early. However the details of the data are interpreted, it is clear that Jaytee does indeed usually show anticipatory behaviour before PS comes home around the time she sets off. How does the dog know when his owner is coming home? How can Jaytee’s anticipation of PS’s return be explained? Several possible explanations need to be considered: 1. Routine expectation. If PS came home only at routine times, as she did when she worked in Manchester as a secretary, Jaytee’s behaviour might indeed be a matter of routine expectation. But in fact PS did not come home at routine times, and her arrivals were not predictable within a matter of minutes (Fig.1). In some cases PS came home at times selected randomly, unknown to her parents, and Jayteee still seemed to know she was coming. So the routine theory is not plausible. 2. Hearing the sounds of familiar cars. Jaytee’s reactions cannot be explained in terms of hearing PS’s or other familiar cars starting up many kilometres away, because he still seemed to know when she was coming when she was travelling in unfamiliar vehicles. Also, on some occasions he seemed to react before she got into the vehicle to come home. He seemed to be responding to her intention to come home, rather than to her actually sitting in a homeward-bound vehicle. This was illustrated very clearly by the videotapes of Experiment 3. 3. Reaction to the expectations of PS’s parents. If PS’s parents knew when to expect their daughter, Jaytee could pick up their expectation and accordingly exhibit his anticipatory behaviour. exhibit . But on most occasions they did not know when she would be coming, and in some cases her return time was selected at random could not have been anticipated by them. Yet Jaytee still anticipated PS’s return. 4. Telepathy between PS and her mother. Three of the occasions when Jaytee did not react occurred when Mrs Smart was absent or asleep. In all cases where Jaytee did react, Mrs Smart was present and awake. This could suggest that his anticipatory reactions are somehow mediated by subtle cues from Mrs Smart. But on most occasions Mrs Smart did not know when PS would be coming home. And Jaytee still reacted when PS came home at unusual times,

unexpected by her mother. In all three experiments in which PS set off at randomly determined times, Jaytee’s reactions still occurred around the time she set off. Perhaps Mrs Smart was telepathically linked to her daughter in such a way that she unconsciously picked up her intention to come home, and then unconsciously showed anticipatory reactions that Jaytee picked up. This potential explanation presupposes the possibility of telepathy between daughter and mother. But if the possibility of telepathy is admitted, it would be simpler to suppose that there was a direct influence of PS’s intentions on Jaytee himself. Moreover, in other experiments to be dscribed in a subsequent paper, Jaytee seemed to anticipate PS’s return when Mrs Smart was not present but one of her sisters was present instead. And in some cases, when Jaytee was on his own in PS’s flat and his behaviour was recorded on videotape, he still reacted around the time she set off to come home (Sheldrake and Smart, in preparation). 5. Reacting to his owners intentions at a distance. Jaytee could have been responding to PS’ intentions in a manner currently unknown to science. This is the explanation we think most probable. Jaytee’s reactions could be described as telepathic, psychic or as dependent on a “sixth sense”. We favour an interpretation in terms of morphic fields (Sheldrake, 1994). Since the period covered by this report, we have continued to investigate Jaytee’s behaviour. In order to obtain an objective record of his activity, we have used a video camera to record his reactions during the entire period of PS’s absences. The results of this research are described in a subsequent paper, and favour the idea that Jaytee reacts to his owner’s intentions (Sheldrake and Smart, in preparation).

his monograph is an attempt at an explanation of the nature of the process of association in the animal mind. Inasmuch as there have been no extended researches of a character similar to the present one either in subject-matter or experimental method, it is necessary to explain briefly its standpoint. Our knowledge of the mental life of animals equals in the main our knowledge of their sense-powers, of their instincts or reactions performed without experience, and of their reactions which are built up by experience. Confining our attention to the latter we find it the opinion of the better observers and analysts that these reactions can all be explained by the ordinary associative processes without aid from abstract, conceptual, inferential thinking. These associative processes then, as present in animals’ minds and as displayed in their acts, are my subjectmatter. Any one familiar in even a general way with the literature of comparative psychology will recall that this part of the field has received faulty and unsuccessful treatment. The careful, minute, and solid knowledge of the sense-organs of animals finds no counterpart in the realm of associations and habits. We do not know how delicate or how complex or how permanent are the possible associations of any given group of animals. And although one would be rash who said that our present equipment of facts about instincts was sufficient or that our theories about it were surely sound, yet our notion of what occurs when a chick grabs a worm are luminous and infallible compared to our notion of what happens when a kitten runs into the house at the familiar call. The reasons that they have satisfied us as well as they have is just that they are so vague. We say that the kitten associates the sound ‘kitty kitty’ with the experience of nice milk to drink, which does very well for a commonsense answer. It also suffices as a rebuke to those who would have the kitten ratiocinate about the matter, but it fails to tell what real mental content is present. Does the kitten feel “sound of call, memoryimage of milk in a saucer in the kitchen, thought of running into the house, a feeling, finally, of ‘I will run in’?”

Animal Intelligence

An Experimental Study of the Associate Processes in .Animals E. L. Thorndike

oes he perhaps feel only the sound of the bell and an impulse to run in, similar in quality to the impulses which make a tennis player run to and fro when playing? The word association may cover a multitude of essentially different processes, and when a writer attributes anything that an animal may do to association his statement has only the negative value of eliminating reasoning on the one hand and instinct on the other. His position is like that of a zoologist who should today class an animal among the ‘worms.’ To give to the word a positive value and several definite possibilities of meaning is one aim of this investigation. The importance to comparative psychology in general of a more scientific account of the association-process in animals is evident. Apart from the desirability of knowing all the facts we can, of whatever sort, there is the especial consideration that these associations and consequent habits have an immediate import for biological science. In the higher animals the bodily life and preservative acts are largely directed by these associations, They, and not instinct, make the animal use the best feeding grounds, sleep in the same lair, avoid new dangers and profit by new changes in nature. Their higher development in mammals is a chief factor in the supremacy of that group. This, however, is a minor consideration. The main purpose of the study of the animal mind is to learn the development of mental life down through the phylum, to trace in particular the origin of human faculty. In relation to this chief purpose of comparative psychology the association processes assume a role predominant over that of sense-powers or instinct, for in a study of the associative processes lies the solution of the problem. Sense-powers and instincts have changed by addition and supersedence, but the cognitive side of consciousness has changed not only in quantity but also in quality. Somehow out of these associative processes have arisen human consciousness with their sciences and arts and religions.

he association of ideas proper, imagination, memory, abstraction, generalization, judgment, inference, have here their source. And in the metamorphosis the instincts, impulses, emotions and sense-impressions have been transformed out of their old natures. For the origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals. Not only then does this department need treatment more, but promises to repay the worker better. Although no work done in this field is enough like the present investigation to require an account of its results, the method hitherto in use invites comparison by its contrast and, as I believe, by its faults. In the first place, most of the books do not give us a psychology, but rather a eulogy, of animals. They have all been about animal intelligence, never about animal stupidity. Though a writer derides the notion that animals have reason, he hastens to add that they have marvelous capacity of forming associations, and is likely to refer to the fact that human beings only rarely reason anything out, that their trains of ideas are ruled mostly by association, as if, in this latter, animals were on par with them. The history of books on animals’ minds thus furnishes an illustration of the well-nigh universal tendency in human nature to find the marvelous wherever it can. We wonder that the stars are so big and so far apart, that the microbes are so small and so thick together, and for much the same reason wonder at the things animals do. They used to be wonderful because of the mysterious, God-given faculty of instinct, which could almost remove mountains. More lately they have been wondered at because of their marvelous mental powers in profiting by experience. Now imagine an astronomer tremendously eager to prove the stars as big as possible, or a bacteriologist whose great scientific desire is to demonstrate the microbes to be very, very little! Yet there has been a similar eagerness on the part of many recent writers on animal psychology to praise the abilities of animals. It cannot help leading to partiality in deductions from facts and more especially in the choice of facts for investigation.

ow can scientists who write like lawyers, defending animals against the charge of having no power of rationality, be at the same time impartial judges on the bench? Unfortunately the real work in this field has been done in this spirit. The level-headed thinkers who might have won valuable resuits have contented themselves with arguing against the theories of the eulogists. They have not made investigations of their own. In the second place the facts have generally been derived from anecdotes. Now quite apart from such pedantry as insists that a man’s word about a scientific fact is worthless unless he is a trained scientist, there are really in this field special objections to the acceptance of the testimony about animals’ intelligent acts which one gets from anecdotes. Such testimony is by no means on a par with testimony about the size of a fish or the migration of birds, etc. For here one has to deal not merely with ignorant or inaccurate testimony, but also with prejudiced testimony. Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals. They like to. And when the animal observed is a pet belonging to them or their friends, or when the story is one that has been told as as story to entertain, further complications are introduced. Nor is this all. Besides commonly misstating what facts they report, they report only such facts as show the animal at his best. Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine. But let one find his way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immediately becomes a circulating anecdote. Thousands of cats on thousands of occasions sit helplessly yowling, and no one takes thought of it or writes to his friend, the professor; but let one cat claw at the knob of a door supposedly as a signal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes the representative of the cat-mind in all the books. The unconscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal’ s mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvellous. It is as if some denizen of a planet where communication was by thought-transference, who was surveying humankind and reporting their psychology, should be oblivious to all our intercommunication save such as the psychical- research society has noted. If he should further misinterpret the cases of mere coincidence of thoughts as facts comparable to telepathic communication, he would not be more wrong than some of the animal psychologists. In short, the anecdotes give really the abnormal or super-normal psychology of animals.

urther, it must be confessed that these vices have been only ameliorated, not obliterated, when the observation is first-hand, is made by the psychologist himself. For as men of the utmost scientific skill have failed to prove good observers in the field of spiritualistic phenomena, 1 so biologists and psychologists before the pet terrier or hunted fox often become, like Samson shorn. They, too, have looked for the intelligent and unusual and neglected the stupid and normal. Finally, in all cases, whether of direct observation or report by good observers or bad, there have been three other defects. Only a single case is studied, and so the results are not necessarily true for the type; the observation is not repeated, nor are the conditions perfectly regulated; the previous history of the animal in question is now known. Such observations may tell us, if the observer is perfectly reliable, that a certain thing takes place, but they cannot assure us that it will take place universally among the animals of that species, or universally with the same animal. Nor can the influence of previous experience be estimated. All this refers to means of getting knowledge about what animals do. The next question is, “What do they feel?” Previous work has not furnished an answer or the material for an answer to this more important question. Nothing but carefully designed, crucial experiments can. In abandoning the old method one ought to seek above all to replace it by one which will not only tell more accurately what they do, and give the much-needed information how they do it, but also inform us what they feel while they act. To remedy these defects experiment must be substituted for observation and the collection of anecdotes. Thus you immediately get rid of several of them. You can repeat the conditions at will, so as to see whether or not the animal’s behavior is due to mere coincidence. A number of animals can be subjected to the same test, so as to attain typical results. The animal may be put in situations where its conduct is especially instructive.

After considerable preliminary observation of animals’ behavior under various conditions, I chose for my general method one which, simple as it is, possesses several other marked advantages besides those which accompany experiment of any sort. It was merely to put animals when hungry in enclosures from which they could escape by some simple act, such as pulling at a loop of cord, pressing a lever, or stepping on a platform. (A detailed description of these boxes and pens will be given later.) The animal was put in the enclosure, food was left outside in sight, and his actions observed. Besides recording his general behavior, special notice was taken of how he succeeded in doing the necessary act (in case he did succeed), and a record was kept of the time that he was in the box before performing the successful pull, or clawing, or bite. This was repeated until the animal had formed a perfect association between the sense-impression of the interior of that box and the impulse leading to the successful movement. When the association was thus perfect, the time taken to escape was, or course, practically constant and very short. If, on the other hand, after a certain time the animal did not succeed, he was taken out, but not fed. If, after a sufficient number of trials, he failed to get out, the case was recorded as one of complete failure. Enough different sorts of methods of escape were tried to make it fairly sure that association in general, not association of a particular sort of impulse, was being studied. Enough animals were taken with each box or pen to make it sure that the results were not due to individual peculiarities.

one of the animals used had any previous acquaintance with any of the mechanical contrivances by which the doors were opened. So far as possible the animals were kept in a uniform state of hunger, which was practically utter hunger. That is, no cat or dog was experimented on when the experiment involved any important question of fact or theory, unless I was sure that his motive was of the standard strength. With chicks this is not practicable, on account of their delicacy. But with them dislike of loneliness acts as a uniform motive to get back to the other chicks. Cats (or rather kittens), dogs and chicks were the subjects of the experiments. All were apparently in excellent health, save an occasional chick. By this method of experimentation the animals are put in situations which call into activity their mental functions and permit them to be carefully observed. One may, by following it, observe personally more intelligent acts than are included in any anecdotal collection. And this actual vision of animals in the act of using their minds is far more fruitful than any amount of histories of what animals have done without the history of how they did it. But besides affording this opportunity for purposeful and systematic observation, our method is valuable because it frees the animal from any influence of the observer. The animalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s behavior is quite independent of any factors save its own hunger, the mechanism of the box it is in, the food outside, and such general matters as fatigue, indisposition, etc. Therefore the work done by one investigator may be repeated and verified or modified by another. No personal factor is present save in the observation and interpretation. Again our method gives some very important results which are quite uninfluenced by any personal fact in any way.

he curves showing the progress of the formation of associations, which are obtained from the records of the times taken by the animal in successive trials, are facts which may be obtained by any observer who can tell time. They are absolute, and whatever can be deduced from them is sure. So also the question of whether an animal does or does not form a certain association requires for an answer no higher qualification in the observer than a pair of eyes. The literature of animal psychology shows so uniformally and often so sadly the influence of the personal equation that any method which can partially eliminate it deserves a trial. Furthermore, although the associations formed are such as could not have been previously experienced or provided for by heredity, they are still not too remote from the animalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ordinary courses of life. They mean simply the connection of a certain act with a certain situation and resultant pleasure, and this general type of association is found throughout the animalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life normally. The muscular movements required are all such as might often be required of the animal. And yet it will be noted that the acts required are nearly enough like the acts of the anecdotes to enable one to compare the results of experiment by this method with the work of the anecdote school. Finally, it may be noticed that the method lends itself readily to experiments on imitation. October 1998