Choice and learning

The Law of Attraction is clear about choice: All any living being has power over in its life is its own choices, and everything that happens to the being is a result of its own choices. I know people argue against this – heck, I’ve argued against it: Suppose a meteor falls from the sky and hit me on the head – how is that my choice? Of course, when we argue against choice, what we mostly are saying is that the choice concept should only apply if we know the potential results.

Nice thought, but irrelevant. Life doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the way life really works: If I get hit on the head by a meteor, that’s the result of every choice I made in my life up until that specific time and place. I am the one who has directed my body to take every step along the way until I reach the one spot in the whole Universe that ends up with me in the line of impact of that one meteor. No one else lives in my body or inhabits my mind and has forced me to do what it took to get me in that one spot. And the meteor is not about me at all – it isn’t aiming to hit me, it’s only following its own path. Even if someone tied me up and sat me in a chair at the point of impact, I still took every step myself to get me to the person who did that to me. I’m the one responsible, because I made every choice along the way – even though I didn’t know that it would get me crushed by a meteor. (I guess that’s why the word “oops” was invented!)

Making choices to do things without knowing what the end result will be makes it sound like everything is just about meaningless chance but it’s not, because although I don’t know what the results will be, someone (or something) does know: My soul. I’ve got a soul (so does every living thing) and my soul has a higher purpose for my life.

Although we don’t generally know much about our soul’s higher purpose for us, we can figure out some things. The Law of Attraction teaches us that if we trust to our higher purpose, we can use our emotions to make the choices in our lives. It’s like playing the game of Hot & Cold: Positive emotions are the warm and hot, and negative emotions the cold. When we choose based on positive emotions, we are on the path of higher purpose. When we choose based on negative emotions, we are not on that path.

Why do we have to play this game? Simple: Our souls are part of the infinite and we, incarnate in these bodies, are finite. Finite beings cannot comprehend infinity, we don't have the capacity for it. Our souls aren’t hiding anything from us, no more than an adult hides anything from a baby - the adult world is just not comprehensible to a baby, as babies don't have the capacity for it.

For babies, things are pretty cut and dried - they get hungry, that upsets them and they cry. They get fed, they are satisfied (after a burp) and they smile. Babies start out with instincts (to cry when hungry, to smile when satisfied) and follow them blindly. As a baby’s instinctive actions are experienced they are stored – along with the associated emotions (pleasure, pain, positive emotions, negative emotions – hot and cold). Babies soon grow from instinctive action to using stored information (emotions + experiences) to make choices of actions in order to get certain results.

The baby is learning.


Learning is about acquiring (accumulating, not being born with) the skills or knowledge to do something. When we learn, we experience something and then store that experience along with the emotions that we felt at the time. We use what we’ve learned to make our future choices. The emotions associated with the learned experiences are the guideposts for making the choices both in daily life and from the higher purposes point of view.

Next: How horses make choices and learn – and what it means for the human/horse relationship.

A foal is born - learning to learn

06/06/09
Copyright © Lif Strand for Spiritual Horsemanship





If I was really good at the Law of Attraction, I wouldn’t get frustrated and irritated by some of the garbage that is put forth about horses*, but I still do. I am getting better at catching myself, but it still happens.

I got ranting the other day about that imprinting nonsense. Imprinting is an automatic (involuntary) psycho-physiological process, not a learning process, and it is hard-wired into the brain. Imprinting is a survival mechanism for certain critters (birds are all I know of) that triggers species specific patterns of behavior. This is because critters that can imprint need to get the information they need for survival fast – they can’t afford the time to learn it.

I'm not sure any mammal can imprint. However, while equines don't acquire all their species-specific behavior patterns when they are first handled by humans or nuzzled by their mothers in the moments and hours after birth, the initial information taken in by a foal during that time period “sticks” more readily than it does at almost any other time in a horse’s life.

That’s because the slate is clean. The storehouse of experience is empty. A foal has nothing else to compare to, to judge by, in order to choose. A foal will choose most anything it experiences at that point if it doesn’t hurt – but that is not imprinting.

In the wild, of course, there are no humans around to provide input of any kind at in a foal’s first hours and days. The input the foal receives is either provided directly (mom’s presence, her smell and voice, are security and nurture; a cactus smells a certain way and hurts when your nose investigates closer; the lead mare is not to be approached or touched unless she invites you) or indirectly (the herd members all snort at and skitter away from a coiled thing that buzzes and hisses – so the foal does too; the herd runs from a pack of wolves – so the foal does too; the lead mare avoids going down that canyon, and no one else, including the foal, does either). All learning is accepted because it is provided within the frame of every-day living and is demonstrated and reinforced every moment by mom and every member of the herd. And, of course, whatever is taught within that framework is going to be “natural” behavior for the foal - it is well within the range of horse-abilities and horse-proclivities. At that point, the foal will choose whatever is given to it by its mom and the herd. There’s no reason for the foal not to.

Horses are born wanting to do the things that the rest of the horses in the herd are doing. They will of course test the boundaries as they grow – that’s the nature of a being that has free-will, and it gives rise to a changing herd dynamic and thereby ultimately to the genetic diversity that would not exist if everything was always the same.

For most domesticated horses, however, things are different. Humans don’t look like horses. They don’t sound or smell like horses. They sure don’t act like horses – and the communication most humans offer isn’t even in the language of Horse. Most horses don’t get to be born or raised in a natural environment, they don’t get to live in a herd, they only get input on how to be a proper horse from their moms for a few months, and after then from other horses over fences and in passing. Yet humans expect horses to overcome all of this to learn how to not only be good horses, but to be horses that do what humans want – and by and large, horses manage to do just that.

However good horses are at overcoming the obstacles necessary for success in the human world, it’s a measure of the faultiness of the usual approach to human/horse interaction that almost always there is a point (or a number of points) in the relationship when the horse isn’t responding the way the human wants – that is, the horse is “choosing” something “wrong”. Generally this is considered to be a problem with the horse. I submit it is always a problem with the human.

----

* Throughout my writing when I say horses, you can probably include any equines – however I want to note that I have worked very little with non-horse equines, so maybe I’m wrong in this assumption.


Next: Choice and learning

A foal is born - 15 days

Photos taken 06/04/09 at 15 days old


He's still a scrawny thing, but he's looking more like a horse and less like a bag of bones.