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I find so many similarities between dog training and the ancient tradition of the guru-shishya

relationship of my country that I cannot but compare each to the positive light of the other.
The guru-shishya relationship of ancient India developed out of the unavoidable exigencies of
transmitting verbally encoded, precise linguistic conventions stretching to upwards of 40 hours of
material learned by heart, with tones encoded, which is not knowledge as we understand it, but does
not lie in an epistemological void either, instead lingering in a space that some consider sacred,
others try to derive quantum mechanics from, or attribute disembodied authorship to, in an ingenious
and fantastic attempt to justify teetering on the edge of absurdity and nonsense.
The first sentiment that comes to mind when one thinks of a 'Guru' is that the Guru is god, 'Guru-r
brahma, Guru-r vishnuh, Guru devo maheshwarah.' This unfortunate perversion took the focus away
from the raison d'etre of the relationship and plunged the whole system into the medieval creed of
blind personality worship, leading to crass systems of sectarian initiation and belief in magical creeds
of liberation, sublimating the filth and imbalance that gave rise to these systems in the first place.
Having witnessed this first-hand myself, I've known how the filth ingrained in the attitudes of those
who surrender to their Guru staggers the balance of life so much that any semblance of healthy and
functional ways of being is lost, seldom to be recovered. Long before this shift occurred, however, the
Guru was a tenacious teacher with a singular goal: To preserve what was contained in his mind
without transferring it to writing, which he looked upon condescendingly, for the mind was to him the
only worthy slate for the transfer of information; unlocking, as it did upon rigorous training, greater
meditative states of being. Whatever the field of information, the Guru wanted it transferred only from
mind to mind.
If all this sounds quaint and irrelevant today, let's consider a parallel that occurs every day all around
us: a dog trainer who unlocks a sense of purpose in their dog, which it could never experience in its
natural state. The trainer transforms a dog from a reactive creature that merely responds to
environmental stimuli, to an active creature that slowly generalizes the faint and exciting idea that its
own actions can bear upon the environment to produce favorable outcomes. Pavlov's classically
conditioned animal becomes, through 'operant conditioning,' an 'animal being' in the presence of the
human being, learning from the human that actions can have purpose, positively reinforcing in itself,
no matter how vague it is, in addition to resulting in positive outcomes. No professional trainer ever
believes that they are a god to their animal. They take pains to unlock greater levels of operant
behavior, and in doing so enrich themselves as well. And with greater development of harmony
between the animal being and human being, both push the envelope before the starry void of night.
"And who among us, in a Cosmos in which so much of reality has yet to be discovered, is qualified to
say whether the human or the dog method of self-expression is nearer the ultimate of reality."
(Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training, quoting Shapiro 1939:111)
So how do you tell a good Guru from a bad one? Give them a dog and return after a year to see how
they've trained it. The one who expects godlike worship and touts hocus-pocus ideas for liberation

and magical powers wouldn't even look to a dog for being ritualistically impure. The one who trains
you, over and over, until you've got 40 hours of material encoded in five different tones, ensuing
seamlessly from your mind, would know he's doing the same thing for you as he might do for a dog
he trains to sit, stand, down, heel, and come. The same vague purpose that the dog feels upon
learning these behaviors is felt by the Shishya upon learning from his Guru. In our ongoing human
evolution, we've let this phenomenon lie untapped, for nothing in our current socio-economic setup
enables us to develop greater levels of absurd but fulfilling pursuits. We've missed the behavioral
clue provided by our own domestic dogs, who'd never naturally heel while looking up to the sky, but
look at us and say, 'Hey, I'm doing some wonderful things now!'

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