If you know anything about me, you'll know the story - how a young animal behaviourist realised that the missing magic ingredient in the relationships between animals and people was actually LOVE. How much LOVE there was flowing between them - the invisible substance that was being exchanged and that determined 100% how that relationship would function.
LOVE. She went into the study in the front room, and one after the other, pulled all the learned tomes and research studies from the shelves, looking for that word, LOVE, and eventually, as the sun started to set, she sat in a sea of scientific books AND THE WORD LOVE WASN'T IN ANY OF THEM.
I can't describe really what happened there. I've never felt such sorrow. But from the sorrow something else arose, like a flame inside - we need to put LOVE back into science.
We need a new science of love.
Yes, and here we are, 30 years later, and slowly, progress is being made.
It's not easy to build a whole new matrix from the ground up, one in which love is logical, and logic is love. I admit I didn't think it would take this long ...
And here we come to the "art part."
I was playing with the AI art generator, to make some pretty pictures for social media posts to advertise my new book, "The Power of the Positives" and one of these was "a book with golden sparkles coming out of it."
Ad pic for "The Power of the Positives" (it's a book full of positive energy!)
https://DragonRising.com/pop
I usually edit the AI image in some way before I post it, and during this editing process I got to thinking about a book with LOVE in it, and how The Power of the Positives is such a book. It really does have all my LOVE in it, and it is calling on the power of LOVE through its little ambassadors, the Positives.
This then connected up with the Star Memory "The sea of books" and I decided to try and work with the AI to make an image to represent that life changing moment for me.
This isn't an easy task. A picture says more than a thousand words; it's an information transmitter, and if the image is wrong, obviously the wrong information is being transmitted. The right information, which is energy, will create the right understanding.
Now you could hit the "create image" button a thousand times, like the endless monkeys blindly pecking away at the infinite typewriters, but that's not how I work with AI art.
I do my best to give it the right instructions, and I'm getting better at it, so I had 8 images which did something right, somewhere.
The final image is a collage. Ah! A COLLAGE. And that was my Star Event with AI art right there.
Artists have been cutting up bits of all sorts and sticking them back together for time immemorial, and it produces a new work of art. A collage. My "Sea of Books" is a collage, it's a real work of art, and I can put my signature on it without feeling ashamed, guilty or suffering from some kind of impostor syndrome.
This clicked into all sorts of other precepts from Modern Energy Art - namely that it is ONLY about the ENERGY of the work of MEA, not anything else. Not the modality, not the goodness or perfection in craft or rendering, but ONLY ABOUT THE ENERGY.
This is exciting and amazing. We're not limited anymore by our physical capabilities or the decades of study it takes to get good at rendering scenes, people, lights, whatever. We can show each other "what's on our minds."
I love "The Sea Of Books" because it brings together Silvia 2023 and Silvia 1993 in the creation of that image.
And I am starting to make peace with AI Art. The first step towards LOVE.
The Sea Of Books
Silvia Hartmann 2023
The story of the Sea Of Books, told in 2009, added December 2024.
The event took place in 1993, in my then office in my then house.
At the time, I was one of the UK's top animal behaviour researchers.
I used to see animal behaviour clients (often people with their mad dogs) in my office, and I had a bookshelf there, floor to ceiling, filled with just about everything the human race had ever published on animal behaviour.
This is by no means as difficult as collecting everything the human race has ever published on say, James Joyce; animal behaviour was a relatively new field in its own right, because most animal behaviour studies had only been done to find out things about HUMAN behaviour, and in a very limited fashion at that, starting with the famous Mr Pavlov and his ringing bells and salivating dogs in the early 1900s.
Still, there were a few hundred books on animal training and behaviour, some old university type studies by folk like BF Skinner, some modern dolphin training treatise by modern dolphin trainers, and a lot of books on dog training and horse training.
On this day, and I don't know what day it was, only that it was bright and sunny and warm, so it must have been in late spring, summer, or early autumn as we didn't have a functional central heating in those days, I walked into the office, shut the door, and started taking one book after the other off the shelf, sat down on the floor, and started looking for just one particular word.
I look through the text, the table of contents, and searched in the index.
I couldn't find the word I was looking for.
When I had satisfied myself that the word wasn't in the book, I would get up again and fetch another, and another, and another. Finally, there was the last one, and the one I kept deliberately till last because it was the one I hoped and prayed would have the word in it.
I took a long time with this book, scanning every single page, but the word was not there.
And then there was this moment when I placed the final book on the untidy piles of rejects that surrounded me on the red carpet, on the floor, and I had nowhere left to go then - the word I was seeking wasn't in any of the books.
The word was, "love".
I remember feeling a sensation that I've never felt before rising in the center of my being, and I broke down and cried buckets, cried and cried and cried and couldn't stop crying.
How?
How could this be?
How could it be possible?
How? Why? WHAT is happening here?
To this day, I can't tell you what that was, a trauma or a guiding star.
It was an "unknowable event" that changed my life.
I was holding in my hands, in my mind, in my own personal diaries THE MASTER KEY to animal behaviour.
And no-one else had ever seen it before, and if they did, they had not written about it.
The master key was unconditional attention - and you might as well call that "love" for that is what it is, in the true meaning of the word.
A state where the other becomes all there is, where you have eyes and ears and senses for them alone and IN PREFERENCE to all the other things in the Universe, of which there are so many, and where you give them your undivided attention, where you soak them up with every fibre of your being, where you feel them in your body, mind and spirit as the unique entity they really are, and were you love, worship, adore them absolutely.
I should have been delighted and cried, "Heureka!" and set out on a path to make THE most amazing career in dog behaviour the world had ever seen - but I didn't.
I wasn't delighted.
I was heartbroken.
I was heartbroken that it wasn't there, and horrified that I should have been given this master key, and I wished it hadn't been me but someone else who could go out now and teach this, preach this as the one and only truth of how to understand animals at all, and how to interact with them correctly.
So I sat in a circle of a hundred old books and new books and manuscripts and learned documents and cried my eyes out.
That's an event that to this day continues to "haunt me" - it keeps coming back to me, and today is perhaps the day, when I'll go and enter that memory, take that aspect into my arms and somehow try and console her, only I am INCONSOLABLE myself, for neither her, nor me, nor any of the aspects, younger and older both, can get over the horror of knowing this, and recognising that most humans don't, and the way they're going, they never will, either.
I've never written a book since that day that doesn't have the word "love" in it, somewhere, even if it is hidden in an otherwise unremarkable sentence.
I've never written an article where what this word is all about hasn't hovered in the background, hasn't played a part.
And neither have I EVER created a technique that doesn't have this magic word at the very heart and core of it.
I guess I've done what I could and still it seems that it is never enough to make a difference, make a change.
If I write a hundred books, will it make any difference?
I don't know.
But the next time you or me or anyone asks the question why I do what I do, or why I write so much, remember that past self sitting in the circle of old books and crying her eyes out.
That's as simple as that.
SFX
Friday, July 31st, 2009
