“We are born creative geniuses and the education system dumbs us down.” (Dr. George Land, NASA)

I know that he loves Stephen Hawking. A man that nature had unfairly crushed into a wheel chair and grew so tall because of his intelligence and humor. I decided that I will start my discussion about how much humans could learn from us with Stephen Hawking’s equation. I do not understand the meaning of the equation, but Stephen Hawking asked that his equation would be engraved on his stone grave. This is my way to honor this great scientist.

Other scientists, such as C A Saslow raise our standards exposing our exquisite sensitivity and the need for a subtle dialogue. "And, especially, we must respect their integration of exquisite tactile sensitivity with a muscle power that can override any of our commands if we neglect to make our request meaningful, consistent and polite." ( C. A. Saslow/ Applied Animal Behaviour Science)

We have effectively a tactile perception in the area situated under your legs, that is more refined that the tactile sensitivity that you have at the tip of your fingers. Do you really think that we have a very high level of sensitivity in one part of our anatomy the rest of our physique as well as our intelligence, is as dull as your equestrian education want you to believe?

“This is your fundamental problem. Even when you love us, you expect obedience. You talk about partnership but our side of the partnership has to be submission.

Your ancestors did not have the knowledge of tensegrity or elastic energy. However, biotensegrity is holding life together at all levels. “Every part of an organism from molecular to the gross anatomy, is integrated by a mechanical system into a complete functional unit” (Stephen Levin, Orthopedic surgeon). Elastic energy is basically how we move. “Most of the length change required for the work of locomotion, occurs not in the muscle fibers themselves but by elastic recoil of the associated tendons and muscles aponeurosis.” (The role of the extrinsic thoracic limb muscles in equine locomotion. R. C. Payne, P. Veenman and A. M. Wilson. J. Anat. (2005) 206, pp 193-404).

All along, we have compensated for the blanks of your equestrian education. We have stored and reuse elastic energy while in your mind, we performed through stretching and relaxation. Some of us have performed the piaff and still perform the move in spite of your whip disturbing the elastic recoil our hind and front legs. We have to ignore, your disturbing stimulus and concentrate on the decelerating activity of our hind legs, storing elastic energy and resisting forward shift of our body over our forelegs. “The hind legs have a considerable braking activity to avoid forward movement of the body over the forelegs.(…) The  forelimbs have a larger propulsive activity.” ((Eric Barrey, Sophie Biau, Locomotion of dressage horses Conference on Equine Sports Medicine and Science - 2002)

As in many performances, our creativity and willingness compensate for the failures of your education. We could do even better if instead of basing your psychology on gentle or strict submission, you were able to understand that our creativity is primarily used to protect our actual body state, muscle imbalance, morphological flaw or other issue. We don’t have the sense of future. We count on you to identify and correct the source of our aberrant kinematics or other issues. When we feel that you guide us toward ease and effortlessness, we work with you. We have the intelligence and creativity to further your insights for more efficient use of our physique. At the contrary, when you interpret our resistances or difficulties as behavior, you force us into protective reflex contraction.

I like the picture introducing his talk, “Waiting for the Emergence of the Human Intelligence.”  You were supposed to be the most intelligent and you turned into monsters destroying us and the planet. Fortunately, as wrote Anthony Douglas William, “There are many great minds on earth and not all are human.” If you were able to learn from us, you would be able to replace the values where they belong. We have emotion. We know love and friendship. We know respect and fairness. Indeed, we have more ethic than many of you ever have.

When you believe that we submit, we deal intelligently with slavery. You have the capacity to kill us and many of you do, just for entertainment. We submit because we need to survive. We execute piaff or flying change out of our talent but with a dysfunctional physique because we are waiting for the emergence of your intelligence. We are waiting for an education coordinating our physique for the athletic demand of the move. This education combines reflexes combinations, that you can stimulate, and the orchestration of our deeper systems that are out of your influence but that we have to orchestrate. Like you, humans, we are constructed from tiers of systems within a system within a system. “The existence of discrete network within discrete networks in bones, cartilages, tendons and ligaments optimizes their structural efficiency as well as energy absorption.” (Christopher S. Chen and Donald E. Ingber. Tensegrity and mechanoregulation: from skeleton to cytoskeleton, 1999) We have to learn how to coordinate all the systems. Some of them are out of our direct control and we have to play with forces, frequency, weight and other abstract elements. We have to learn how to think is terms of efficiency. We are willing to do it as we are interested by ease and effortlessness but we need your help. Paraphrasing Margaret Mead, you need to teach us how to think instead of telling us what to think.

With the support of advanced knowledge, you can teach us to think in terms of ease and efficiency. Effortlessness is as attractive to us than it is to you. We have the mental capacity to benefit from your suggestions, but also to process beyond your suggestions.

Give us a hand without pulling back and we will give ours without restriction.

The greatest obstacle in the relationship that we would like to have with you is the myoptic lens your self-importance. “Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.” (Tom Regan)

You judge our reactions in respect of what you think should be. You do not understand that we initially explore how to execute the move while protecting our muscle imbalance, morphological flaw or other issue. The elementary concept that applied properly, correct aids produce correct movement makes you believe in systematic responses that do not exist. We react protecting back muscles imbalance or other issue. The utopic thinking that correct aids equal correct movement keep you away from a real dialogue. Our response tells you how, a this instant, we interpret your insight. From our response, you can figure how to reformulate your sentence directing our mental processing toward a more appropriated response. It is a dialogue between your capacity of analysis and our processing ability. We are born with some aptitude for one sport over the other but we need to learn the technique.

“Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.” (Cicerothe) We need your silence but we don’t need your blanks. As long as your equitation is limited to “correct aids,” you shoot words but you do not make comprehensive sentences. You expect us to fill the blanks between the words. We do in many instances and you take the credit for our achievements. When we really need help, you judge us instead of making the analysis that we expect from you. We need your understanding of our functional anatomy and we need you silences giving us the time to process.  

You want everything black and white because you want it simple. Our locomotor apparatus is complex and the knowledge of our locomotor apparatus evolves constantly. You repeat antiquated beliefs under the name of tradition, when in fact classical authors stated, “Respect for tradition should not preclude the love of progress.” When you reach to us, we reach back to you. When you expect submission, we develop protection.

“If I see furthest, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants” (Isaac Newton.) We can be your giant but you have to look further than your self-importance. We can work between members of the same specie better than you do. If one brain is not enough to process a situation, we add one or two more.

We can love members of a different species. You instead, appear to have great difficulties to even work between races. The one of us which are carnivore kill for food.

You instead, you kill us for fun. Some humans see a defeated bull. The ones who can see further, see an animal which has been tortured for no reason, resisting death, standing firm on his front legs. He is the giant and you are very small.

“Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been”.  (David Bowie) Many however, never became the person they should be. They fear the future, mistrust the present and invoke the safety of a comfortable past which in fact, never existed, (Robert Kennedy).

We can teach you that life can be larger than your cellular phone, that what you have been told is not necessary what is. We can teach you that, as beautifully written by jimmy Hendrix, the power of love. “When the power of love will overcome the love of power, the world will know peace.”  

We can teach you humor, which you used to have, before you became overwhelmed by your self-importance.

Chrysippus, an ancient Athenian philosopher died from laughing at one of his own jokes. This would never happen in modern days. “If you lose one sense, your other senses are enhanced. That is why peoples with no sense of humor have an increased sense of self-importance.” (Author unknown)

We are not ultracrepidarians; we learn life through life. According to Albert Einstein, ““Truth is what stands the test of experience.” We experience effortlessness or lameness from your knowledge or illusion of knowledge. You should respect our opinion as an indication that you might know how to make us do it, (illusion of knowledge), but you don’t know how to develop and coordinate our physique for the athletic demand of the performance, (knowledge). Instead, ultracrepidarians, who are numbers in the human race, give opinions on subject they know nothing about.

“We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more.” (Albert Camus) You are so far in your pollution and corruption that the risk is much greater than happiness. You are born creative genius but the education system dumbs you down. We could evolve as genius but your education system dumbs us down. There is a reason for that. “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping them ignorant.” (Maximilien Robespierre)

The times are so serious that you need us to teach you again decency, kindness, empathy and ethic. You can learn how to think by teaching us how to think. He talks, through the science of motion, about intuition but warns against intuition without science. According to William James, intuition works in an associative manner: it feels effortless (even though it does use a significant amount of brain power), and it’s fast. Rational thinking, on the contrary, is analytical, requires effort, and is slow. Why, then, would we ever want to use a system that makes us work hard and doesn’t deliver rapid results? Think of it this way: intuitions, contrary to much popular lore, are not infallible. Cognitive scientists treat them as quick first assessments of a given situation, as provisional hypotheses in need of further checking.

Through your intuition and your rational thinking based on actual knowledge, you can lead us to ease and effortlessness and soundness. It demands a significant amount of brain poser, but you can learn more than our happiness. You can learn your happiness as well and save the fundamental support of all happiness, the planet. 

Chazot.