Introduction – Beyond Reaction to Full Emotional Perception

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Welcome to The Dog Teachings Podcast, where we explore a practical, objective, and verifiable path to awakening—offering proven methods to cultivate lasting presence, clarity, and higher consciousness in your everyday life.

I’m Gary Eggleton. Today’s journey moves us past scattered reactions and surface emotions into the enduring clarity of a fully awakened emotional centre.

In our last episode, The House Within – Reclaiming the Inner World from Outer Distractions, we saw how misplaced attention splinters the self and locks us into automatic responses. True presence began only when attention was turned inward, stabilising into something more solid than fleeting awareness.

And yet, even after that shift, unexpected emotions still surprise us. Have you ever entered a room and instantly felt tension in the air—long before words or explanations emerged? By the time you learned an argument had just ended, your emotional centre had already understood the whole story: tight shoulders, clipped tones, abrupt silence. 

In this episode, we’ll explore how to make that rapid insight your everyday norm. To do so, two kinds of inner speed must be grasped:

1. Reaction Speed: the order in which our centres fire—instinctive, moving, emotional, then intellectual.
2. Meaning Speed: how quickly each centre interprets what it senses once triggered.

These speeds are often mixed up. Understanding their difference is the key to transforming jumpy reactions into clear, confident knowing.

Picture this: a sudden bang echoes nearby as you walk down a familiar street. Instantly, your instinct jolts—heart pounding, muscles braced at the raw sensory surge. In the same heartbeat, your body shifts—flinching or turning toward the source. Then your emotional radar kicks in: “Is this dangerous? Am I safe?” Finally, your mind steps up with logic—“That was just a car backfiring,” long after your body and feelings have already responded.

Two insights stand out:

1. Though instinct always leads the way, the emotional centre can assign meaning almost as fast—so quickly that tradition holds it may process thousands of times faster than our mind. 
2. Most of us have dulled this ability through habit, stress, or second-guessing, so our emotional insights arrive too late or feel muddled.

In this episode, we’ll examine how culture and conditioning hold back our emotional clarity—and, most importantly, I’ll share the simple, structured practices that free your emotional centre to work at full speed. Drawing on The Blueprint of Consciousness, our website, and earlier episodes, these exercises will help you anchor a steady “I”—a self that stays, notices, and responds with genuine, unhurried awareness.

This path isn’t just theory—it’s a set of concrete steps. With steady practice, you’ll move from reactive fragmentation into lasting emotional clarity.

Let’s begin.

Section 2: The Reaction Sequence of the centres

Before the emotional centre can deliver instant insight, its activation order must be understood. In any sudden event, four inner centres respond in tight succession, each fulfilling a specific role.

First, the instinctive centre fires. It detects raw sensory input—sound, touch, temperature—before conscious thought can form. You don’t decide to react; your body simply alerts itself. Pulse quickens, breathing shifts, muscles tense in readiness.

For example, when I was twelve in England, I’d never been keen on cricket. One sports lesson, a batsman deflected the ball straight at my face. Before I even knew what was happening, my hands shot up and caught it—protecting me, not trying to field. Everyone thought I was a natural, but all I’d done was let my instinctive centre do its job. It judged speed, trajectory, and arc in a split second and told my muscles to move. I got picked for the team, lasted one game—and promptly dropped, because I knew nothing about cricket beyond protecting my face.

Next, the moving centre takes over, triggering a reflexive physical response. You flinch, duck, step back, or turn toward the source—actions meant to protect or orient your body.

Then comes the emotional centre, which instantly assigns meaning to the event. It asks: “Is this safe or threatening? Should I feel alarm, curiosity, or calm?” That emotional verdict often precedes any words in your mind. It’s why you might feel uneasy in a silent room or immediately trust a stranger’s greeting without conscious analysis.

Finally, the intellectual centre engages, analysing the situation in a step-by-step manner. Only after your body and feelings have reacted does your mind piece together the facts—“That was just a car backfiring,” or “The pan slipped off the counter.” Only then does your system truly relax.

To illustrate again: imagine you’re cooking when you suddenly smell smoke. Instinctively, you cough and your body recoils. Almost at once, alarm wells up—your emotional centre urges you to check the stove. Moments later, your intellect reasons, “I forgot to turn off the burner.” By then you’re already safe.

Because raw detection must come first, the instinctive centre always leads. Yet once all centres are triggered, the emotional centre’s ability to evaluate context can outpace your logical mind—provided it isn’t clouded by habit or doubt.

Understanding this precise order of reaction sets the stage for our next focus: processing speed, or how rapidly each centre interprets what it senses. In what follows, we’ll explore why emotion can grasp full meaning almost instantly, while logic follows more slowly—and how that difference can be harnessed.

Section 3: Processing Speeds and the Dimensionality Model 

Now that we’ve established the reaction sequence of the centres, we turn our attention to processing speed—the true key to unlocking the emotional centre’s remarkable power. Processing speed doesn’t refer to which centre activates first, but rather to how rapidly and comprehensively each one interprets what it receives.

While the instinctive centre detects raw input first—like sound, touch, or motion—it processes in a binary way: danger or safety, pain or comfort. It works at lightning speed but is limited to simple survival signals.

The moving centre builds on this, responding with action: posture, coordination, and muscle memory. It reacts faster than thought but remains mechanical, habit-driven, and linear.

Then comes the emotional centre, and with it, a shift—not just in speed, but in structure. According to Ouspensky, and refined by Gurdjieff, it’s proposed that the emotional centre operates 30,000 times faster than the intellect. If this model holds, it would make the emotional centre nearly 900 million times faster than our basic reflex systems. These figures are conceptual—not empirical—but they underscore something crucial: emotional insight doesn’t arrive after thought. It arrives first—and it arrives whole.

Instead of analysing line by line, the emotional centre delivers dimensional perception—integrating mood, tone, memory, and context into a complete understanding in a single moment. That’s why an emotional truth can feel instantly and profoundly real—even before we know why.

However, here’s the crucial point: although your emotional centre has immense processing potential, it is often underused or misused. Many people’s emotional centres are fragmented—clouded by unprocessed trauma, reactive habits, or years of intellectual override. Instead of clarity, we hesitate, loop, or spin out in emotional reactions that never resolve.

To understand the scope of each centre’s processing depth, we can use a Dimensional Bandwidth Model:

• Instinctive centre (1D – Binary)
  Processes simple, immediate meaning: safe or unsafe, pain or comfort.
  
  
• Moving centre (2D – Action-Oriented)
  Adds physical context: balance, movement, and muscle-based action.
  
  
• Emotional centre (3D – Contextual, Holistic)
  Integrates nuance: posture, voice tone, social memory, mood, relationships—all at once.
  
  
• Intellectual centre (4D – Structured Abstraction)
  Handles language, logic, and complex thought—precise, but sequential and slow.
  
  
• Higher Emotional centre (5D+ – Symbolic Insight)
  Grasp of meaning of symbols without language—profound symbolic resonance in an instant.
  
  
• Higher Mental centre (6D+ – Universal Knowing)
  Immediate comprehension without process—pure knowing, pure reason, beyond duality.
  
  

Imagine listening to music:

• Your instinctive centre hears the raw sound vibrations.
  
  
• Your moving centre responds—tapping your foot, swaying naturally.
  
  
• Your emotional centre immediately absorbs the song’s emotional tone: melancholy, joy, longing, elation—no explanation needed.
  
  
• Your intellectual centre follows later, dissecting lyrics or recognizing structure.
  
  

A fully functioning emotional centre can grasp the entire emotional narrative of a piece of music, a room, a glance, or a wordless interaction in one moment. But if this centre is suppressed, that clarity gets buried—forcing you to rely on intellect, and often missing the depth entirely.

So, developing the emotional centre is not just about reacting faster—it’s about changing how you perceive. It’s moving from step-by-step processing to all-at-once understanding. It’s about seeing more, feeling more, and knowing more—without the need to think your way there.

With this deeper model in place, we’re now ready to explore why society trains us to distrust this capacity—and how you can begin to reclaim and restore your emotional clarity.

Section 4: Why Society Suppresses the Emotional centre

Despite its capacity for near-instant understanding, our emotional centre is routinely sidelined by cultural conditioning and institutional norms. From the earliest classrooms to professional offices, subtle messages train us to trust reasoning over feeling—and the consequences ripple through every aspect of life.

In schools, success is measured by test scores, essays, and logical problem-solving exercises. Gut reactions and intuitive flashes are labeled “subjective” or “unscientific,” teaching children to prize analysis above their own inner signals. Years later, many adults still second-guess a strong hunch, apologising to themselves for trusting what they felt. Likewise at home, we tell our children to be polite—encouraging them to greet a stranger even when they flinch or hide their faces, sensing something is off. Although a child’s instinctive centre picks up emotional alarm before thought, we train them to override that natural warning in favour of social niceties.

In healthcare, patients’ gut feelings often go unheard. A person describing persistent discomfort may be steered toward yet more tests, rather than having their bodily intuition honoured. Dismissing those early warnings can delay diagnosis and reinforce the belief that only data—not lived experience—matters.

In relationships, defaulting to words over emotion creates rifts. Imagine a parent noticing their teenager’s sudden withdrawal but launching into a lecture instead of simply acknowledging the unspoken sadness. That missed opportunity to connect leaves both parties feeling misunderstood—even when everyone insists, “We can talk it out.”

In workplaces, quarterly targets and slide decks eclipse quick, instinctive insights. Team members learn to prepare bullet-point rationales instead of sharing the raw sense that a project “feels off.” When managers ignore the palpable unease humming beneath polite consensus, small issues can fester into costly setbacks.

Across media and social platforms, sensational headlines and algorithm-driven feeds provoke reflexive responses—fear, outrage, desire—while rewarding the quickest clicks. Every impulsive reaction trains us to bypass our deeper emotional sense, scattering our focus and muting the very signals we need for genuine understanding.

It’s vital to remember that the oft-cited “30,000×” and “900 million×” processing ratios are teaching models, not lab-proven facts. Their role is to underscore the gulf between blocked feeling and unhindered insight. Once seen as conceptual tools, these figures help us appreciate just how swiftly our emotional centre could operate if freed from these societal constraints.

By recognising where and how external pressures have overridden our natural emotional intelligence—whether in classrooms, clinics, living rooms, boardrooms, or newsfeeds—we create space to reclaim those signals. In the next section, we’ll explore how a stable, uninterrupted self—the permanent “I”—begins to emerge once these barriers fall away.

Section 5: Emergence of the Permanent “I”

Every day, we shift between a dozen fleeting selves—worrying selves fretting over deadlines, social selves navigating small talk, planning selves mapping out tomorrow’s tasks. Each “I” appears for a moment, then fades, leaving us disjointed and unfocused.

The permanent “I” offers a different experience. It isn’t a mystical persona but the continuous sense of self that weathers every change without fragmenting. This enduring awareness anchors thought, feeling, and action in an unbroken stream.

A Day-in-the-Life Example:
You wake before dawn, bleary but present. Rather than launching into tomorrow’s to-do list, you notice your breath, the soft click of your alarm, the weight of your feet on the floor. On the commute, you sense the collective impatience in the car’s hum, yet remain poised—your posture steady, pulse even. Arriving at work, you feel the team’s undercurrent of stress in quick glances and hushed tones, and you choose to acknowledge it: “I notice tension—how can we ease this?” That single question, grounded in your permanent “I,” shifts the day’s dynamic.

Dinner-Party Scene:
At a gathering buzzing with overlapping conversations, you no longer dart between each emotional surge. Instead, your lasting self surveys the room’s tapestry—reading unspoken concerns, joyful refrains, and subtle alliances—while you decide where your input matters most.

High-Stakes Negotiation:
In a tense boardroom, initial spikes of anxiety ripple through participants. Your heart rhythm stays calm, your spine remains upright. You sense shifting motives—fear of loss, drive for gain—and guide the discussion toward mutual ground rather than getting pulled into every argument.

This stable “I” brings three profound shifts:

• Continuous Self-Knowledge: You no longer “snap back” to yourself after losing focus; instead, you recognise the moment you begin to drift.
• Seamless Integration: Decisions, emotions, and thoughts converge naturally—no more battling inner contradictions.
• Equable Presence: Stressful triggers arise but do not hijack your system; you witness them without being swept away.

Cultivating this unified self lays the foundation for enduring awareness. In the following section, you’ll learn three powerful exercises—drawn from The Blueprint of Consciousness, our website, and prior discussions—that anchor your permanent “I” and reclaim your emotional centre’s full speed and depth.

Section 6: Three Practical Exercises to Anchor Your Emotional centre

Cultivating the permanent “I” depends on disciplined practice. Here are three cornerstone exercises—fully detailed in The Blueprint of Consciousness, on TheDogTeachings.com, and in earlier episodes—that clear mental clutter, restore your emotional radar, and weave unified awareness through each moment.

1. Emotional centre Observation

Aim: Feel the deeper significance behind ordinary details.
Duration: a few minutes as often as you can throughout the day.

1. Select a commonplace element—a doorknob, a staircase, a patch of grass, or your dog’s wagging tail.
2. Ask: “What does this mean?”
   • A doorknob stands for access and security.
   • A staircase offers gentle transition versus sudden change.
   • Grass embodies life’s grounding and renewal.
   • Your dog’s greeting radiates unguarded joy and loyalty.
3. Extend: Imagine living without a toilet for a month—notice how your gratitude deepens.
4. Apply to Speech: Listen to someone talk and, instead of focusing on words, feel the intention and emotion behind them.

Practitioner Note: Within days, many notice objects and interactions taking on vivid emotional resonance.

1. The “I AM” Exercise

Aim: Build a continuous, body-wide sense of “I am.”
Duration: 3–5 minutes, twice daily.

1. Settle: Sit comfortably, choose a starting breath, and state quietly to yourself, “I’ll begin on the next inhale.”
2. Inhale, silently affirm “I”—feel yourself as pure awareness.
3. Exhale, silently affirm “AM”—anchor that awareness into every cell: heartbeat, posture, breath.
4. Reflect: After each cycle, ask, “How much of me was truly present?”
5. Iterate: With each “I AM,” aim for greater presence: “Better, but not yet all of me.”
6. Engage Each centre:
   • Instinctive: On “I AM,” heighten sensory focus—notice every nerve’s alertness.
   • Moving: On “I AM,” hold your body completely still—signal your moving centre’s participation.
   • Emotional: On “I AM,” feel the weight of being human—self-consciousness as a unique gift.
7. Integrate & Build: Combine sensing, stillness, and feeling over 7–10 breaths until a clear, body-wide “I AM” assembles.

Some feedback on this by a student - “By week two, I remained present through an entire difficult meeting—no mental drift.”

1. Threefold Attention

Aim: Simultaneously engage instinctive, moving, and emotional centres.
Duration:5 minutes

1. Breathe & Count (Moving centre): Count inhalations and exhalations up to as many as you need to become automatic —your anchor for bodily movement.
2. Add Sounds (Instinctive centre): Without dropping count, expand part of your focus to ambient noises—traffic hum, distant voices, birdsong.
3. Invoke Gratitude (Emotional centre): Introduce a feeling of appreciation—family, work, simply being alive—while keeping the count and sound awareness.
4. Sustain All Three: Notice how counting, hearing, and gratitude sharpen and support one another.
5. Merge on Presence: Once stable, bring every thread to rest on the simple fact of “I am here.”

 If you lose one strand, gently notice the gap and return. One participant reported, “After a week, I handled a family crisis with calm I never knew I had.”

Consistent daily practice of these exercises—morning and evening—dissolves mental fog, revives your emotional centre’s natural speed, and cements the continuous presence of your permanent “I.” 

You can find full descriptions of these exercises in our book The Blueprint of Consciousness at the end of chapter three, or check back for early podcasts where we described these practices in detail.

Up next: real-world impacts of this steady awareness.

Section 7: Real-World Benefits of a Restored Emotional centre

When your emotional centre regains its natural speed and your permanent “I” stays present, you begin to notice tangible shifts in daily life:

1. Poised, Instant Responses
   Old habits of startle and overreaction give way to measured action. For example, when a surprise email arrives demanding revisions by morning, you feel the initial jolt of tension—yet rather than spiralling, you acknowledge the emotion, outline a quick plan, and move forward confidently. A project manager shared, “I used to wake up at 3 AM worrying about deadlines; now I simply note the task and return to rest.”
2. Richer, More Authentic Relationships
   You sense subtle shifts in others’ energy—frayed patience, hidden disappointment, or unspoken enthusiasm—before a word is spoken. It was described once by someone coming home after a long trip and, without a single question, sensing their partner’s fatigue and offering silent support. That moment of attunement deepened their bond more than any long conversation.
3. Effortless, Value-Driven Decisions
   Choices become clear as soon as the context is felt. When deciding whether to take a new role, you sense alignment—or dissonance—between your values and the opportunity. Rather than wading through lists of pros and cons, you feel “yes” or “no” arise and act accordingly, often finding that your initial impression was spot-on.
4. Reduced Anxiety, Sharper Focus
   Worries about “what if” scenarios naturally fade when attention remains anchored in the present moment. An example was given whereby a teacher’s teaching a full schedule no longer felt draining; instead, each class became an engaging exchange, since she no longer carried yesterday’s tensions or tomorrow’s fears.
5. Consistent Creative Flow
   Artists, writers, and innovators tap spontaneous inspiration with ease. A musician noted that entire song motifs now emerge fully formed during warm-ups—no trial-and-error—because his emotional centre instantly captures the piece’s mood and structure. That reliable creative spark makes work feel more like play and less like labour.

These transformations aren’t theoretical—they’re documented changes reported by practitioners. As emotional reactivity softens, your ability to read people and situations becomes as precise as any data, yet infinitely richer in nuance. Decision fatigue gives way to steady resolve. Anxiety yields to clear focus. And time once lost to worry is reclaimed for purposeful action.

With your emotional centre operating at full capacity, every moment carries the promise of insight. In our closing segment, we’ll tie these benefits together and suggest ways to weave these practices into a lifelong journey of unified presence and personal power.

Section 8: Conclusion – Living from Your Unified Self

Everything we’ve explored—from reaction order to processing speed, cultural conditioning, and the permanent “I”—culminates in a single invitation: to live each moment from your integrated centre, rather than from flickering, fragmented selves.

Key Takeaways:

1. Four centres in Sequence: Instinct senses, movement reacts, emotion interprets, and intellect explains.
2. Processing Speed Matters: Emotion can grasp context nearly as fast as raw sensation—when unblocked, it delivers rich meaning in milliseconds.
3. Conditioning Clouds Clarity: Schools, workplaces, media, and relationships teach us to mute gut feelings in favour of logic, scattering our focus.
4. Permanent “I”: A continuous self that weathers every shift—anchoring thought, feeling, and action in one steadfast awareness.
5. Three Core Practices:
   • Emotional Observation teaches you to feel the significance of everyday details.
   • The “I AM” Exercise grounds awareness in your whole body.
   • Threefold Attention harmonises instinct, movement, and emotion in parallel focus.

Sustaining Integration:

• Daily Commitment: Short sessions of each practice—morning and evening—build momentum. Aim for 5–10 minutes of Emotional Observation, 5 minutes of “I AM,” and brief Threefold Attention resets throughout your day.
• Return to Your Resources: Full step-by-step guides, animations, podcast transcripts and diagrams are at TheDogTeachings.com, and The Blueprint of Consciousness leads you to an objective exercise to bring a permanent impartial observer into your being.
• Join the Community: Our twice-weekly Zoom classes offer live instruction, Q&A, and peer support—ideal for refining these methods and sharing breakthroughs.

Over time, the benefits become unmistakable: sudden deadlines no longer trigger panic; you sense others’ unspoken needs before a word is uttered; decisions arise from inner alignment rather than exhaustive debate; creative insights flow naturally; and anxiety gives way to an unforced calm that carries you through each moment.

Your permanent “I” isn’t a distant ideal—it’s the background presence you’ve always carried. You’ll recognise it when, instead of jolting back into focus, you simply notice: “I was here all along.” From that place, you respond with clarity, integrity, and ease.

Thank you for embarking on this journey. The path ahead is one of ongoing practice and discovery. By honouring the swift, integrated signals of your emotional centre and sustaining these exercises, you claim the unified self that transforms reactive living into conscious, empowered experience.

Until next time, stay rooted in your awareness and hold fast to your unified presence, letting your true self guide each step.

Goodbye.

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