For a few months we had moved the parrots and their cages to a different spot in our room. The way they were placed now, was in a way that our little birdie (a female house sparrow) was close to the parrots their space. Recently we’ve moved the parrots and their cages/structures to another part of the room again.
A few days ago we were busy with birdie talking to her in her cage and saw that she was displaying completely new behaviour. When we’d come close with a strange object she’d puff herself up and open her wings and make noise – which is a typical parrot thing to do when they’re scared and want to scare the other thing away. And here’s this little tiny birdie acting the exact same way!
We also have this thing where if the Parrots don’t stop their tantrums for attention, we spray them a bit with a little water spray bottle we have in our room. They’ll then make a big hoo-ha but stop what they’re doing.
What is interesting is that we never ever sprayed birdie because she’s not an attention beggar like the parrots. But when we put the water bottle spray thing close to her or show it to her she acts as if she’s a parrot that’s being sprayed lol and acts all offended. Also when we let her out flying, no matter what we do she goes out and sit on the parrot cages. She doesn’t even want to fly around or anything, she just wants to hang out with her fellow ‘flock mates’. Even though she thinks she’s a parrot, the parrots disagree and mostly try and bite her through the cage. Even after she got bitten she wouldn’t fly away from them but just stay there. So now we can’t let her out because she doesn’t get that they want to kill her. So now we can only let her out under strict supervision.
These events show how the environment plays a role in terms of programming a being. Input – Output.
Another “cool” confirmation point is that the Parrots will react to certain inputs – such as Gian making Eagle sounds – and produce a certain output – while they’ve never actually heard or seen an eagle. (When Gian made the sound the all crashed in a frenzy into the window).
When we still had TweeTweet the little flycatcher, whenever she’d see an eagle in the sky through the window, she’d shriek reeaaaally loud and then hide underneath our desks until the eagle was out of sight (even though she never got into direct contact with them).
When I first found out about Desteni I was very sceptical about this whole ‘pre-programming’ point and was looking at ways how I could show to myself that I was indeed a programmed robot. So one day as I was talking to my friends about the subject of being programmed beings, we kept on stumbling on points where the behaviour would always be something that was ‘taught’ and thus not pre-programmed. So then I looked at ‘What do I do in my reality that was not taught but has always been with me’. And then I fell upon the point of dreaming. Nobody is able to show or teach you how to dream at night – yet you are doing it. For me this was my ‘aha’ moment, of yes, I am a organic robot lol.
Or for instance, a few weeks ago I was doing a session of Contemporary Dance exercises with Maite. At some point we wanted to integrate doing ‘a wheel’ (you know where you go sideways and go stand on your hands and then keep going so you end up back on your legs) in a sequence of movements. In the exercise I kept doing the wheel at my left side, but Maite said, no you must do it from the right side. So I was like, ok fine, I’ll do it from the right side doesn’t matter.
But then when I wanted to initiate doing the wheel from the right, the moment where I have to go and put my hands on the floor and get my legs in the air – I stopped and I screamed! LOL
Because, it was so weird as if I was about to set my hands into some sort of abyss. I tried again but the exact same thing happened – I had no idea what I had to do and hit a void. Then I realised I only ever practised doing the wheel from the one side of my body and not the other when I was a kid. And whenever I would attempt doing the right side it literally felt like there was a file missing in my program.
Then Maite tried doing the left side and she had her big stop and shout moment, and was also completely astonished. We had to re-teach ourselves to do the wheel on the other side in small little steps and make everything bigger as we went along, but we really felt the struggle as we had to structure and create this new program for ourselves.
So those were some of my moments where I went “Oh woaw, I really am an organic robot” =).
In a way these little realisations are cool because as long as you’re specific in how you program yourself you know you’ll be able to carry out the task.
