Let’s then look at what this means about our autobiographical memory, our memory of our life as we believe it happened to us. Your reaction to anything that happened to you is an assembly of physiological reactions, mirrored social reactions from other people involved in that time and place, your own memory or similar events, which likewise also carry social baggage and so on down the line.

Empathy is about memory too? You remember what arguing feels like… Empathy is more primary than memory. Your thoughts around the empathic experience are memory, but the immediate reaction to seeing someone injured has a primary route into your brain, for an extreme example. Empathy and your body’s self-preservation instinct are the same things.

A more direct linkage and so a more direct reaction? Yes. You don’t want to be hurt, and don’t want hurt to affect you by extension either. You will have a deep subconscious drive to prevent these things from occurring, with the rare exception of the sadist who comes to be addicted to pain likewise by extension.

Maybe the sadist is addicted to some sort of chemical rush. They are indeed. The reaction we have, that dulls our pain after a while, can be triggered vicariously. They are addicted to numbing themselves.

Is sadist the same as having a pain fetish? No, that is masochism. Sadism is sort of the opposite, the complimentary inclination.

Now the “intelligence” of your body is distributed all through your body, even including some things that technically are not your body like the gut flora health care researchers are so fascinated with these days. Your brain is set up to be dependent on the behaviours of these foreign organisms as much as your own cells.

Is this an alternative interpretation of homoeostasis? It would be, yes.

Sadists don’t get pleasure from pain? Not their own pain no, but as I said, every signal our brain processes comes from every other tissue in our body. Our brains know what our bodies teach them. Your endocrine glands just being perhaps the loudest signals, but the rest of the information gets processed also.

And when our brains try to ignore our body, the body gets louder. Indeed, the cells in your body react the same way they would if they were outside of your body, and they react to the same stimuli they would. They are capable of reacting in the same way your neurons are to mirrored experience or empathy. They can take kidney cells from your urine sample and cause them to shift into neurons. That’s how little different the other cells in your body are from neurons. What this amounts to is that empathy knows no species barriers. What you will tell yourself is “me” is often your sensitivity to environmental processes going on around you that aren’t directly impacting your biology.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~