Shall we get down to the base code? Gestures. Every thing, every event, every stimuli, registers as a gesture, a motion, even before we experience emotion about it.

The very first sense our bodies develop is touch, and our primary experience of touch is proprioception, our awareness of our bodies, our sense of pain. Even single celled organisms have this, even viral organisms, and they have been confirmed to be organisms. Some even approaching a cell in complexity have this sense of touch and motion, pain and proprioception. This is why they can have defensive reactions.

Self and other? Well, we perceive the proximity of a fire through our sense of touch, and as the fire nears we deduce threat. Is it different with animals or people? Does rapid approach ever seem like something other than aggression?

But what if we “train” the fear/threat response to be a compassion response? You cannot. The fire will still burn, and you will still withdraw.

Even when they seem friendly, we brace ourselves.

Compassion is training not of a response. The responses are foundational meaning. Compassion is broadening our range of interpretation, learning that a bird with a hurt wing is like a human with a hurt arm. The associate, metaphor, a.k.a magick, and the wisdom behind spirituality.

And broadening our range of options, in behaviour.

So everything is gestures. More broadly everything is dance. We even compare particle physics to dance. According to physics you never touch the actual matter, the actual particles. You just make contact with a field of force generated by those particles, the atoms and molecules. The gesture made by the chair or desk or keyboard and your physical contact with it, your physical body itself, is a gesture. Your body is something that’s happening, something being expressed, and if only in an indirect way, something that you personally do. We even phrase behaviour in this sense when we are speaking as basically as we can. A gesture of good will, gesture of friendship, of diplomacy.

Your body is your experience? Indeed.

Obscene gestures, also. Even obscene, yes.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~