I have an entire section in my manifesto that talks about the value of spiritual architecture:

The path toward betterment is at its core a question of our place in the world … Unfortunately … The systems of this world are too complex for our tools to measure. And thus, whether secular or spiritual, to determine the path to virtue is inevitably a journey of faith.

So, the idea goes, we have to develop spiritual tools. Meaning-making tools. Something like this. Faith is the fuel that helps create the meaning that structures our attempts to be better.

I also make a big deal about how religious behaviour should be considered differently to religion:

Religious behaviour is, at its core ritualistic behaviour around some kind of article of faith.

When you view it this way, you see that religious behaviour is the way one develops the values around which we organise ourselves. We have the faith, so we structure our behaviour, and we do so in and for groups that help bring normative pressure that make us better.

Again. Spiritual tools. Meaning-making tools.

And everywhere I complain, more-or-less, that if you don’t do the thinking, the thinking will be done for you. The whole ‘choose your ideologies’ thing btrmt. is based around.

Nowhere is this so acute as in this spiritual space—a complex world that requires faith, and religious behaviour that helps us navigate it, mediate by the communities we perform that behaviour with and for.

So it’s pretty striking that I spend so little time actually doing this.

This is partly because I honestly believe that much of our drive towards meaning—this desire to place ourseves and give back—can be satisfied by community. I write about it often. Communities are exactly the kind of large, normative structure that one can derive meaning from.

But I often find myself encountering moments that make me sing that line Brooke Fraser cribbed from C.S. Lewis:

If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, I can only conclude that I am not from here.

If community isn’t enough to satisfy these stranger aches, then it’s time to turn to something more comprehesive.

Luckily, there are many existing traditions that one can choose to help navigate this more metaphysical landscape. Less luckily, trying to derive meaning from the beliefs of believers as a non-believer has proven rather ill-fated.

I wasn’t always a non-believer. I was heavily Christian for many of my teenage years (hence Brooke). I have dabbled elsewhere. You can often see the traces in my work. I tried dead religions for a while, so it felt less offensive when I did dabble. As you’ll see, should you keep reading, Gnosticism has proven enormously influential.¹ I tried neo-religions for a while, because neo-religions are usually organised around this kind of personal, spiritual journey, and very open to dabbling. But this was too far in the other direction—a little too slap-dash.

Anyway. This winter break, I needed to develop a cosmology for my D&D world. I’ve been spending a huge amount of time developing lore and history and the stories that make nice texture for a D&D game, and realised that the gods on all the D&D wikis, and in the fiction I’ve been reading lately were fucking boring.

So. I thought, I’d just make my own. Between all my brain-science related musings on the nature of purpose, I figured I had enough to have a crack at a metaphysics.

And as I went I realised I was getting more out of it than all the dabbling I did since my teenage flirtation with Jesus. Probably because I was using my own real beliefs to generate a normative, metaphysical structure, rather than trying to force myself to believe other people’s.

It was difficult. I don’t think I’ve written a denser “I’m thinking hard things through” article since my one on magic mushrooms or states of mind.²

But it was one of the most stimulating things I’ve done since I re-launched this site in the pandemic. Just after writing about how irrelevant questions of consciousness and free will were, I found myself having to grapple with them where they actually matter.

In the process, I reckon I’ve at least illustrated more seriously what I mean when I talk about the importance of a spiritual architecture. How these things help you move towards meaning. Towards being better.

It helped me. And it makes for kick-ass worldbuilding. Hopefully it’ll be at least interesting for you. And if any of you have ideas about how to push past the places I got stuck, please reach out. I’m tired of hitting what seems like a capital-m Mystery, and finding out that I just wasn’t being very smart.

See how far you make it.

¶Introduction

There are two core insights that drive this metaphysics. We might call these revelatory, but I won’t get into the details of precisely how they were revealed online, I think.

The first is that:

Lots of things are happening, but anything can matter.

Said another way, anything could be an organising principle. The most obvious is ourselves. We organise the world around ourselves and what has meaning/purpose to us. This, in itself, produces a froth of competing, lesser, organising principles. My hand, my leg, my head. Then, because we are interacting in a world with other purposive creatures, there ends up being many intersecting ‘centres’ of purpose. Centres in the sense Christopher Alexander meant them—things that are organised by how we focus on them, rather than any kind of real boundaries.

So, you’re reading this sentence. Your attention is organising the shapes into words, and words into an argument about metaphysics. But each word is itself a centre: a cluster of letterforms that you group without any particular effort on your part.³ And the argument I’m making is a centre within a larger one: whatever made you read this article in the first place, and whatever you’ll do with it afterwards. Now, a typographer would look at the same thing and attend to something different—the spacing, the line-height, the font choice, the rhythm of the paragraph as a visual shape. Every gesture of attention organises the same stuff into different centres.

This can get more abstract. For example. Watch a parent at a playground. Their child is climbing the thing, and the parent is attending to it as a problem of safety. The height of it, and how far their kid could fall. But the kid sees the very same thing as an adventure—the height is the whole point. These aren’t two perspectives on one thing, they’re different attentional gestures towards the same stuff. The parent organises wood and metal and air into a structure of risk, while the kid is organising the same thing into a structure of possibility.

More abstract again. Other parents, nearby, might be attending to the playground as a social space. The kid’s friend is learning how to negotiate her status through play. The council designed the thing for the insurance liability. Each constitutes different centres organised out of the same stuff.

And this fractal relationship between organisation around purpose happens with anything you care to attend to. Indeed, it’s hardly limited to the human perspective. We could hop into E. O. Wilson’s time machine, and slow our playground down a thousandfold. Now the climbing child is frozen in time, but inside her, neurons are highways of molecular traffic with each cell acting as a centre maintaining its own homeostasis—‘attending’ in some minimal fashion to glucose gradients, and oblivious to the adventure the kid is organising with its outputs. If we sped things up we’d see the playground party become a blur, but ecosystems would come into focus—forests advancing and retreating across landscapes, rivers shaping the land they carve through. At every level, stuff is organised around things that ‘matter’ to that stuff. The cell can’t see the playground and the kid can’t see the cell, but both are intersecting centres.

There are no hard borders around anything, because borders are defined pragmatically by what a source of attention is trying to do in a given context—the purposeful pattern that it holds at the centre. Take the ‘mind’. Itself, a society of interacting subsystems,⁴ it is a centre with fuzzy borders (where does the ‘mind’ end?) that tells a provisional story about a “self” which describes ‘everything’ at a particular scale that would equally be impossible to draw a hard boundary around. More, because many centres pursue ends,⁵ many centres can be treated, at least minimally, as ‘mind-like’, and contribute to these purposive patterns.

Lots of things are happening, but anything can matter. Which leads us to our second insight:

Whatever gives meaning will eventually demand sacrifice.

Any organising principle/gesture of attention collects some chaos and makes it meaningful, but in doing so, sacrifices meaning into chaos. Not all organising principles can be true at the same time. When something is attended to, other things fade. When one interpretive lens is applied, others become unavailable. Where the same ‘stuff’ shares substrate, they interfere—it is a problem of identity. Each attempt to hold something at the centre is therefore a gesture which is at once: centripetal, conserving, pattern-holding, which, for fun, we might call logos; and also centrifugal, diverging, pattern-breaking, which, again for fun, we might call chorós.⁶ The parent, attending to the playground as a risk, is a logos that extinguishes the kid’s centre—chorós. Attending only to the kid’s joy would extinguish the parent’s centre. The parent must hold both, and holding both is itself a sacrifics because neither centre gets full attention.

Without both, organisation collapses into heat-death (logos) or white-noise (chorós). A community that enforces perfect conformity wouldn’t stand out as a community, but a single entity, just as a community that has no shared norms at all would simply be an undifferentiated selection of people. Both, together, are a necessary feature of this tapestry of attentional gestures.⁷

As such, I thought to call this metaphysics of mine Centrism with an emphasis on Christopher Alexander’s idea of ‘centres’. I also toyed with Synechism, from Pierce, to recognise the underlying continuity between these centres, despite the provisional boundaries. Centre-keeping, or just the Keeping, to recognise our role in the process. Pattern work, for the same reason. I’ve landed on Gesticism, because, as you’ll see, there is something very fundamental here about the gesture of attention.

But all these names miss the core agonal tension that any gesture will be inadequately capture meaning. No attempt to find the solution will be able to encompass it all, because meaning demands sacrifice. Put another way, in more of an apophatic tradition, knowledge is a barrier to learning. Naming any centre, or collection of centres, hides others that might help us navigate the world better. This is why the world leaves us feeling alienated. Any ‘centre’ we occupy, or any ‘gesture’ we make to impose meaning on the world is necessarily inadequate. It leaves us wanting.

I told you it was pretty Gnostic.

So, to the extent I have explained this well, we are now left with several questions. Initially, prompts for religious tensions in my D&D world, which have become pretty serious attempts to grapple with hard problems. A strange way to spend a winter break, I know, but each to their own. In my footnotes, I have noted my inspirations or the pointers others have given me to develop things further. I’d be very happy to hear yours.

¶First, from where does attention come?

Gesticism regards the mechanism of meaning-making as the gesture of attention from a centre to a centre—a pattern-making and simultaneously pattern-breaking enterprise. There is then a question around what distinguishes a centre that has the capacity to attend.

It would seem that anything which pursues ends—whose organisation makes outcomes matter to them—has the potential to be a gesturing centre. Anything that, does things for reasons.⁵ Yet, this raises a question about extent. Does everything have the capacity to gesture? Is it more constrained? Cells pursue homoeostasis. Thermometers respond to temperature. Do both care?

We might take a panpsychist view, in which mattering is graded. Perhaps a thermometer’s caring about equilibrium is vastly simpler than mine, but not entirely absent. The classic panpsychist critique would then apply—what does it mean for a thermometer to care? At least cells die when they fail to pursue homeostasis. So, we might instead mark out stronger criteria: self-maintenance is necessary, or embodied history, top-down causation, internal values.⁵ Living organisms clearly demonstrate these. AI might. Thermostats, no.

What matters for Gestic thought is the practice. Treating something as a caring centre is itself a sacrifice.⁸ Treating a thermometer as pursuing equilibrium excludes attending to its aesthetic form or history. This extends to phenomenological patterns themselves. Concepts like necessity, who the Greeks named Ananke, or Kairos—opportunity, or Eris—discord. Even my very own Logos and Chorós. Whether these are fundamental cosmic principles or emergent attractors we mythologise remains open.

Many centres seem to pursue ends and it is straightforward to treat them as minimally mind-like. We often carve these out and personify them, to have dialogues with them.⁹ This ‘spiritification’ is epistemic technology—a way to remember that real agency is distributed, and to allow dialogue with complexity. The constraints are real regardless of whether the centre ‘really’ cares.

Which, of course, brings us to actual finite minds. You are unambiguously a centre. You care about outcomes, experience deliberation, and bear the cost of exclusion. This may simply a difference in scale, not kind.[^12] However, it’s also possible that there is a qualitative difference. Minds might be strange loops¹⁰ in the tapestry that become self-reinforcing or autopoeietic gesticulatory centres.¹¹ Recursive logos—patterns that include themselves in their pattern-making. Attention here becomes a structural property emerging from self-reference. Or minds might involve irreducible caring—particular configurations where chorós constrained by logos creates something that genuinely matters, not reducible to mechanism alone.

Whether minds simply emerge from complexity (naturalism), or involve something irreducible (vitalism), Gestic practice would be the same. Centres are constrained by exclusions that make them matter, whether structural or irreducibly experiential. The phenomenology is identical and Gesticism is agnostic. However, should eliminitivism (no phenomenology exists) or pure mechanism (nothing genuinely matters) prove measurably true, then Gesticism would collapse. If there’s no experience or mattering, guidance about bearing sacrifice becomes as meaningless as everything else. Until then, we must remain phenomenological realists: experience and mattering are what we navigate with.

Equally, finite minds may emerge from some metaphysical substrate beyond; somewhere ‘outside’ mattering, distinct from the phenomenal tapestry. Or finite minds may emerge from a kind of “aeonic fray”. Like Gnostic emanations or Henadic procession and reversion, knots of meaning emerge and at times produce gesticulatory centres. The specific mechanism matters less than the fact that your attention is trapped within the tapestry. If something doesn’t involve the gestures of attention, or mattering, it sits outside the scope of Gesticism. For the navigation problem—which sacrifices to bear, which patterns to maintain, there is no accessible outside. You are a centre gesturing to centres; there’s no escape from the Gestic agony.

The productive questions seem to then become: what helps one navigate? Where does recognising agency beyond your framing illuminate sacrifice? Where does it not? What does this mean for how one gestures?

¶Second, to what does attention go?

Attention attends to things, just as gestures gesture at things. What are the things? What individuates centres from the continuum of logos and chorós?

Gesticism refuses the question as posed. You see, attention goes to patterns—configurations that are stable enough to matter, and structured such that they are distinguishable from chaos. This implies identity—a pattern must be this and not that. A pattern without boundaries is pure inclusion and undifferentiated becoming (chorós) or pure exclusion and thus frozen uniformity (logos)—neither can be attended to because neither is about anything.

These boundaries are constituative not incidental. You don’t start with “things” and then attention selects among them to gesture toward. Rather, the gesture of attention creates boundaries by organising some chaos into meaning, while sacrificing other, potential meaning into chaos.

The finitude of attention we questioned earlier isn’t a limitation to overcome, it’s the very condition of mattering. You exist as a finite mind—a centre that cares—not despite constraints, but through them. The exclusion inherent to any organising principle is what makes it organising at all.[^12]

So, to what does attention go? Whatever it can distinguish as having identity. Identity requires exclusion, and exclusion creates finitude.

It therefore doesn’t matter whether the things coalescing into centres are mental (idealism),¹² physical (materialism), both (neutral monism),¹³¹⁴ or processual events (process philosophy). What matters is that attention individuates by creating boundaries, and those boundaries are always sacrificial—holding this centre means not holding that.

This is the agonal core of Gesticism. You cannot attend without excluding. Cannot matter without sacrifice. Cannot exist without constraint. The very gesture that makes meaning possible is the gesture that makes meaning impossible to hold completely. Thus, again, the question becomes not about attempting to find the “right” organising principle, but rather, accepting that every gesture of meaning is simultaneously a gesture of loss.

¶Third, what about agency and choice

To ask questions about how Gesticism implies we should act, we must first address our capacity to act. All centres which pursue ends contribute to the tapestry, but do mind-like centres control their attention? Or is attention extracted from them by the dynamics they are embedded in? You see, minds constrain but equally are produced by constraint—control architectures that determine where attention must be placed. To what extent does that constraint determine the capacity to gesture? There are several positions we can draw from the literature on free will.

Agency might be illusory. Minds feel like they are choosing, but are simply playing out attractor dynamics. The self is empty, and mistaking the pattern for agency is the cause of suffering. This is determinism.

Agency might emerge from the dynamics—simple attractors have no meaningful agency, but sufficiently complex attractors produce something meaningfully agentic even if continuous with underlying dynamics. A pendulum settling is different from a centre with feedback loops, memory, nested sub-centres. This is compatibilism.

Or some centres might be fundamentally different—not all attractor states are passive (like a ball settling in a bowl). Some actively pursue goals, resist peturbation, reorganise their environment. Mind-like attractors might be qualitatively special, not merely more complex. This is free-will.

It isn’t exactly clear to me that this matters for Gestic thought. Whether you’re free, determined-but-complex, or the subject of an elaborate illusion, you still experience deliberation. On the face of it, the phenomenology is identical regardless of the metaphysical truth, and thus you must grapple with choices about which sacrifices to bear. However, if the phenomenology of deliberation turned out not to be causally connected to outcomes, then it seems like it should matter. If the experience of choice was simply the epiphenomenon of a completely deterministic process, then you actually are not choosing anything and it’s not clear that any guidance on how to act has utility at all. Equally, if some choices are actually entirely unconstrained by anything, then sacrifice is unnecessary.¹⁵ In both cases the feeling of sacrifice doesn’t reflect anything recognisably sacrificial.

Gesticism, therefore, would seem to require a compatibilist view. We must navigate as if choices matter because functionally they do—the phenomenology of choice is part of the pattern-making and -breaking whether it’s “real” or sophisticated pattern-following. The adequacy of any answer to ‘do we have free-will’ is tested by whether it helps us with the navigational problem: given the constraints we face, which centres should we maintain?

¶Fourth, what does it mean for behaviour—the ‘good’?

The central agony of Gesticim means we seek to free ourselves from the inadequacy of the gestural tapestry. I think of the Gnostic notion of Archons, or the Buddhist dukkha. If our desires are unsatisfied here, we can’t be from here.

Many traditions seek a solution in dissolution—seeking oceanic boundlessness in an attempt to unknot ourselves into undifferentiated unity. I suggest this can’t be a serious solution. Even if you attained complete psychological equanimity your body remains a centre. It maintains boundaries, pursues ends, excludes alternatives, even if you no longer identify with those things. Destroying the body cannot be a solution either. The tapestry isn’t organised around only you. Other centres still bear the cost of exclusion, and your personal release doesn’t end the agonal tension. It simply changes the shape of it.

Others encourage transcendence—to make informed decisions about meaning and sacrifice from outside the froth. Gesticism demonstrates that this is a category error. The tapestry is not a space from which one steps out of. You don’t have attention, you are attentional gestures. It is the structure of attention and mattering itself. Any observation is a gesture of attention. A perspective is a pattern held at centre. To observe from ‘outside’ would seem to mean observing without attending, mattering without boundaries. The ‘outside’ collapses into just another centre within the tapestry. Differently positioned, but no less embedded.

So, roughly, some principles:

1. Sacrifice isn’t something one can avoid, it’s constituative. Choosing a pattern to hold at the centre is a gesture that necessarily sacrifices others, and no amount of care avoids this. The ‘good’ has to start by recognising that costless pluralism is impossible. For example, consider specialising in a discipline. You’re not just losing time for learning other skills. The way you see reorganises around your discipline. The budding economist starts finding incentive structures everywhere, and the burgeoning novelist starts seeing narrative arcs in the morning news. Every gain is a loss of other modes of seeing. Choosing to generalise instead costs depth—your attention becomes thin rather than structured. There’s no costless position. Each inadequately captures meaning.

2. We must therefore attend to what is being sacrificed. Mostly we gesture unconsciously—drifting into centres without realising what we’re excluding. The ‘good’ involves making this sacrifice deliberate. I’m reminded here of the therapy classic ‘five things I’m grateful for’. Trying to sensitise oneself to positivity by journaling daily. Famously it’s super effective, until, less famously, it plateaus dramatically. This, because the habit of journaling becomes the centre, rather than the thinking about gratitude. The old centre—thinking through writing—is replaced by a new one—the routine itself. The sacrifice—your exploratory attention—went unexamined.¹⁶ This isn’t a moral failing, it’s just the structure of things. Gesticism doesn’t demand that you never let practices become routine, only that you notice the trade. The difference between a practice you re-patterned into a ritual and one that hollowed out while you weren’t looking is the difference between a gesture and an accident. Same cost, very different way of navigating.

3. We must maintain patterns deliberately. No centre is stable by default. Every organising principle is subject to chorós (decay) and logos (ossification). The ‘good’ means actively working these patterns, rather than letting them drift one way or the other. A relationship maintained by pure routine—the same topics of conversation, the same roles, the same fights—is logos without chorós. A rigidity that maintains shape but isn’t really about anything anymore. A relationship with no shared structure—expectations, ideosyncrasies, continuity—is chorós without logos. A formless thing that doesn’t mean anything over time. The good is holding patterns while allowing them to change. Or releasing them and re-patterning. My own trajectory—from Christianity to dead religions to neo-religions to this—is exactly that. Each was a centre I held, found inadequate, and let go. The Gestic demand is willingness to do this even when the current pattern is comfortable.

4. We must recognise distributed agency. I am not the only gesturing centre, and nor are you. Your pattern-making intersects with innumerable others. Human and non-human, individual and collective, concrete and abstract. Remember our playground—the parent’s centre constrains the child’s and vice versa. The playground-as-community constrains both. The ‘good’ means attending to these intersections and recognising that your centres constrain and are constrained by others. Your gestures shape what others can gesture toward, and theirs shape yours.

I should say, this might all seem very boring, but it makes for a great deal of fun coming up with the principles of the religions that split from my “orthodox Gesticism” laid out here.

So, the heresy of the Unquiet Choir—agents of wildness and ruin—concludes that, if sacrifice is constitutive, then pattern-holding is the source of suffering. Why not, then, dissolve the patterns? Gesticism would point out that you can’t dissolve. Even the attempt is a gesture, which centres on something like liberation, at the cost of structure, with all the sacrifices that entails. A violation of principle two—refusing to attend to their sacrifices—and four—a refusal to acknowledge distributed agency. On the other hand, the Kherakhite heresy—something like Ginsburg’s Moloch made real—reaches the opposite conclusion. If dissolution fails, then perhaps holding the pattern tightly is the answer—the final, perfect order. A violation of principle three—treating the current pattern as a terminal state. Both are attempts to solve the agony, but Gesticism claims it can’t be solved, only navigated.

¶Gesticism in practice

Fun. But also, I’ve found this to be more useful than just for worldbuilding. As you can tell, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn in by this way of framing many similar, far more developed, observations of the same things. Specifically, for this first draft, I drew on virtue ethics (pattern cultivation, avoiding pathological extremes), cybernetics (trade-offs, system dynamics), enactivism (sense-making through boundaries), process philosophy (becoming over being), Gnosticism (the agony of constraint), Taoism (limitation inherent in naming), Buddhism (suffering as constitutive), and apophatic traditions (knowledge as barrier to learning).

I should note that Gesticism is often not fundamentally different. The reason I found it so satisfying for myself is that, unlike these others, it centres¹⁷ something I’ve always found disatisfying, but never articulated. The inescapable centric agony: identity means exclusion, patterns are always inadequate. There is no meaningful release, only conscious navigation of which sacrifices to bear.

So where classical virtue ethics suggests eudaimonia is achievable—you can be Aristotle’s eudaimon, or the Stoic sage—Gesticism denies this. Modern virtue ethics denies this too, but I think that Gesticism helps me in a way MacIntyrian ethics can’t. Not so much in action-guidance perhaps, but in orientation. MacIntyre would tell you (I think) that dissatisfaction is diagnosic. Something is wrong in the way things are arranged. Revising the arrangement can improve the coherence of a life. But Gesticism has dissatisfaction as constituative. It doesn’t signal that things are badly arranged, it’s what arrangement is. Centres are structurally inadequate because organising principles are sacrificial. Perhaps you should revise, but no revision will eliminate the ache. This isn’t just a change of mood. Gesticism denies the notion of ergon—stable natures that revision could approach. The goodness of any given practice is constituted by exclusion—the gesture of attending to them—not waiting to be discovered. Revision doesn’t move you closer to anything ‘correct’, it just rearranges the sacrifices. You choose what to bear, not whether to bear.

I don’t know if this is just a philosophical quibble, but it helps me with the narrative. Modern virtue ethics wants me to improve my narrative through virtuous revision—make things more coherent. Gesticism says the narrative is itself a centre; a gesture that organises my life (logos) by excluding what doesn’t fit the story (chorós). Revision doesn’t produce greater coherence, but different sacrifices. The ache I feel when something is excluded from my story isn’t a symptom to be treated but the cost of having a story at all.

It’s in these margins that it has come to actually guide my normativity—overlapping with, yet distinct from, other traditions I have dabbled in.

And of course, it has left many productive questions:

• Perhaps the most interesting question is why. Why are things organised this way? Why is there pattern-making and pattern-breaking at all? Are these fundamental, or merely widespread? Gesticism is silent on this and probably shouldn’t be.¹⁸
• Another question that bothers me is whether Gesticism’s position on substance is sufficient. What makes something stable enough to distinguish before a gesture of attention individuates it? Is the idealist position, that it is the collision of gestures—the distributed agency—enough? Or should something more constrain what boundaries are possible? If gestures are the things that make boundaries, then what makes some gestures succeed and some fail? It feels a bit like I’m just pushing ‘constraint’ around.
• Relatedly, I’m agnostic as to whether there’s an ‘outside’ to the tapestry, but if there is, I’m not actually certain that I can rule out transcendence. If minds originate in some distinct metaphysical substrate, then there might genuinely be positions where observation isn’t itself a gesture. This feels incoherent—objectless awareness seems impossible. Certainly Gesticism applies only to object-directed modes, and must bracket the question of whether other modes exist.
• Even in my example above, I can distinguish Gesticism from virtue ethics, but only really in terms of orientation—what I expect from revising. Not so much in terms of specific guidance. It seems like that should change behaviour, at least in the margins, because expectations guide behaviour. But whether it’s enough to count as genuinely different, or it’s just modern virtue ethics with extra steps, seems open.¹⁹

Two of these questions are actually critical, in a sense. If Gesticism does not provide different guidance, or provide an account of why pattern-making and -breaking are metaphysically necessary, then it is merely an exercise in reframing and maybe it shouldn’t guide my decisions, but stay relegated to my D&D world.

This worried me for a while, but actually, upon reflection with others, seems fine. Firstly, the language problem of communication means that reframing is often valuable in and of itself. This has been true for me already. As I mentioned, in exercising this, I’ve helped myself identify why hard problems matter, where I only just described them as stupid questions. It also produced the very experiences that encourage mystery and apophatic traditions to refuse positive descriptions of divinity. Language seems to fail at the questions I falter on. A kind of experiencing through intellectualising.

More deeply, it’s not as though other traditions have solved these problems. Practice in normative frameworks don’t wait for metaethical closure. The test of Gesticism’s utility wouldn’t be in solving hard problems, but whether it actually produces what it seems like it might—conscious navigation of sacrifice, deliberate pattern-work, or more gracefully bearing the inadequacy. If it fails here, then I’ll leave it in my D&D notes. Otherwise, the gaps become productive questions rather than defeat.

So, to remain productive, I’m going to try to move beyond intellectualising, toward enacting. Much of this is a mystery—something that must be experienced or participated in to be understood.

I’ve actually already found it useful to do this through worldbuilding: prototyping spiritual technology. Fictional contexts where Gesticism is played out. It hasn’t just let me test coherence, but generate examples in the kind of low stakes environment that pushed me away from my other spiritual dabbling. It’s not gonna solve my metaphysical tensions, but it has helped to understand the extent to which it works for me as normative guidance.

But I think more could be done, to be honest. I’ve got a podcast and an article about how people should choose their mundane cults, but I didn’t really say how. What the structure of these things look like, and how to pick a good one. It feels like Gesticism could help me illustrate, and explore. Show a visible structure that allows me to pick these things apart without getting sued. So, I’ll probably try to develop the components of a Gestic community… of one. Design articles of faith, the religious behaviours, the hierophanies and practices. How the beliefs matter, and the practices reinforce the beliefs. An exercise in exploring the mundane cult. A mundane cult of one.

Seems like fun to me. Let’s see.