"Maybe" Needs Ground - Freedom to Search for Other Paths

When Words Begin to Trap Us

In the previous texts, we arrived at an uncomfortable idea: we can possess a great deal of information and still make decisions within a very narrow space. Some words arrive repeatedly, some fears are pre-activated, and certain questions acquire Qualia. Other possibilities barely participate in Movement.

Perhaps freedom begins with the possibility of keeping more than one path accessible. But we need to correct something: "maybe" cannot become a place to live.

There is a "maybe" that opens and another that paralyzes.

The first says:

"It might be. Let us try."

The second says:

"Because I am not certain, I cannot move."

The difference is decisive for freedom.

The question is not only whether we can imagine other paths. It is:

Do we have the conditions to choose one, walk it, make a mistake, return, and still continue to exist?

The river of doubt does not need to become our home

As a Fervent Secularist, I often use an allegory: many paths may lead to transcendence, but almost all of them must cross a river of doubt.

Doubt can protect us from dogma. It can prevent a word from becoming territory too soon. It can remind us that feeling something intensely does not automatically prove the explanation we give to the experience.

But we can spend an entire life inside the river.

In that case, the doubt that was supposed to preserve freedom begins to prevent Movement.

Perhaps to transcend, here without requiring any metaphysical interpretation, is to assume an experience sufficiently to live it, choose a bank of the river, and preserve enough humility to admit later that it was not the whole territory.

Doubt protects freedom while we are crossing. It begins to limit freedom when it prevents us from continuing to walk.

Provisionally assuming something is not the same as turning it into truth

A personal experience helped me understand this distinction.

During a practice led by someone connected to a Tibetan therapeutic tradition, I heard:

"Jackson, you have problems related to your mother and your childhood."

I replied:

"Maybe."

The reaction was intense:

"No 'maybe.' Either it is or it isn't."

What stayed with me was not the need to accept that interpretation, but the realization that no hypothesis was being explored far enough for us to discover what it could produce.

We could do something else:

"Let us provisionally assume that this is true."

What memories appear?

What does this hypothesis organize?

Where does it fail?

Afterward, we can keep it, modify it, or abandon it.

That is not dogma. It is experiment.

In 5D Consciousness:

doubt -> maybe -> provisional hypothesis -> Movement -> experience -> error/success -> reorganization -> new Movement

"Maybe" is productive when it opens a door, not when it forces us to remain standing in the doorway.

Experimenting also has a cost

This is where freedom meets economics.

A company with capital may test ten ideas and abandon nine. A person who depends on next week's salary may not possess the same margin for error.

A 2024 meta-analysis combined 256 effect sizes from 29 datasets, involving 111,852 participants, and found a negative association between financial scarcity and cognitive performance. When education was taken into account, the effect decreased substantially, showing a complex relationship that does not justify saying that poverty "reduces intelligence." (ScienceDirect)

Within 5D Consciousness, a Body-Territory under pressure does not necessarily stop thinking or creating. We can instead ask how much of its search space remains repeatedly recruited by rent, food, debt, transportation, and care.

How many paths can truly be explored when a single mistake can threaten survival?

Freedom also involves having room to fail.

Money is an architecture of possibilities

Not all money is created through debt. Central banks also create money. But commercial banks create deposit money when they issue loans. In 2025, Norges Bank explicitly explained that a bank and its customer can create new deposit money when entering into a loan agreement, within the constraints imposed on the banking system. In 2026, the Bank of England reiterated that commercial banks create much of the money used by households and businesses when they extend credit and simultaneously create deposits. (Norges Bank)

This architecture allows expectations about the future to be brought into the present:

credit now -> future obligation

Credit can finance housing, businesses, and innovation. The question is not whether debt should disappear, but something else:

Why can we so easily imagine money creation when there is a future obligation, yet find it harder to imagine creating present conditions that allow a citizen to continue participating and experimenting?

Citizen DREX as a hypothesis of freedom

This is where BrainLatam's Citizen DREX proposal can function as a mutation in the search space.

It is not the official Drex project of the Central Bank of Brazil. The official initiative has been developed as infrastructure for transactions involving the digital real, digital assets, and contracts, with the Drex Pilot used to test these possibilities. (Central Bank of Brazil)

Citizen DREX is a BrainLatam hypothesis: asking whether a future public digital infrastructure could also periodically distribute value linked to citizen belonging, without that value necessarily appearing as an individual's future debt. (BrainLatam)

Any real proposal would require monetary, fiscal, and institutional design, together with evaluation of inflation, incentives, governance, and other risks.

Its value here is to change the question from:

"How does the citizen obtain money?"

to:

"What minimum conditions would increase a citizen's capacity to explore paths without disappearing when one of them fails?"

If such an architecture proved viable, it could expand the margin for learning, changing jobs, caring, creating a business, or moving through a transition.

We produce excess while the territory responds

Freedom encounters another limit: the biome itself.

The United Nations Environment Programme's Global Resources Outlook 2024 shows that global extraction of natural resources has increased dramatically over recent decades and projects that, without significant changes, resource extraction could rise by around 60% by 2060 compared with 2020 levels. (UNEP)

At the same time, the 2023 update of the planetary boundaries framework concluded that six of the nine assessed boundaries had been transgressed. (Science Advances)

This does not dictate a single economic policy, but it makes it increasingly difficult to treat climate, water, soil, and biodiversity as scenery external to the economy.

If no Body-Territory exists separately from the material conditions that sustain its continuity, then economic production happens inside the biome, not beside it.

Perhaps "production" is another word that has become too narrow.

Biome Income: what if maintaining is also producing?

BrainLatam's Biome Income hypothesis asks whether maintaining the ecological conditions of life can also be recognized as the production of collective value.

Preserved water.

Living soil.

Standing forest.

Biodiversity.

Communities capable of remaining in their territories.

In the BrainLatam formulation, this does not simply mean paying someone because they live near a forest. It begins from the idea that sustaining water, biodiversity, climate stability, and other conditions necessary for the continuity of life produces value for the territory itself. (BrainLatam)

The goal is not simply to put a price on everything.

It is to ask why we so easily recognize value when something is extracted, transformed, and sold, yet struggle to represent the value of what was maintained so that life could remain possible.

Biome Income may need to be redesigned or even replaced.

That does not weaken the question. It is precisely an active "maybe":

"What if maintaining the conditions of life is also a form of producing value? Let us develop the hypothesis far enough to discover where it works and where it fails."

The climatic future can reach the body before it reaches the calendar

The climate emergency shows how the future can constrain the present.

Studies published in 2023 and 2025 involving Brazilian children and young people found fear, sadness, anxiety, and concern about the future associated with environmental change, uncertainty, and perceptions of insufficient information or action. (Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry)

Social media may participate in this architecture without being treated as a single cause. A 2025 study of 1,400 adults in the United States found associations between greater social media use, climate distress, and climate doom. Because the design was cross-sectional, it cannot establish that social media caused these states. (Climatic Change)

The climate threat is real.

The problem is not feeling it.

The question is:

Can the feeling find Movement?

When we repeatedly receive signals of fire, flooding, extreme heat, and a threatened future, yet perceive few possibilities for participation, a circuit may emerge:

information -> anticipation -> feeling -> more information -> anticipation

Concern can become Movement.

Or it can become paralysis.

Climate freedom would not mean ignoring the threat.

It would mean expanding the conditions for transforming that threat into possible action.

"Maybe" needs ground and Movement

Freedom does not mean remaining forever between possibilities.

Choosing is also part of freedom.

Assuming.

Experimenting.

Making mistakes.

Correcting.

Trying again.

Machine learning offers a limited analogy: a model does not wait for absolute certainty before operating. It produces an output, encounters error, updates parameters, and tries again.

This does not mean that an algorithm experiences doubt or freedom.

It merely offers a useful image:

we do not need to eliminate uncertainty before we begin to move.

Dogma says:

"It is this way, even when the world no longer fits."

Paralyzing doubt says:

"I do not know whether it is this way, so I cannot begin."

Active "maybe" says:

"It may be this way. Let us walk far enough to find out."

This is why "maybe" needs ground: material conditions that allow us to take risks, a biome capable of sustaining continuity, institutions that allow trajectories to be corrected, and enough security for one mistake not to immediately destroy the possibility of trying again.

Perhaps freedom is not possessing certainty before we walk.

Freedom is having the conditions to choose a path, test it, recognize when it does not work, and still be able to search for another.

The river of doubt remains necessary.

It protects us from confusing our words with the world.

But we do not need to build our home inside it.

"Maybe" opens the door.

Freedom needs ground so that we can walk through it.

References

DE ALMEIDA, Filipa et al. Financial scarcity and cognitive performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 2024.

CHOU, D. T. et al. Climate awareness, anxiety, and actions among youth: a qualitative study in a middle-income country. Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry, 2023.

RICHARDSON, Katherine et al. Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 2023.

UNEP - INTERNATIONAL RESOURCE PANEL. Global Resources Outlook 2024: Bend the Trend - Pathways to a Liveable Planet as Resource Use Spikes. 2024.

SCHOR, Marina et al. 'I am really scared for the future': climate distress among Brazilian youth. Environmental Education Research, 2025.

FROTA, M. A. et al. Exploring support systems for young people with climate anxiety. 2025.

BUCK, Holly Jean; SHAH, Prerna; YANG, Janet Z. Social media use is associated with climate anxiety, climate doom, and support for radical action. Climatic Change, 2025.

NORGES BANK. How is money created? 2025.

BANK OF ENGLAND. It's all about the role of money. 2026.

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL. Drex - Digital Brazilian Real and institutional documentation on the Drex Pilot.

CIONEK, Jackson. DREX Cidadão: dinheiro como metabolismo do território. BrainLatam, 2026. BrainLatam hypothesis of monetary creation linked to citizen belonging.

CIONEK, Jackson. Que Estado aparece quando começamos pelo Corpo-Território? BrainLatam, 2026. Source for the Biome Income hypothesis.