When We Gather - Freedom, Allostasis, and the "One Among Us"

When Words Begin to Trap Us

In the previous text, we arrived at the idea that freedom needs ground. It is not enough to see another path. We need conditions to try it, make mistakes, correct course, and continue existing.

Now we can ask another question:

What happens when this Movement cannot be produced alone?

There are human events that hardly fit within an isolated individual. We sing together. We dance. We mourn the dead. We celebrate an arrival. We walk, eat, remain silent, and repeat gestures that other generations repeated before us.

Perhaps we have separated into "religion," "politics," "art," "healing," and "celebration" events that, in many Amerindian worlds, did not necessarily exist as independent domains.

In 2026, anthropologist Paola Andrade Gibram showed how, among the Kaingang, tỹnh practices involving singing, dancing, body painting, and ornamentation participate directly in political mobilizations at the Acampamento Terra Livre. They do not appear merely as decoration around a politics happening somewhere else.

Perhaps freedom also needs places where Body-Territories can change together.

Allostasis: not returning, but continuing

Allostasis offers an interesting language for this.

Instead of imagining regulation only as a return to a previous state, we can think of anticipatory and adaptive regulation in response to demands. Katsumi and colleagues proposed in 2022 that allostasis can be understood as an important principle of brain organization related to the predictive regulation of bodily resources. This is a theoretical perspective, not a single explanation for all human experience.

This changes how we can understand a funeral.

After a death, nobody returns exactly to the previous state.

João Kelmer showed in 2025 how, among the Boe (Bororo), mourning and memory are ritually elaborated. Personal and collective losses enter into actions, songs, dances, forms of care, and relationships through which the living themselves are reorganized.

Perhaps ritual is not simply a "release."

It can be a collective way of constructing an inhabitable after.

In the extension we propose within 5D Consciousness, an encounter could function as a collective allostatic infrastructure:

anticipation -> preparation -> encounter -> rhythm -> Movement -> Qualia -> relationship -> reorganization -> next state

This is a BrainLatam hypothesis, not an established definition of ritual.

When two bodies are not merely two brains

Neuroscience is beginning to measure small parts of these relations.

In 2026, Federico Curzel and colleagues used fNIRS hyperscanning during music listening in 34 dyads of friends. Listening to music together was associated with greater interpersonal neural synchrony than listening separately, and similarity in reported pleasure was related to the synchrony observed.

In 2024, Chenghao Zhou and colleagues used EEG hyperscanning during hand contact. The result was not simply "touch creates synchrony": among romantic partners, contact increased measures of interpersonal connectivity over time; among strangers, the pattern was different and even decreased.

This does not demonstrate a "collective consciousness."

Nor does it show that two brains become one.

It shows something more careful:

The relational meaning of an event participates in the neural dynamics that we are able to measure.

The same touch is not the same encounter when who touches whom changes.

The unit of an event may be larger than a word

In a ritual, perhaps the unit of meaning is not an isolated word.

It may be:

song + rhythm + gesture + territory + memory + presence of others.

Indigenous archaeologist Jaime Xamen Wai Wai wrote in 2024 about how archaeology allowed him to reconnect with parts of Waiwai history and to defend an Indigenous archaeology capable of changing narratives about the Amazonian past. His reflection connects archaeology with trajectory, territory, knowledge, and elders, rather than only with objects removed from a place and interpreted externally.

A Decolonial Neuroscience can learn something from this.

Instead of asking only:

"Which brain area is activated during this ritual?"

we can ask:

"What world of relationships needs to remain intact for this event to make sense?"

Perhaps the experimental cut itself can destroy part of what we intend to understand.

DANA: protecting transcendence without owning its explanation

This is where we can update DANA.

In the BrainLatam formulation, DANA is a philosophical and regulatory principle of secular religiosity or active neutrality: the State protects the right to believe, not believe, doubt, and change belief without deciding which transcendental explanation is true. DANA is not proposed as a new religion or as a scientific discovery.

We can now add a function.

A secular State does not need to provide transcendence.

But it can protect spaces for transcendence.

Song.

Dance.

Silence.

Contemplation.

Celebration.

Ritual.

Art.

Encounter.

An experience of transcendence can be real as experience without its intensity proving God, spirit, ancestry, or any particular metaphysical explanation.

DANA would protect precisely this openness: the possibility of living experiences that temporarily exceed the habitual "I" without an institution immediately transforming that event into mandatory doctrine.

Jiwasa: a "we" that includes the listener

The Aymara word jiwasa offers another disturbance.

A Peruvian study published in 2024 on intercultural communication records jiwasa-naka as an inclusive form of "we," in contrast to forms that exclude the interlocutor.

This does not mean that Aymara speakers are naturally more collective.

But the linguistic distinction allows us to ask:

What changes when "we" explicitly includes both the one who speaks and the one who listens?

In the BrainLatam extension, we use Jiwasa to describe a relational space in which different Body-Territories can participate in a common task without one of them permanently owning the collective.

The project's recent formulation describes the true Jiwasa as adaptive: leadership changes according to need. The false Jiwasa concentrates function, fear, and dependence.

We can summarize it this way:

A leader may participate in Jiwasa. The leader cannot own Jiwasa.

God as "one among us"

Here we can update an older BrainLatam idea.

In 2023 we wrote:

"Truth is between us, not inside us."

Within DANA, we can take this allegory further:

God can be thought of as a true Jiwasa: "one among us" who helps orient all of us.

We need to mark the genealogy of this sentence carefully.

This is not an Aymara translation of God.

It is not Indigenous theology.

It is not a scientific claim that God exists.

It is a BrainLatam philosophical extension.

Its value lies precisely in removing ownership of the transcendent position from any individual.

If God is "among us," no priest, politician, business leader, or social leader can permanently become the owner of the voice that should guide everyone.

The "between" disappears when someone captures it.

Egregore without needing to invent an invisible entity

We can also update the word egregore.

We do not need to use it as a claim that an independent supernatural entity emerges above a group.

We can treat it as a metaphor for an emergent configuration:

bodies + words + rhythms + symbols + memories + expectations + Movement + Qualia -> collective configuration

No individual possesses this configuration alone.

But each participant may be modified by it.

And here an essential warning appears:

synchrony is not synonymous with freedom.

An authoritarian group can also sing together.

A fear-based cult can produce belonging.

A crowd can synchronize anger.

The same collective capacity that reorganizes Body-Territories can expand a search space or narrow it.

True Jiwasa or captured belonging?

This is why we need a practical criterion.

After the encounter:

Are more Movements possible, or fewer?

Can I disagree and still belong?

Can leadership be replaced?

Does the ritual allow new questions, or does it demand that one answer be repeated?

Does feeling find expression, or is it immediately transformed into fear, guilt, debt, or obedience?

Danilo Silva Guimarães argued in 2025 that physiological and cultural conditions jointly participate in the field of needs and possibilities within which human action takes place.

Freedom, therefore, does not happen outside the relationships that sustain us and also constrain us.

Ailton Krenak, in Futuro ancestral, published in 2022, once again shifts our attention toward relationships among life, rivers, territories, and other beings, disturbing the idea of the future as something separate from the conditions that make existence possible now.

Perhaps a true "we" must also be territorial.

Freedom needs an "among us"

In the previous text, we said that freedom needs ground.

Now we can add:

freedom also needs encounters in which we can change without disappearing.

Celebration, art, dance, song, silence, play, and ritual can be more than entertainment or doctrine.

They can become spaces in which feeling finds Movement before it needs to become belief.

A free society is not only one in which we are allowed to pronounce any word.

Perhaps it is also one that preserves enough diversity of encounters for us to reorganize grief, joy, fear, change, and belonging without giving someone else a monopoly over what those experiences mean.

DANA protects openness.

Allostasis helps us ask how we continue.

Jiwasa asks what we can produce between us.

And Decolonial Neuroscience gains a task: not merely to measure brains that are together, but to investigate which relationships make it possible to be together without the collective destroying difference.

Perhaps being free does not mean living without a collective.

It means being able to belong without disappearing inside it.

A "we" remains alive only while there is still room for each "I" to move within it.

References

GIBRAM, Paola Andrade. Cantos da vida contra governos da morte: os kanhgág tỹnh e o Acampamento Terra Livre. Revista de Antropologia, 2026. Anthropological research on Kaingang expressive practices and political mobilization.

KELMER, João. Fazendo parentesco com os mortos no Brasil Central: luto, memória e ritual entre os Boe (Bororo). Mana, 2025.

WAI WAI, Jaime Xamen. Uma história de como os Waiwai da Amazônia vêm construindo e agora contando suas arqueologias. Estudos Avançados, 2024. Indigenous archaeology produced by a Waiwai researcher.

GUIMARÃES, Danilo Silva. Sentimentos mobilizados diante de demandas de pessoas e seus mundos. Jornal da USP, 2025.

KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras, 2022.

ESCOBAR, W. Comunicación intercultural desde los medios de comunicación. 2024. Reference for the Aymara linguistic distinction between inclusive and exclusive forms of "we."

KATSUMI, Yuta et al. Allostasis as a core feature of hierarchical gradients in the human brain. Network Neuroscience, 2022. Theoretical perspective on allostasis and predictive regulation.

CURZEL, Federico et al. Joint music listening enhances interpersonal affective and neural synchrony. Cortex, 2026. fNIRS hyperscanning study with friend dyads during shared music listening.

ZHOU, Chenghao et al. Brain-to-brain synchrony increased during interpersonal touch in romantic lovers: an EEG-based hyperscanning study. BMC Psychology, 2024.

BRAINLATAM. Estado responsável, laico e plural - DANA e pertencimento sem conversão. 2026. Conceptual source for DANA as a philosophical and regulatory principle, distinguished here from scientific evidence.

BRAINLATAM. Jiwasa: Cuando el Yo Solo Existe en el Nosotros. 2026. Source for the BrainLatam extensions of true Jiwasa, false Jiwasa, and collective allostasis.