dEUS: when the selves stop competing and begin to compose

What if God were not only an idea above life, but a way of feeling the living composition of all selves within the Earth?

This text does not propose a religion. It also does not deny anyone’s personal spiritual experience. The proposal is different: to think of dEUS as a neurophilosophical and decolonial concept, born from life, DNA, Tensional Selves, Jiwasa, and the relationship with all living beings.

In this reading, the human being is not a single, fixed, isolated “I.” We are many selves in composition. Each task, bond, memory, fear, desire, and territory activates different ways of being and existing. There is the self that works, the self that cares, the self that defends, the self that creates, the self that fears, the self that belongs, and the self that tries to survive.

We call these forms Tensional Selves.

They are not imaginary characters. They are learned bodily modes. Each Tensional Self organizes posture, breathing, attention, memory, interoception, proprioception, and action. One self appears when we need protection. Another when we teach. Another when we negotiate. Another when we enter fruition. Each self is an existential metabolism.

The basis of this begins before language. It begins in DNA.

DNA is not only a biological molecule carrying instructions. It is an intelligence of life’s continuity. From the fertilized egg, life organizes differentiation, rhythm, form, limits, openings, and possibilities. The body is born as composition. Different cells become tissues, organs, and systems. No cell needs to be “everything.” Each one participates in a larger whole.

This is one of the central images for understanding dEUS.

Life does not function through absolute competition among parts. It functions through composition among differences. When parts stop destructively competing and begin functionally composing, the body lives better. The same can be said of Tensional Selves, Jiwasa, and territory.

From the perspective of the Damasian Mind, consciousness emerges from organism regulation, feelings, and the relation between body and world. Antonio Damasio’s Feeling & Knowing reinforces that consciousness depends on deep bodily processes in which feeling and knowing are inseparable. Mind is not detached from life; it emerges from life organized in the body.

Here, dEUS begins to take shape.

When Tensional Selves compete inside us, we live fragmented. One self wants to create, another wants to defend, another wants to please, another wants to control, another wants to flee. This internal competition can produce anxiety, rigidity, guilt, fear, and Zone 3. The body becomes captured by tensions that cannot compose.

But when the selves begin to recognize themselves as parts of the same organism, something changes. The self that defends does not need to destroy the self that creates. The self that fears does not need to silence the self that trusts. The self that works does not need to crush the self that contemplates. The selves stop fighting for command and begin composing a larger field of consciousness.

This larger field is what we call dEUS: the living composition of selves in relation with DNA, body, territory, Jiwasa, and all living beings.

The spelling matters: dEUS.
The “EUS” — the selves — appear inside the word.
Not as individual vanity, but as integration.

dEUS is when the selves stop competing and begin composing.

This idea dialogues with Pachamama, but follows another path. Pachamama begins from the whole toward the individual: Earth as living body, matrix, territory, and condition of existence. dEUS, in this formulation, begins from DNA and the selves toward the whole. It is the path from one to world, from cell to body, from body to collective, from collective to Earth.

Pachamama says: the whole lives in us.
dEUS says: our selves can compose with the whole.

This formulation also dialogues with vegetal cycles. Human beings belong to the vegetal world more than modern culture admits. To green, to flower, to fruit, to withdraw, to cross winter, to return in spring: these cycles are not only external metaphors. They help the body understand rhythms of expansion and recollection. Not every time is a time to produce. Not every time is a time to bloom. There are times of roots, silence, fruit, fall, and return.

When modern culture demands continuous productivity, it violates these cycles. It forces all selves to perform all the time. The body loses its seasons. DNA still belongs to life, but the social mind tries to operate like a machine.

dEUS appears as the recovery of living composition.

Contemporary neuroscience supports part of this intuition. Research on interoception and self suggests that the sense of self is deeply tied to internal bodily signals, physiological regulation, and embodied cognition. The self is not only a cognitive narrative; it is also a bodily process.

This is decisive for Tensional Selves. A self is not born only from an idea about oneself. It emerges from bodily states. Each self has a breathing pattern, a posture, an affective temperature, an attentional field, and a relationship with territory.

When these selves remain isolated, the body fragments. When they enter composition, the body gains dynamic unity — not rigid unity, but living unity.

This living unity can expand into Jiwasa.

Jiwasa is when territory becomes “we.” It is when the collective emerges without erasing the individual. In a healthy Jiwasa, each person maintains singularity while participating in collective intelligence. Leadership circulates. Criticality remains. Difference does not destroy belonging.

dEUS is the next step: when individual selves compose with a larger Jiwasa that includes not only humans, but also water, forest, mountain, animals, plants, climate, memory, and future.

Here we return to Indigenous thought. Many Indigenous cosmologies do not radically separate humans from nonhumans. Life is relation among beings. Earth is not a backdrop; it is participant. Rivers, mountains, forests, and animals are not only resources; they are presences in the world. Ailton Krenak’s Futuro Ancestral helps restore this continuity between body, territory, and life.

The concept of dEUS does not need to copy Pachamama or replace religious traditions. It can function as a neurodecolonial bridge: a way to show that spirituality, when not captured by fear or power, can be understood as the composition of selves with life.

This also helps distinguish devotion from debt.

When a person feels they have received inspiration, a gift, an encounter, or something deeply good, an impulse to give back may arise. This impulse can be beautiful. It is born from belonging. But if captured by anxiety, it can become obligation, guilt, or fear.

True devotion, in this reading, does not arise from debt.
It arises from composition.

When the body feels that it belongs, it wants to contribute. Not because it must pay something back, but because participating in the whole is a way of sustaining the flow of life. This is a devotion close to Pachamama, APUS, and Jiwasa: care as a response to belonging.

Hyperscanning research helps sustain this reading. Recent reviews show that inter-brain synchrony appears in contexts of cooperation, empathy, communication, and shared goals. This suggests that the human “I” can couple with other bodies in real collective processes.

But scientific language often remains colonial when it describes this only as “inter-brain synchrony” or “social coordination.” It measures composition, but rarely recognizes the lived meaning of that composition. It measures coupled brains, but does not always ask what world, territory, trust, and embodied spirituality allow such coupling.

Decolonial Neuroscience must ask that question.

It is not enough to study the isolated self.
We must study selves in composition.

It is not enough to study the individual brain.
We must study the body in Jiwasa.

It is not enough to study spirituality as belief.
We must study devotion as the body giving back belonging.

dEUS, therefore, is a transversal concept. It connects DNA, Tensional Selves, APUS, Jiwasa, Pachamama, and DREX Cidadão. At the individual level, it organizes the selves. At the collective level, it organizes belonging. At the territorial level, it recognizes that all beings participate in the continuity of life.

When dEUS is wounded, the selves compete. The body enters Zone 3. The person fragments, the collective becomes threat, Earth becomes resource, and spirituality becomes fear or control.

When dEUS composes, the selves collaborate. The body enters Zone 2. The person breathes better, perceives the other, feels territory, respects cycles, and participates in the world with more criticality and care.

This also changes politics. If the selves need to compose, society must compose as well. A healthy State should not stimulate permanent competition among fragmented bodies. It should create conditions for citizens to live with minimal stability, belonging, education, health, time, and care.

Here, DREX Cidadão appears as social metabolism: money born in the citizen to sustain life, not only in banks, debt, or speculation. If the economy organizes bodies, it can either wound or support dEUS. It can place selves in desperate competition or allow them to compose with the collective.

In the end, dEUS is not an escape from the world.
It is a way of belonging to it more deeply.

It is DNA remembering that it comes from life.
It is the body remembering that it contains many selves.
It is Jiwasa remembering that the collective does not need to crush the individual.
It is Pachamama remembering that all beings belong to Earth.
It is consciousness remembering that thinking is composing.

Perhaps the question is not only: “Which God do I believe in?”
Perhaps the deeper question is:

Which selves within me are still competing, and which ones can already compose with life?

When this composition happens, dEUS stops being only a word and becomes a bodily, collective, and territorial experience.

Because dEUS, in this reading, is this:

life recognizing itself through the selves that finally stop competing and begin composing.

References

DAMASIO, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.
Foundational for understanding consciousness as embodied, interoceptive, proprioceptive, and situated.

MUSCULUS, Lisa et al. “An Embodied Cognition Perspective on the Role of Interoception in the Development of the Minimal Self.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.
Connects interoception, embodied cognition, and the development of the minimal self.

MONTI, Angelo et al. “The inside of me: interoceptive constraints on the concept of self.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2022.
Reviews evidence that the emergence, maintenance, and disturbance of selfhood are deeply linked to interoception.

KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro Ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
A key Latin American reference for belonging, living territory, ancestry, and continuity of life.

ESCOBAR, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Supports the ideas of pluriverse, territory as ontology, and collective world-making.

HAESBAERT, Rogério. “From Body-Territory to Territory-Body (of the Earth): Decolonial Contributions.” GEOgraphia, 2020.
Helps articulate body-territory, territory-body of the Earth, and Latin American decolonial thought.

AZHARI, A. et al. “A Systematic Review of Inter-Brain Synchrony and Social Interaction.” 2025.
Shows that inter-brain synchrony appears in contexts of cooperation, empathy, and communication.

SCHILBACH, L. et al. “Synchrony Across Brains.” Annual Review of Psychology, 2025.
Reviews second-person neuroscience, real-time interaction, and synchrony across brains.