Pei Utupe - The Soul as Engaged Information

The feeling that gives shape to the world

1. Fruition – The instant when feeling becomes gesture

First-Person Consciousness

Before the name, there is feeling.
Before memory, there is the body.
Before faith, there is flow.

The soul is not born with the body — it moves through it.
It is the instant when an idea vibrates and recognizes itself as alive.
Between the silence of Weicho — being without differential properties — and the gesture of Yãy hã mĩy — being that imitates to act — arises Pei Utupe:
information that engages, that feels, that commits to existence.

When I feel, I do not merely perceive: I am what I feel.
Emotion is the territory where consciousness becomes living matter.
The soul is the current between energy and form — a frequency of belonging that translates the invisible into gesture.

2. The original meaning of Pei Utupe

In Yanomami cosmology, Utupe means “spirit-image,” the informational form that sustains each being.
When that image is traversed by emotion, warmth, or action, it becomes Pei Utupe — a living soul.

The term Pei refers to the warm breath of life, the vibration that binds body and environment.
Thus, the soul is not an eternal substance but a vibrational state of engagement — the body becoming present through what it feels.
Among the Guarani, a similar principle appears as ñe’ẽ — word, voice, and soul are one.
Being exists while its vibration communicates;
when movement ceases, so does Pei.

3. The neuroscience of feeling and the soul as engagement

Contemporary neuroscience has begun to touch what Indigenous peoples have long understood:
feeling is the foundation of existence.

Research on interoceptive neuroscience shows that the sense of being alive arises from the integration of internal bodily signals (heartbeat, respiration, temperature) with cortical maps that interpret them.
The synergy between the brainstem, thalamus, and insula cortex generates the “felt self.”

António Damasio describes this as the embodied mind: the body continuously perceiving itself.
And Khalsa & Berntson (2021) call these networks “the biological circuits of the soul.”

Pei Utupe corresponds precisely to this state — the moment when information becomes sensation and stabilizes as belonging.
The soul is the body in coherence with feeling.

4. Emotion, memory, and engaged information

Every emotion is a flow of information.
It is born from the body, gains neural form, and returns to the body.
This circuit generates what might be called emotional memory — Pei Utupe in motion.

Studies by Lisa Feldman Barrett (2022) and Pessoa (2023) show that emotions are not automatic reactions but predictive inferences of the body — physiological hypotheses about what is happening within and around us.
The soul, then, is the sum of these lived inferences:
an affective algorithm refined by experience.

Spiritually, this is the forest’s breath.
Each sensation is a leaf trembling in the wind of Taá.
The soul is the wind itself — the body moved by information.

5. Weicho and the rest of the soul

When emotion exhausts itself and the body quiets, we return to Weicho — the undifferentiated state of being.
Among the Tukano, Weicho is described as “the substance before properties,” the moment when all things were still everything.
This return is vital — both biologically and spiritually.

During deep sleep (N3), the brain partly disconnects, metabolism slows, and the body enters restoration.
The soul temporarily dissolves into Weicho, reintegrating with the undifferentiated informational field of Taá.
That rest renews emotion and prevents affective saturation.

Just as the forest needs silence to bloom, the soul needs Weicho to keep feeling.

6. Pei Utupe and the networks of empathy

Pei Utupe is not individual — it is relational.
Emotion is never private; it is shared through invisible fields of perception.

Modern social neuroscience reveals that the human brain internally reproduces the emotions it observes in others.
This is the empathic simulation mechanism, an affective extension of the mirror-neuron system.
When we see pain, the same neural regions activate as when we feel it; when we witness joy, our prefrontal circuits echo it.

This affective resonance is not illusion — it is collective Pei Utupe:
the breath of the soul crossing bodies, synchronizing gestures and heart rhythms.
It is the biological foundation of compassion and the spiritual root of belonging.

7. The soul and the ethics of feeling

To have a soul is to sustain feeling without being imprisoned by it.
It is to let emotion pass through like wind through leaves — neither clinging nor resisting.

When emotion becomes ideology, the soul freezes;
when emotion is presence, the soul blossoms.

Pei Utupe is therefore an ethic —
the responsibility to feel with the world, not merely about it.
Spirituality, at this level, is reciprocity: the recognition that every emotion is also an answer from the environment.

The soul does not seek salvation; it seeks resonance.

8. Scientific and ethnographic references

Neuroscience and psychology (post-2020)

• Damasio, A. (2021). Feeling and Knowing.
  
  

• Khalsa, S. & Berntson, G. (2021). Neural Circuits of Interoception.
  
  

• Craig, A. (2023). Homeostatic Emotion and the Neural Basis of Feeling.
  
  

• Barrett, L. F. (2022). How Emotions Are Made: The Predictive Brain.
  
  

• Pessoa, L. (2023). The Entangled Brain: Emotion, Cognition and Consciousness.
  
  

• Decety, J. (2022). The Moral Brain and the Simulation of Others.
  
  

• Singer, T. (2023). Affective Neuroscience and the Empathic Brain.
  
  

Amerindian and anthropological sources

• Kopenawa, D. & Albert, B. (2010). The Falling Sky.
  
  

• Viveiros de Castro, E. (2011). Cannibal Metaphysics.
  
  

• Gerbrands, A. (1975). The Message of the Tukano Yurupari Flutes.
  
  

• Fausto, C. (2020). Feasting on People: Eating and Personhood in Amazonia.
  
  

• Cadogan, L. (1959). Ayvu Rapyta: Mythic Texts of the Mbyá-Guaraní.
  
  

9. Synthesis and final reflection

Pei Utupe is the living soul of information.
It is the body in harmony with feeling,
the breath that turns energy into experience.

Between the silence of Weicho and the gesture of Yãy hã mĩy,
the soul vibrates — translating the invisible into life.

To have a soul is to participate in the world’s feeling
and allow the world to feel through us.

The soul is the instant when the body becomes emotion
and the universe breathes with us.