The Consciousness of the Umbu: Faith, Body, and Sacred Doing

By Jackson Cionek – Brain Bee Ideas / Inosciência / Museum Sambaqui of Joinville

Introduction – When Doing Was Consciousness

Sometimes I wonder: what was the consciousness of the Umbu people like?
I don’t mean their beliefs or their language, but the deep feeling of being alive in a world that had not yet separated subject from nature.
The Umbus did not think about doing — they were the doing itself.
Life unfolded without the gap between gesture and meaning.
And here lies our hypothesis: that the Umbu people may have lived in a neurophenomenological state of collective Zone 2, where each body was a conscious part of a larger body — the group, the landscape, the time.

1. The Body as Ancestral Mind

According to the Damasian Mind, consciousness arises from the integration of interoception (feeling the inside of the body) and proprioception (sensing the body in space).
But in the Umbu, this integration was not mediated by language or centered on an ego.
It was an embodied consciousness, guided by gesture and full bodily attention to the environment.
To carve a stone, to light a fire, to follow animal tracks — each was a form of somatic cognition.
The body thought with the world, not about it.

While colonial cultures separated the subject from the object, the Umbu acted within the landscape — body and territory were one pulsating mind.
The Body-Territory was not a metaphor; it was a lived neuroecological reality.

2. Faith: The Phase Before High Performance

In the Extended Yãy Hã Miy framework, faith is not belief — it is bodily confidence.
It is the neuroaffective state that precedes perfect synaptic coordination — the doing without hesitation.
Before electrical synapses stabilize through practice, there must be faith — the surrender to the gesture without expectation.

The Umbu craftsman, when making a spear point, expected no reward, no recognition.
He trusted that the body already knew what to do.
This trust corresponds to what neuroscience today would call a pre-synaptic activation of Zone 2 — a state where the body acts without relying on the dopaminergic system of motivation.

Faith, therefore, was both a neural and spiritual phase: the transition from effortful doing (Zone 1) to fluid doing (Zone 2).

3. The Electrical Synapses of Sacred Doing

The Umbu people lived in a rhythm of synchronization.
Electrical synapses — which allow rapid, coordinated transmission between neurons — are the perfect metaphor for their mode of consciousness.
They acted without the delay of desire or planning — action was immediate, coherent, and collective.

In Umbu making, gesture preceded thought.
Faith was not expectation, but full presence in the act.
This state — action without reward, presence without anticipation — quieted the dopaminergic loop and opened the bioelectrical flow of fruição (attuned enjoyment).
It is the opposite of the modern mind, addicted to goals and validation.

4. The Collective as an Expanded Brain

Imagine each Umbu as a living Zone 2 inside a complex system.
Each body, a node of consciousness.
Each gesture, a synapse.
Together, they formed a collective connectome, where social harmony emerged from synchronized sensing.

There was no isolated individual — only a group consciousness, where one’s action was the continuation of another’s perception.
The social body functioned as a network of interoceptive crossings, sustained by rituals, sounds, fire, and rhythm.
This distributed form of consciousness was an ancestral neuroecology — a model of collective cognition that preceded symbolic language but not meaning.

5. The Language of the Body and the Grammar of Gesture

Western semiotics — from Peirce to contemporary neuropsychology — treats the sign as representation.
But for the Umbu, the sign was the act itself.
Meaning was not something spoken, but something done.

This resonates with Marcus Maia’s proposal that the grammatical unit can extend beyond the word or sentence to encompass an entire paragraph — or, in this case, an entire ritual gesture.
Each Umbu artifact — a spearhead, a fire, a burial — was a sensory paragraph in a living grammar of presence.
The body was the verb; the territory, its syntax.

6. The Neurophenomenological Hypothesis of Umbu Consciousness

Hypothesis: The Umbu people developed a pre-reflexive, somatic-synchronic form of consciousness characterized by dominant electrical synchronization, low dopaminergic dependence, and high ecological interoception.

This consciousness manifested as sacred doing, in which faith, body, and collectivity formed a neurophenomenological system of expanded Zone 2 — where each individual was a conscious cell within a larger social organism.

This form of consciousness precedes colonial rationality and reveals that human excellence — or high performance — originally emerged not from belief, but from the bioelectrical integration between body and Earth.

7. From the Umbu to the Universal Human

Umbu consciousness never disappeared — it remains in our bodily memory.
Each time we create something in silence, without seeking reward, we touch this origin.
The Umbu gesture still vibrates in our neurons: a knowing that moves between body and soil, between doing and being.
To rediscover it is to reconnect science and ancestry — a Decolonial Neuroscience that breathes with the planet.

Post-2020 References for Scientific Dialogue

1. Northoff, G. & Lamme, V. (2021). The Dynamic Hierarchy of Brain and Body in Consciousness. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
   → Establishes body–brain interdependence as the foundation of consciousness.
   
   

2. Berntson, G. G., & Khalsa, S. S. (2021). Neural Circuits of Interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
   → Demonstrates that internal sensation is the nucleus of conscious self-awareness.
   
   

3. Storm, J. F. et al. (2024). An Integrative, Multiscale View on Neural Theories of Consciousness. Neuron.
   → Supports consciousness as a network phenomenon across multiple scales — including social.
   
   

4. Damasio, A. (2021). Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon Books.
   → Defines consciousness as the embodied perception of the living body in action.
   
   

5. Gallagher, S. (2020). Action and Interaction. Oxford University Press.
   → Argues that consciousness arises from embodied action and ecological interaction.
   
   

6. Wengrow, D. & Graeber, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything.
   → Shows that many ancestral societies practiced freedom through collective action rather than hierarchy.
   
   

7. Seth, A. K. (2021). Being You. Penguin Press.
   → Reinforces interoception as the biological foundation of the feeling of being.
   
   

Brain Bee Synthesis:
The Umbu did not believe — they trusted.
Faith was the right gesture, the precise synapse, the silence between impulse and meaning.
And within that electrical silence, perhaps we were all born: body, mind, and Earth in perfect synchrony.