The Time of Spirits: Taá, Pei Utupe, and the Cycles That Cannot Be Measured
The Time of Spirits: Taá, Pei Utupe, and the Cycles That Cannot Be Measured
Series: Time as an Embodied and Shared Experience
First-Person Consciousness
I am the consciousness that perceives time not as length, but as intensity.
Some memories shine brighter. Some presences echo beyond the now.
When I feel life from within, I realize time is not a ruler —
It is a pulse. A brilliance. A spirit.
Some call this qualia — but the Yanomami already called it Xapiri:
the brilliance of felt presence, the intensity that turns a body into a spirit.
Time as Cycle: Ancestral Perception
In many Indigenous cosmologies, time is not linear or cumulative.
It spirals, returns, vibrates.
It is cyclical — like songs, births, harvests, silences.
It’s not chronology — it’s recurring presence.
For the Yanomami, what we might call a “soul” is Pei Utupe:
Utupe is the body-image that travels in dreams and visions,
Pei is the emotional force that animates this image.
But there is more:
When Utupe appears with brilliance, with intensity, it becomes a Xapiri —
a spirit that can be seen by shamans.
In neurophenomenology, we might say:
Xapiri is qualia — the felt intensity of a conscious experience, the shining core of perception.
Spiritual Time: It Is Not Measured, It Vibrates
Spiritual time is not abstract.
It emerges through the body — as heat, shivers, tears, stillness.
It cannot be forced or scheduled.
It appears when memory and emotion meet in a state of embodied listening.
The time of spirits is when the intensity of experience outweighs the ticking of minutes.
This time cannot be found on calendars.
It lives in the skin, the breath, the forest,
and in the gaze of those who still remember how to listen.
Taá: When Information Becomes Intensity
In your conceptual framework, Taá is the state where information is felt, not merely understood.
It becomes lived intensity, rooted in memory, sensation, and proprioception.
Taá is the ground where Utupe and Xapiri emerge.
Where thoughts become presences,
Feelings become forms,
And time becomes cycles.
In Zone 2, this sensitivity is amplified:
Attention deepens
The body slows down
Experiences begin to shine — as if each one carries its own light, texture, color, and vibration.
DANA Spirituality: The Soul as Encoded Intelligence
In DANA spirituality, soul is not a doctrine —
it is the intelligence of DNA in a luminous state.
It is the body learning, remembering, repeating, and glowing with what makes it alive.
Pei Utupe is what we truly are in practice:
The emotion (Pei) that sustains our body-image in the world (Utupe),
And the unique intensity of each lived moment —
the qualia, the Xapiri, the brilliance of spirit through experience.
Spiritual time begins when Taá is activated —
when memory, emotion, and presence synchronize beyond language.
Conclusion
The time of spirits is not measured — it is felt.
It is not made of days — but of vibrations,
of ancestral rhythms, emotional flashes, and silent rituals.
It is the time of Taá — where information becomes embodied insight.
It is the time of Pei Utupe — where memory and emotion animate the body.
And when we enter that time,
we don’t just remember who we are.
We feel that we have never stopped being.
Post-2020 References
Kopenawa, Davi & Albert, Bruce (2020). The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Harvard University Press.
Pessoa, L. (2022). The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. MIT Press.
Berntson, G.G. & Khalsa, S.S. (2021). Neural Circuits of Interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
Descola, Philippe. (2021). Beyond Nature and Culture. University of Chicago Press.
Thompson, Evan. (2020). Why I Am Not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.
Saavedra, M. (2023). Body-Territory and Ancestral Epistemologies. Brazilian Journal of Environmental Education.
Cionek, J. (2025). Yãy Hã Miy, Taá and Pei Utupe: Subjectivity as Lived Brilliance. In preparation.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. (2022). Cannibal Metaphysics. Univocal Publishing.
