Weicho - Being Without Differences

The silence that precedes the gesture

1. Fruition – The Rest of the Whole

First-Person Consciousness

Before time, there was silence.
Not the silence of absence, but of total presence.
Nothing moved, and yet everything was.

No sound, no color, no boundary — only the field of possibilities.
This was Weicho: being without differential properties,
the state in which stone was not yet hard, water not yet fluid, and man not yet distinct from wind.

Within this primordial stillness, the universe rested in itself — not as emptiness, but as undivided fullness.
And from this rest, gesture was born.
Taá began to dream, Yãy hã mĩy began to imitate, Pei Utupe began to feel.
But Weicho remained — the invisible ground of all consciousness.

2. The Tukano origin of Weicho

Among the Tukano, Desana, and Barasana peoples of the Upper Rio Negro, Weicho (also rendered Weixo or Wetschu) designates the original substance from which everything emerged.
Before there were worlds, forms, or spirits, there was this indifferent matter — an essence that contained, in potential, all future differences.

“In the beginning there were no names.
Everything slept within itself.”
(Barasana Creation Chant, translated by Reichel-Dolmatoff)

Weicho is being before it becomes a thing.
When the Creator breathes the first sound, that substance vibrates and differentiates:
stone gains weight, river gains direction, body gains breath.
Yet Weicho never disappears — it remains as the continuous backdrop of reality.

In Tukano shamanism, entering trance means “returning to Weicho”:
to see the world without contours, where spirits and materials interpenetrate as one vibration.
To return to Weicho is to regain the perceptual unity that precedes all separation.

3. Weicho and the neurobiological body

From a neuroscientific perspective, Weicho corresponds to a state of minimal neural differentiation — the system’s deep rest.
During slow-wave sleep (N3), low-frequency oscillations (< 1 Hz) deactivate the prefrontal cortex, narrative self, and the segmentation between body and environment.
The mind returns to an oceanic perception: pure feeling without form.

At this stage, mTOR (mammalian Target of Rapamycin) — a master regulator of cellular metabolism — lowers its activity, promoting protein recycling and energetic restoration.
It is the moment when the organism “turns off” to rebuild itself.
Thus, Weicho represents the deep sleep of existence — when consciousness depersonalizes and the body reorganizes within the undifferentiated.

Research by Tononi (2021) and Mashour (2022) on minimal consciousness shows that the brain never reaches absolute zero — even in N3, small coherent networks oscillate silently.
That is Taá within Weicho: the dream still asleep, preparing the next gesture.

4. Weicho and the metabolism of creation

Tukano cosmology describes Weicho as the “bed of primordial waters.”
Biology describes the same principle as the basal metabolic state, where life reorganizes itself to continue existing.

When mTOR is inhibited, cells enter regenerative autophagy —
they recycle what is unnecessary and preserve what is essential.
Spiritually, this is the body returning to its original purity — to being without differential properties.

Within Weicho, nothing is lost; everything is rearranged.
What seems like death is only transformation without ego.
Indigenous wisdom intuited this long ago: every act of creation is born from rest, not effort.
The universe breathes through the alternation of gesture and stillness.

5. Indifferent consciousness and the dissolution of self

The experience of Weicho can be touched — however briefly — in states where the body loses the distinction between inside and outside.
During trance, deep meditation, or dreamless sleep, the mind stops representing and simply is.

Neurophysiologically, connectivity between executive networks decreases while slow thalamo-cortical synchrony increases.
Self-awareness dissolves, leaving only total presence — no subject, no object.

This is what Damasio would call the absolute proto-self,
or what Alfredo Pereira Jr. describes as the neutral face of Triple-Aspect Monism:
pure information before it becomes matter or consciousness.

At that threshold, Weicho ceases to be only myth and becomes a neurobiological phenomenon — the system returning to the informational ground of existence.

6. Weicho within the cycle of other states

Each of the previous blogs describes a movement emerging from Weicho:

Consciousness is not linear but cyclical.
Just as sleep alternates between N1, N2, N3, and REM, the mind alternates between differentiating and returning to the undifferentiated.
Weicho is the invisible womb of all states — the soil from which every perception is born and to which it returns.

7. Weicho and a spirituality without promise

The spirituality of Weicho offers no continuation or redemption.
It speaks of a return to the undifferentiated, not as an end but as renewal.
When life falls silent, the body decomposes into molecules that recirculate — information redistributed through new forms.
Nothing is lost; everything transforms.

Weicho is therefore the eternity of the instant, not of the person.
It is the state where individuality ceases and information endures.
It is the purity of being before history — the same silence renewed with every deep breath.

8. Scientific and ethnographic references

Neuroscience and biology (post-2020)

• Tononi, G. (2021). Integrated Information Theory and the Minimal Conscious State.
  
  

• Mashour, G. (2022). Consciousness and the Neural Correlates of Sleep.
  
  

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

• Pereira Jr., A. (2022). Triple-Aspect Monism and the Ground of Experience.
  
  

• Barrett, L. F. (2022). The Predictive Brain and the Energetics of Emotion.
  
  

• Berntson, G. (2023). Autonomic Rhythms and Metabolic Balance during Deep Sleep.
  
  

Amerindian and anthropological sources

• Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1971). Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians.
  
  

• Hugh-Jones, S. (1979). The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia.
  
  

• Desana and Tukano: Museu do Índio / Rio Negro – Cadernos de Mitologia Indígena.
  
  

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

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

9. Synthesis and final reflection

Weicho is the universe resting within itself.
It is the silent ground where the body sleeps,
the mind dissolves, and the soul rests.

Everything that is born, is born from Weicho;
everything that dies, returns to it.

It is the sleep of matter,
the pause of consciousness,
the eternal instant where nothing is separate.

To live is to differentiate from Weicho;
to die is to return to what one never ceased to be.