Happiness Already Lived Here – Joinville, SC: Over 10,000 Years of Presence

I feel what I perceive.
When I take a deep breath and gaze at the Serra do Mar from my window, I sense that my body still carries memories that may not even be mine — perhaps they belong to all those who came before.
By silencing digital noise and letting my body resume listening to the forest, the stones, the air, and gravity, I feel something awaken within me: a sense of time that does not run, but pulses.
And there, in the space between my own interoception and the horizon line, I realize that Joinville was once a territory of spirituality without dogmas — a time when there was no guilt, no final judgment — only belonging to the now.

A Felicidade Já Morava Aqui – Joinville - SC mais de 10.000 Anos de Presença

Happiness Already Lived Here – Joinville, 10,000 Years of Presence

The First Inhabitants of Joinville

Long before the sambaquis were built — even before the Guarani, Jê, or colonizers — peoples of the Umbu Tradition already inhabited or traveled through the region of Joinville. Living between 12,000 and 2,000 years ago, these hunter-gatherers left traces of a life fully rooted in nature: bifacial arrowheads, scrapers, and fire pit remnants beneath rocky ledges.
They had no cities, temples, or kingdoms. They had forest, movement, and presence.

These peoples did not live “in a state of survival,” as Eurocentric narratives often claim.
They lived in a state of presence — with collective decisions and seasonal freedom, moving between ways of life and social reorganizations as the landscape, climate, and affections allowed.

Museu Arqueológico de Sambaqui de Joinville

A Spirituality Without Judgment or Guilt

These peoples left no sculptures of gods, no sacred hierarchies. But they left something deeper: silence and traces of reciprocity with life.

Based on archaeological studies and the insights of The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow), we now understand:

• They did not create judging deities;
  
  

• They projected no guilt, sin, or salvation;
  
  

• They made no division between sacred and everyday life;
  
  

• And they did not fear life after death — because they were fully present in the now.
  
  

This spirituality was not “primitive” — it was original: a bodily and environmental awareness where belonging was not taught but lived.
They did not pray for the future — they were in tune with the organic dance of the present.

Correcting the Myth of Agricultural Hierarchy

For a long time, we believed that human evolution followed a “natural” path: from foraging to farming, from farming to statehood, from the state to institutionalized religion.
But today, evidence shows that there was no such linear progression.

Agriculture was not synonymous with hierarchy. Agricultural and foraging peoples alternated between periods of freedom and authority, communion and command — in seasonal or ceremonial cycles.
Judgmental religiosity and the idea of punishment after death didn’t emerge with maize or farming — but with specific forms of political domination, often tied to the domestication of bodies, time, and thought.

Damasian Mind, DANA Spirituality, and the Now

The spirituality of these peoples deeply resonates with what we now call the Damasian Mind: a mind rooted in interoception and proprioception, where thinking is an echo of feeling.
Their way of life mirrors DANA Spirituality — not a belief system, but an ancestral intelligence of the body, where DNA creates not dogmas but rhythms.

They did not seek the beyond.
They sought the hunt, the forest, clean water, the group’s laughter — caring for body and spirit as one and the same.

Joinville Carries a 10,000-Year Memory

Not a memory of fear or judgment,
but of presence and belonging.

The Umbu peoples, though without written words, left us a clear message:
Life is now.

True spirituality never left the forest.
We did.

Planet 01 — the 0.1% richest —
wants to impose a colonial spirituality
to keep us trapped in Zone 3.