Yãy hã mĩy - To Imitate Being to Transcend Being
Yãy hã mĩy - To Imitate Being to Transcend Being
The wisdom of imitation that creates worlds
A Good Dream in the Well-Being of Now
1. Fruition – The gesture that precedes thought
First-Person Consciousness
Before understanding, the body imitates.
Before speaking, it observes.
Before believing, it experiments.
A baby is not born knowing how to be — it is born imitating being, repeating movements, voices, expressions, tensions, and breaths that compose the dance of belonging.
Thus the human awakens — not through idea, but through gesture.
Imitation is the first verb of consciousness.
It is how the body translates the invisible into movement, the inaudible into sound, the ineffable into culture.
And each time we imitate, something new is created.
For this reason, the ancestral peoples called this act Yãy hã mĩy — the sacred gesture of becoming the other in order to discover oneself within the Whole.
2. The principle of Yãy hã mĩy among the Maxakali
Among the Maxakali of eastern Minas Gerais, the term Yãy hã mĩy literally means “that which is imitated in order to hunt or to learn.”
Before hunting, a Maxakali man imitates the animal — its sounds, steps, breathing, and rhythm.
But this imitation is not disguise — it is a ritual of belonging.
By imitating the animal, the hunter becomes part of it, and thus the encounter is fair.
Death, in this context, is transformation: life energy circulates between body and territory.
Yãy hã mĩy also extends to the learning of children.
To learn, for the Maxakali, is to repeat songs and gestures of the elders until the body “remembers” by itself.
It is within this remembering-without-thinking that faith is born: the bodily trust that the right gesture will open the right path.
This trust can be described in contemporary cognitive-neuroscience language as Affordance — a term coined by James J. Gibson to denote the direct perception of the opportunities for action offered by the environment.
The Maxakali body, attuned to its territory, does not decide what to do — it feels what is possible.
Faith, in this sense, is a spiritual Affordance — the ability to recognize the possible before thinking it.
It is the body perceiving the world as its own extension, and the gesture emerging naturally from the field of possibilities that surrounds it.
3. The neuroscience of imitation and bodily faith
Recent research shows that the human brain was shaped to imitate and anticipate.
Mirror neurons, located in premotor and parietal regions, fire both when performing an action and when observing another performing it.
Since 2021, studies have demonstrated that these circuits extend into interoceptive areas — the body feels the other before cognition interprets.
Imitation, therefore, is the basis of empathy and learning — but also of faith.
When we repeat a gesture with intention — a prayer, a song, a ritual, an artistic act — the brain activates networks linking emotion, movement, and meaning, creating circuits of coherence.
This coherence is the terrain of faith: a body that recognizes itself as acting with the world, not against it.
In neuroscientific vocabulary, this is called neural Affordance: the pre-reflective perception of what the environment allows.
Rizzolatti and Grafton (2022) demonstrated that the same mirror-neuron network that observes and executes actions also codes action possibilities.
This capacity makes the gesture intuitive and thought creative.
Within Yãy hã mĩy, such perception is the very territory of faith — the body that knows, without reasoning, what must be done.
4. To Imitate Oneself – The birth of Tensional Selves
When the body learns a gesture, it not only imitates the outside world but also creates a “tensional self” to sustain that doing.
This “self” is a metabolism of attention, emotion, and intention — a neural configuration that maintains energetic coherence for the act.
The Maxakali grasp this intuitively: the hunter who imitates the jaguar generates within himself the I-jaguar, and when he returns, he must release it to become human again.
That release is the wisdom of return.
In modern life, we accumulate multiple tensional selves — the one for work, for affection, for belief, for performance — and often forget to return.
We remain trapped in imitated forms, forgetting that transcendence lies precisely in returning to the body that imitates.
Yãy hã mĩy reminds us: every imitation must dissolve back into the consciousness that created it.
5. Faith as neuroplasticity and expanded affordance
Studies on experiential neuroplasticity (2022–2024) show that intentional repetition reshapes synaptic architecture and modulates dopaminergic receptors.
Ritual practice, prayer, and motor learning share the same mechanism of predictive reinforcement — the brain fine-tunes its connections according to the meaning attributed to movement.
This sensorimotor integration is the basis of expanded Affordance — when body, emotion, and environment form a single field of possibility.
Faith, then, is the bodily experience of the possible:
not an abstract belief, but a direct relation with what the world offers to the right gesture.
Yãy hã mĩy teaches that proper imitation is not submission but openness.
To imitate is to listen to the informational field (Taá) and reorganize oneself to act in synchrony with it.
6. Yãy hã mĩy in sleep and spirituality
During sleep, we relive this ancestral process.
In the tonic and phasic REM phases, the brain repeats and reorganizes motor and emotional patterns — imitating itself to test new forms of being.
Each dream is an internal Yãy hã mĩy: the brain enacts possibilities and redraws the paths of awakening.
Spirituality, therefore, is not belief or dogma but a cycle of conscious imitations:
imitating what is divine to act with meaning;
imitating what is natural to belong;
imitating what is human to transcend.
To dream is to continue learning the gesture — inwardly.
7. Spirit and Soul revisited
As defined in Taá, we maintain the essential distinction:
Spirits (Utupe) are ideas without feelings, pure informational structures — cognitive forms, patterns of meaning.
Souls (Pei Utupe) are those same ideas once engaged with emotion and action, when the spirit vibrates within the body.
In Yãy hã mĩy, spirit and soul merge in the conscious gesture.
Imitation becomes the point of convergence between information and emotion, between form and movement.
Nothing survives death — what remains is the learning of the gesture, dissolved again into the informational field of Taá.
8. Scientific and ethnographic references
Neuroscience & Psychology (post-2020)
Iacoboni, M. (2021). The Mirror Neuron Revolution: How Imitation Shapes the Mind.
Gallese, V. & Cuccio, V. (2022). Embodied Simulation and Empathy Revisited.
Keysers, C. & Gazzola, V. (2023). Interoceptive Mirroring and Emotional Contagion in Humans.
Lutz, A. et al. (2024). Neural Correlates of Ritual Practice and Predictive Coding in Repetitive Actions.
Grafton, S. & Tunik, E. (2022). Action Possibility and Neural Affordance Mapping.
Decety, J. (2022). The Moral Brain and the Simulation of Others.
Amerindian & Anthropological Sources
Maxakali: oral accounts recorded by Carlos Alberto Ricardo (ISA, 1983–2010) and Museu do Índio – Collection Yãy hã mĩy.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2011). Metaphysical Cannibalism.
Seeger, A. (1987). Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People.
Kopenawa, D. & Albert, B. (2010). The Falling Sky.
Fausto, C. (2020). Feasting on People: Eating and Personhood in Amazonia.
9. Synthesis and final reflection
Yãy hã mĩy is the original verb of consciousness.
Faith is the body recognizing what the world offers.
Affordance is the bridge between gesture and possibility —
the instant when doing meets being.
When we imitate with presence, gesture becomes wisdom;
when we imitate without awareness, gesture becomes noise.
The path to transcendence is simple: to imitate being until dissolving being.
Buen Sueño en el Bienestar del Ahora
A Good Dream in the Well-Being of Now
Sonho Bom no Bem-Estar do Agora
El Renacimiento del Pertenecer Natural – Joinville, los Umbu, los Sambaquíes y la Prosperidad Bribri
The Rebirth of Natural Belonging – Joinville, the Umbu People, the Sambaquis, and Bribri Prosperity
O Renascimento do Pertencimento Natural – Joinville, Umbus, Sambaquis e a Prosperidade Bribri
Movimiento de las Aguas Interiores y Sincronía Circadiana del Ser
Movement of the Inner Waters and Circadian Synchrony of Being
Movimento das Águas Interiores e Sincronia Circadiana do Ser
Cuerpo Territorio – La Conciencia del Espacio Vivido
Body Territory – The Consciousness of Lived Space
Corpo Território – A Consciência do Espaço Vivido
Movimiento de las Aguas – El ciclo vital dentro y fuera del ser
Movement of the Waters – The Vital Cycle Inside and Outside the Being
Movimento das Águas – O Ciclo Vital Dentro e Fora do Ser
Apus – La Propiocepción Extendida del Ser
Apus – The Extended Proprioception of Being
Apus – A Propriocepção Estendida do Ser
Yãy hã mĩy Extendido – El cuerpo que imitando se trasciende
Yãy hã mĩy Extended – The Body That Imitating, Transcends Itself
Yãy hã mĩy Extendido – O Corpo que Imitando se Transcende
Taá Extendido – El Sueño que Conecta Todas las Cosas
Extended Taá – The Dream that Connects All Things
Taá Estendido – O Sonho que Liga Todas as Coisas
Weicho - El Ser sin Diferencias
Weicho - Being Without Differences
Pei Utupe - El Alma como Información Comprometida
Pei Utupe - The Soul as Engaged Information
Pei Utupe - A Alma como Informação Engajada
Yãy hã mĩy - Imitarse Ser para Trascenderse Ser
Yãy hã mĩy - To Imitate Being to Transcend Being
Yãy hã mĩy - Imitar-se Ser para Transcender-se Ser
El Soñar de la Información - El Taá
The Dreaming of Information - The Taá
O Sonhar da Informação - O Taá
Sentir e Se Referenciar - Diferenças Fundamentais entre Parkinson e Alzheimer
Deputado Federal Joinville
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