COP30 | Belonging as Metabolism: The Conscious Flow of a Living Economy

First-Person Consciousness

I am 18 years old.
I live in a city where the air feels heavier each year.
There are mornings when I feel the same heaviness inside my chest —
as if my own breathing were connected to the breathing of the streets.

When I recycle, when I plant, when I share knowledge online,
I feel the air change slightly.
It’s not imagination.
It’s feedback.
My nervous system and my ecosystem are one continuous circuit.

That’s why I say: I belong because I metabolize.
Belonging is not a feeling; it’s a physiological state of connection.

1. From Individual Pulse to Collective Metabolism

Modern neuroscience confirms what ancestral cosmologies already embodied:
the self is not an island but a rhythm.

Antonio Damasio calls it the Feeling of Life Itself — the body’s continuous mapping of its internal states.
When many nervous systems synchronize through empathy, communication, or shared tasks, they form what systems biology calls a collective homeostasis.

Recent hyperscanning studies (2023–2025) show that groups in cooperative attention literally align their neural oscillations.
At that moment, the social body behaves as a single metabolic brain,
capable of creativity and long-term thinking.

That’s the physiological base of what we call Zone 2 — Fruição:
a calm yet alert state where energy flows instead of fragments.
And it is exactly this state that the DREX Citizen aims to sustain economically.

2. Economy as Neuro-Metabolic Continuum

Every heartbeat, every breath, every transaction of energy —
biological or financial — obeys the same thermodynamic law: flow or die.

When the economy isolates people from one another through fear or scarcity,
it mimics a nervous system in chronic stress:
sympathetic overdrive, cortisol dominance, cognitive collapse.

The DREX Citizen functions like a vagal reset for society.
By guaranteeing a minimal, steady daily income,
it restores parasympathetic balance — the social equivalent of slow breathing.
It lets the collective brain exit the panic loop and re-enter cognitive flexibility.

In biological terms:

Money becomes oxygen, not adrenaline.

3. DNA as the Operating System of Belonging

Recent research (Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2024) demonstrates that DNA diversity determines ecosystem metabolism.
A biome survives through heterogeneity in cooperation — different genetic strategies harmonizing toward a common stability.

Likewise, a democracy thrives when differences cooperate metabolically instead of competing destructively.
The colonial model tried to suppress difference, to standardize behavior and belief.
But biological life proves that difference is structure, not threat.

Our task at COP30 is to translate this biological fact into economic law:
only systems that preserve genetic, cultural, and informational diversity remain stable over time.

4. Breaking the Colonial Reflex

The colonial mind operates on remedial narratives:
consume → profit → accumulate → redeem through charity.
It’s a metabolic fiction that never closes the loop.

Complex-systems economics (Ecological Economics, 2021) shows that such linear flows create entropy — waste of energy and meaning.
True sustainability emerges only when outputs feed inputs:
when every act of life generates conditions for more life.

Belonging, then, is not ideology.
It’s the completion of the metabolic cycle that colonial capitalism broke.

5. Citizen as Neuron of the Planetary Mind

If the biosphere is the planetary nervous system,
then each citizen is a neuron — a cell of perception, decision, and connection.

The Monism of Triple Aspect (Alfredo Pereira Jr.) explains this continuity:
mind, body, and world are not separate substances but three expressions of one living process.
To feel, to act, and to belong are simultaneous.

Therefore, political consciousness is not an abstraction.
It’s a metabolic event — synaptic, hormonal, atmospheric.
And when policy disconnects from that reality,
it ceases to be governance and becomes pathology.

6. From Dopamine to Fruição

Social media and consumer markets run on dopamine loops — short bursts of pleasure without integration.
They mirror the colonial economy: excitement without nourishment.

Zone 2, on the other hand, corresponds to mTOR-regulated metabolic balance — the body’s mode for repair, learning, and creativity.
Every DREX Citizen payment that reduces survival stress allows the brain to enter this zone.
It is neuroeconomics in its truest sense: aligning resource distribution with cognitive health.

7. Acting Like Moss and Fungus: The Cycle of Belonging

In nature, mosses and fungi colonize barren rock together.
Moss retains water — physical metabolism.
Fungus releases acids — chemical metabolism.
Together they create soil — the first space of belonging for future life.

Humans can do the same:
one group builds physical conditions, another transforms meaning,
and together they regenerate the ground of existence.

Belonging is not ownership.
It’s participation in regeneration.

8. COP30 — Toward Metabolic Democracy

Belém 2025 can become the birthplace of a new civic physiology.
Where the right to circulation replaces the illusion of profit.
Where the economy breathes in rhythm with rivers and forests.

To belong is to circulate.
To circulate is to stay alive.

Now that I understand my consciousness as part of a larger metabolism,
I no longer ask what can I consume?
I ask what can I nourish?

And that, I believe, is the real meaning of citizenship.

Scientific References (2020–2025)

• Metabolic Diversity and Ecological Function in Microbiome-Driven Ecosystems. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2023.
  
  

• DNA-Based Modeling of Ecosystem Complexity and Evolutionary Adaptation. Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution, 2022.
  
  

• Complex Adaptive Systems and Ecological Economics: Towards Metabolic Accounting. Ecological Economics, 2021.
  
  

• The Planetary Microbiome and Its Role in Carbon Cycling. Science, 2020.
  
  

• From Genetic Information to Ecosystem Metabolism: A Systems Biology Approach. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2024.