When the Cause Disappears - Allostasis, Freedom, and the Miracles of Transformation

Trust, forgiveness, and metabolic plasticity: when Deliverance allows another way of Being

The Guilt That No Longer Needs to Be Spoken

Imagine growing up hearing that certain feelings related to your sexuality are sinful.

You learn a narrative.

Repeat its words.

Observe how people react when someone disobeys.

Perhaps you discover that expressing what you feel may mean losing your sense of belonging.

Now imagine being alone.

You experience desire.

Nobody is accusing you.

But guilt emerges.

Perhaps you feel fear, shame, or a pain that is difficult to explain.

Your breathing may change.

Your body may prepare a protective response.

Who is producing this threat when nobody needs to speak it anymore?

Sexuality is not an illness. But beliefs, rejection, and expectations of punishment can contribute to genuine suffering.

And what if what had been feeding that suffering ceased to exist?

When the Narrative Remains in the Body-Territory

Let us return to the classroom.

For months, a student was ridiculed.

Now the aggression has stopped.

Even so, the student avoids certain classmates.

Perhaps they continue preparing defensive responses.

In BrainLatam's language, we can investigate this organization as a predominance of Rock mode.

Rock represents protection, habits, and learned responses.

Scissors involves analysis and anticipation.

Paper opens possibilities for enjoyment, contextual openness, and reconsideration.

These are functional metaphors, not three anatomically independent connectomes.

The Body-Territory may continue protecting itself against a threat that no longer exists under the same conditions.

But this does not mean that its history was mistaken.

Protection was learned through real experiences.

The challenge is understanding how new conditions may allow other movements.

Allostasis: The History of Our Adaptations

Bruce McEwen developed the understanding of allostasis as stability achieved through change.

Our organism continuously adjusts its responses to demands.

Neural, autonomic, endocrine, and immune systems participate in these processes.

When certain demands persist, they may contribute to allostatic load.

Now imagine that the threat ends.

Some responses may decrease rapidly.

Others may continue.

Memories, expectations, and physiological adaptations do not necessarily disappear together.

The cause that initiated our suffering may not be the same cause that continues sustaining certain symptoms.

And transforming the initial cause does not guarantee that every associated process will disappear.

But it may create conditions for new forms of regulation.

The Body Speaks on Many Scales

Perhaps we notice our chest becoming more expanded while trying to understand a difficult problem.

Later, when we begin putting that understanding into practice, our rib cage may settle into another range of movement.

We do not need to consciously decide on this transformation.

We may also change our breathing when encountering threat or acceptance.

But breathing does not tell the whole story.

If sufficient hyperventilation occurs, arterial CO₂ decreases.

Blood pH may rise.

Small cerebral arteries and arterioles tend to constrict, altering blood flow.

The body speaks, but it does not have a single dictionary.

A respiratory change alone does not demonstrate freedom, fear, or spiritual transformation.

We need to recognize the metabolism, the territory, and the Doing in which it occurs.

The Environment Also Encounters Our Cells

Persistent suffering involves more than conscious interpretations.

Environmental experiences can participate in neuroendocrine, autonomic, and immune regulation.

Cells receive signals.

They adjust metabolic processes.

They respond to hormones, nutrients, and the chemical conditions of their tissues.

Epigenetics investigates mechanisms associated with the regulation of gene expression, including DNA methylation and histone modifications.

These processes can participate in lasting adaptations.

But this does not mean that every belief directly modifies a specific gene.

Nor does abandoning a particular belief automatically reverse epigenetic changes.

The metabolism produced has a history, and different aspects of that history may persist across distinct timescales.

Plasticity exists.

Its limits and possibilities require investigation.

Në Ropë: When the Conditions for Living Exist

In previous texts, BrainLatam has approached Në Ropë in relation to the conditions that sustain the flow of life.

We revisit this philosophical inspiration while preserving the need to verify its original cultural meanings.

We do not propose identifying Në Ropë with a molecule, a measurable form of energy, or a particular genetic mechanism.

The question that interests us is:

What happens when the conditions that once sustained existence no longer allow certain movements?

A cell needs suitable conditions to function.

A Body-Territory also needs conditions of belonging, protection, and possibilities for action.

These are not equivalent phenomena.

But the comparison helps us recognize that living does not depend solely on possessing capabilities.

It also depends on the conditions under which those capabilities can be realized.

When Pain Learns Another History

Imagine feeling pain while performing a certain movement.

You begin avoiding it.

You anticipate its recurrence.

Now imagine that the pain persists for months.

Research on lower back pain shows that chronification may involve changes in the relationships among circuits associated with nociception, emotion, and motivation.

This does not mean that pain has simply moved from the cortex to deeper brain regions.

Nor does it mean that the pain is imaginary.

But it reveals that its organization can change through lived experience.

The condition that initiated pain may improve while other processes continue contributing to its maintenance.

Within the Completeness of Movement hypothesis, we ask which conditions allow previously restricted movements to find possibilities for realization again.

Forgiveness Encounters Guilt

Let us return to the person who learned to feel guilty about their sexuality.

Perhaps their critical understanding has already changed.

They recognize:

“My past brought me here, but it may not always be able to take me where I could go next.”

However, understanding this may not immediately transform learned feelings.

Now imagine that, during a meaningful religious encounter, someone says:

“You are forgiven in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

For someone who believes, these words may represent something extraordinary.

A previously internalized condemnation may lose its authority.

Perhaps the person cries.

Perhaps they feel relief.

Perhaps they discover that they can continue belonging without denying what they feel.

We do not need to assume that their sexuality required forgiveness.

The suffering may lie in learned guilt, not in the experience of existing, feeling, or loving.

Deliverance and Transformation

A longitudinal study published in 2024 investigated perceived forgiveness from God and self-forgiveness among religious participants.

Its findings suggest relationships between these experiences and lower stress overload.

They do not demonstrate, however, that a religious declaration eliminates a pathology or necessarily produces physiological recovery.

But they raise an important question.

If certain expectations of condemnation were contributing to the maintenance of suffering, what happens when they no longer organize experience?

Perhaps vigilance decreases.

Perhaps certain defensive responses are activated less frequently.

Perhaps new possibilities for relationships appear.

Transformation may happen gradually.

And it does not need to depend on a conscious decision about every bodily process.

The Miracle We Can Investigate

Imagine someone who has lived under threat for years.

Now they encounter safety.

They sleep better.

They begin singing again.

They participate in encounters they previously avoided.

Perhaps certain symptoms decrease significantly.

Perhaps they say:

“It was a miracle.”

We can recognize the spiritual meaning of that experience.

And we can investigate its possible mechanisms.

If certain symptoms were being maintained, in part, by conditions that have ceased to operate, the organism's plasticity may support recovery.

But symptom improvement does not necessarily mean remission of a diagnosed disease.

And not every pathology depends on beliefs.

The lived miracle may be the emergence of possibilities that once seemed impossible, without this constituting proof of supernatural intervention or universal healing.

Science does not need to remove the personal meaning of the event.

Consciousness and the Completeness of Movement

Within the 5D Consciousness hypothesis, we propose:

“Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism produced.”

We do not claim that consciousness explicitly controls this entire metabolism.

It perceives itself as Being within the metabolism produced.

When new conditions allow physiological, emotional, and relational reorganization, other possibilities for movement may emerge.

Within the Completeness of Movement hypothesis, we investigate mobilization, perception, gesture, feedback, meaning, and transition.

But completeness does not mean executing every prepared response.

Perhaps the most important transformation is to stop continually producing a defense whose necessity has diminished.

Freedom may emerge when we no longer need to keep executing the narrative that once organized our protection.

When We No Longer Threaten One Another

Imagine a community in which someone concealed their feelings out of fear of condemnation.

Now they encounter acceptance.

They can ask questions.

Disagree.

Continue belonging.

Perhaps their bodily experience changes.

Perhaps they need considerable time.

Within the Human Quorum Sensing hypothesis, we investigate how reciprocal encounters may expand individual and collective possibilities.

Bringing people together is not enough.

We need to understand which relationships support safety and agency.

And this also leads us to the Jiwasa-State.

A State cannot expect every Body-Territory to find, alone, a new calibration for enduring collective conditions that continue producing suffering.

The conditions of coexistence themselves must remain open to transformation.

When the Cause Disappears

Let us return to the first experience.

The person who learned to feel guilty encounters another possibility for understanding their history.

Perhaps through faith.

Perhaps through acceptance.

Perhaps through new knowledge and relationships.

The past continues to exist.

But it may cease to determine every future experience.

Some transformations will be consciously perceived.

Others may occur through physiological and cellular processes that we do not consciously recognize.

Recovery is neither guaranteed nor necessarily immediate.

But new possibilities may emerge.

When what was feeding suffering ceases to operate, the plasticity of the Body-Territory may allow another organization of life. What science investigates as recovery, consciousness may experience as a miracle.

And our question remains:

Can the transformation of conditions that sustain stress favor emotional, autonomic, cellular, and neural reorganization, expanding our possibilities for agency and for perceiving ourselves as Being?

Annotated References

McEwen, Bruce S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840, 33–44.

Establishes allostasis as stability through change and allostatic load as a possible consequence of persistent or dysregulated activation of adaptive systems.

McEwen, Bruce S.; Gianaros, Peter J. (2011). Stress- and Allostasis-Induced Brain Plasticity. Annual Review of Medicine, 62, 431–445.

Discusses how stress experiences relate to brain plasticity and physiological regulation, without implying that recovery is automatic once a stressor is removed.

Slavich, George M. (2020). Social Safety Theory: A Biologically Based Evolutionary Perspective on Life Stress, Health, and Behavior. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16, 265–295.

Presents social safety as a relevant component of relationships among environment, stress, biological regulation, and health.

Cohen, Sheldon; Wills, Thomas A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310–357.

Examines how different forms of social support may contribute to well-being and buffer the consequences of certain stressful experiences.

Meyer, Ilan H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697.

Develops the minority stress model, including prejudice, expectations of rejection, concealment, and internalized stigma. It supports the distinction between sexuality itself and suffering produced by social conditions.

Skalski-Bednarz, Sebastian Binyamin (2024). The interplay of forgiveness by God and self-forgiveness: A longitudinal study of moderating effects on stress overload in a religious Canadian sample. BMC Psychology, 12, 717.

A longitudinal study involving 211 religious participants that identified relationships among perceived divine forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and stress overload. It does not demonstrate disease remission or directly measured reductions in allostatic-load biomarkers.

Hashmi, Javeria A. et al. (2013). Shape shifting pain: Chronification of back pain shifts brain representation from nociceptive to emotional circuits. Brain, 136(9), 2751–2768.

Investigates changes in the functional representation of pain during chronification, including circuits related to nociception, emotion, and motivation.

Baliki, Marwan N. et al. (2012). Corticostriatal functional connectivity predicts transition to chronic back pain. Nature Neuroscience, 15, 1117–1119.

Relates corticostriatal functional connectivity to the subsequent persistence of pain, contributing to our understanding of its learning-related and plastic dimensions.

De Jaegher, Hanne; Di Paolo, Ezequiel (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 485–507.

Introduces participatory sense-making, relevant to investigating how changes in relationships may transform individual and collective possibilities for action.

BrainLatam — Cionek, Jackson (2021). Neuroepigenética e sociedade: como o ambiente pode modificar a expressão de nossos genes.

Discusses relationships among environment, gene-expression regulation, neurophysiology, and behavior. The possibility of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans requires caution and cannot be assumed from individual experiences.

BrainLatam (2024). Në Ropë: fisiologia da vida por outra perspectiva.

Approaches Indigenous knowledge, vital flow, and the physiological conditions of existence. Its use in this article is philosophical and analogical; the cultural attribution and meaning of the term require confirmation from primary Indigenous sources.

BrainLatam — Cionek, Jackson (2026). O instante em que A deixa de Ser A.

Develops relationships among the transformation of prepared movement, allostasis, and new conditions of experience, continuing the W44/2026 series.

BrainLatam — Cionek, Jackson (2026). Completude do Movimento.

Presents the original Completeness of Movement hypothesis, distinguishing mobilization, feedback, meaning, and the possibility of transition from the mere release of tension.

Cionek, Jackson. Religare — Religiosidade Plena em um Estado Democrático, Laico e de Direito.

An original philosophical work developing spirituality, Egregore, freedom of Being, and belonging in dialogue with the emergence of the Jiwasa-State.

Scientific and conceptual note: Allostasis, the effects of social stress, associations between forgiveness and psychological distress, and certain forms of neural plasticity have scientific support. Explaining a particular experience of Deliverance through epigenetic or cellular changes, or through remission of a disease, would require direct investigation. Sexuality is not treated as an illness, and the religious experience of forgiveness does not imply objectively established moral guilt.

Central principle: The past may explain why we learned to protect ourselves, but it does not have to determine every possibility of Being still available to us.

BrainLatam | W44/2026 · Blog  · 5D Consciousness · Allostasis · Neuroepigenetics · Në Ropë · Completeness of Movement · Jiwasa-State