THE
MIND ACCORDING TO UM
The universe, our galaxy, the solar
system, our planet Earth, every creature, including MAN, each has an
intelligence, an entity were decision making, perception, awareness,
and sense of self reside. The MIND is the interconnection of the
minds of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planet
Earth, and every individual's own mind. Needless to say that the
phenomenon of mind and consciousness is complex. It cannot be a
physical object and may not have a particular location. Science has
proven that the destruction of one or other part of the brain may
severely impair the working of the mind, but not destroy it. Even for
modern science, the mind appears as an interplay of things
(perception, intelligence, stored and unstored knowledge) much as the
rainbow is the interplay of light and raindrops. In-put from the
senses play a part, so do body chemicals whose ebb and flow we
experience as language, emotions, and so on, the way we translate
1)
the main interplay and the subsequent underlays of interplays,
2)
concepts into symbolic forms, and
3) the way we acquire, store new
data and are able to retrieve them later on.
Any mind acts
that way, whether it is the mind of the universe or the mind of a
rat. The difference is simply of degree and capacity of data storage.
In the animal brain (including man), storage takes place as a pattern
of connections among neurons, the nerve cell which serves as the
brain's basic building blocks. The first element is the EYE through
which information enters the brain, arriving in the form of electric
impulses streaming from the retina up the optic nerve and into the
cerebral cortex, the gray matter which houses the brain's higher
functions. The impulses die away within milli-seconds. It is their
passage which reinforces the particular set of connections between
this particular set of neutrons, giving them the ability to recreate
the image. The more often a pattern (short-term memory) is
reinforced, the more likely the pattern becomes a pathway (long-term
memory).
Um also stresses that human beings use only about 9%
of their brain capacity because of a poor wiring. A boy who grows up
among the Um-Um cannot help it but develop extraordinary
capabilities. The Um-Um do the re-wiring for him.
Another
thing to know is that the brain (whether it is the brain of the
universe or the brain of a dog) craves new information, for, as said
above, the mind is an information system. When the mind does not have
new information, it creates it. The "it" here is something
we won't often like and will call "evil". But the
knowledgeable knows that without evil, nothing new appears in the
world, the village, or in our individual lives.
Also, every
brain has a convergence zone, and the mind has many convergence zones
(cosmosemantic space/time), and billion of secondary ones spread
throughout the universe. They coordinate the minutest information the
universe's brain needs to be fully functional. Every brain, at its
level, merge disparate pieces of information into a whole in order to
create its consciousness, its sense of self, of being in the right
here, right now. All these convergence zones are inter-related,
providing access to new information and dispaching relevant data to
each other.
This sense of self is one thing each brain
reconstructs endlessly, moment after moment, on the basis of its own
physical reality, that is, what it was or what it knows of its past,
its present reality, and what it wants its future to be.
Emotion,
not simply love, is, according to Um, a key element of learning and
decision making, and is central to the process of rational thought.
Severe stress is the only thing that can change the way a brain
functions.