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.