What is Mind?

What is Mind? It is that power within us that limits, measures, fixes a particular centre and views from that standpoint, e.g. a theory or a perspective. Whilst the user of mind can also see things from different points and perspectives, he must fix himself, i.e. fix his standpoint somewhere. He must take a position; otherwise he might be musing like a poet. We are taught from our childhood days that mind is what makes us different from animals and indeed from lesser mortals. We associate mind with the powers of thinking, feelings, experience and intelligence. Some might say that mind is what allows us to experience our worlds and all the knowledge therein. But mind is not a faculty of knowledge. And therefore what it creates cannot be the ultimate knowledge, or ultimate reality. It is merely a prism through which we experience only that aspect of reality which it has the capacity to reveal to us. Consider the minds of those who are learning disabled and you get immediately the sense of what I am trying to communicate. Consider too the mind of a buffalo. With it inability to see colours, its world is black and white. How would we adjust to a world that had only two major shades and the various hues of grey in between? The beauty of a sunrise or the magnificent colours of iridescent flowers would be lost to us. Consider too the bats that locate objects in space in the dark through the power of echo-location. It ‘sees’ only by sending out frequency sonar of its own, like an ultrasound machine in hospitals, and ‘views’ objects when this sonar is reflected off it. Its perception relies entirely upon echo, i.e. reflection rather than direct experience. Its reality is so different from ours and its world obviously so. Reality is different for different animals, those on the ground from those in air to those in the submarine world.