Mind
It is difficult to get anything more than a spiritual amorphous concept of the neurological matrix of the brain. The creation of our minds would almost certainly begin before birth, in a gradual process as the increase in production of new neurons stimulate any existing neural pathways already made, and create a simultaneous linking up of these neurons in a symbiotic and dual causal way. As sensory information increases, the brain develops and orders itself by means of creating an interconnected matrix resulting from this stimulation, which constructs an associated neurological phenomenon from the patterns it develops, which is a recursive awareness. The being of the processes, its very existence and sum of the whole thing, is consciousness.
When senses have formed sufficiently to become a normal processing of information, the mechanism — which is patterned neuron interconnectivity — attains the capability to produce thoughts or ideas. These thoughts are packets of neural activity like modules, juxtaposed and assembled from the comparing of previous patterns of sensory information. Any experience we have is ultimately derived from sensory input and therefore any mental conceptualisation will use a synaesthesia of these senses, borrowing from the neural patterns already laid down due to exposure to living. The activity of the comparing that naturally occurs from all of this, is called the mind. It is the mechanism of knowing.
The mind is the sensory collector which combines all that is received and merges it together to form concepts. The mind itself is created from our neurological processes which produce our experiences. The mind is effectively physically constructed from the sensory experience by the forming of neural pathways. Without something happening the mind would have no relativity to construct anything; but just being alive is something happening, and all that work being done to exist, is the energy that the brain transforms into root mind — consciousness.
Other than pure neural phenomena, everything that anyone experiences is a conceptualisation formed in the brain ultimately taken from sensory information. Our experience is therefore the past. Experience is the minds encapsulation of sensory reception. All experience is created by the brain and the usage of this experience is the mind. All other knowledge comes from the experience of others, who are as us — fallible, societally indoctrinated, confined to judgement relative to their experience, and hopelessly anthropocentric.
The mind conceptualises our reality using sensory information placed upon a framework of time, revealing a sequence of events. The mind works with patterns: in recognising relationships between things and the comparing that follows, and the noticing of the changes that this produces. It is the creator of the concepts of future, past and present, and all thoughts that reside within this compass. The patterns that are created within this neurological matrix are strengthened relative to the frequency of use, creating habits and beliefs.
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There is no future, there is no past; only the present, at which the mind is conceptualising future and past to act as stabilizers to gain a clearer view. Past and future are concepts only. Reality itself is only a concept of the mind.
It is our mind and the game that it produces for our awareness that is our experience of life. At the base level where we are truly flowing beneath our mind's conceptualisation, nothing much is happening. It is only the forward thinking, past and future concepts formed by the mind which makes it interesting (between our being) and in reaction, neurotransmitters and other system responses are produced which give us our physical experience. It is all just happening, and it is our reaction that produces our experience and feeds the story that we say it is.
The sensory information which enters the brain — the actual happening of this process via neurons — is what produces the artifact of experience, which when grouped with other processes, constitutes the difference that produces the functioning of the mind. It is the mind which compares, and consequently produces the concept of time and the continuity.
Our sensory information is what our minds have been constructed from, but there is a substratum that is invisible to normal experience which tells the rest of the story. This substratum is the spiritual; early partially formed mental concepts, still formed from sensory input but which are usually not relayed to our normal awareness due to their incomplete nature. The normal awareness of ours is heavily societally influenced, and if there is no association to link with, an experience can become invisible to it. This is why it is difficult to fit a spiritual experience into our normal conceptual matrix: it is too amorphous. Our awareness is an edited sub-section of experience, and the spiritual is part of what has been edited out. The mind has considerably more to access than what our awareness shows us.
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The mind is the result of information which then produces more. It creates the concepts and there is no relatable experience which isn't concept. The mind focuses upon difference. That is its entire preserve. No difference, no mind. The mind exists because of the results of the difference.
New is always an attraction to this machine and it is 'interest' that is the natural motivating incentive and what the mind is attuned to. Mental stimulation occurs when there are more interconnections within the neuronal structure due to new information arriving, which then sparks off a chain reaction of neural activity, feeding recursively from previously laid down pathways which are the strengthened neural connections born from experience.
If the neurological pathways for memory and imagination are the same, then perhaps memory and imagination actually are the same. It is known that the sub-conscious does a phenomenal amount of work to do something as simple as raise a cup to one's mouth, and so it is possible that to retrieve a memory, the mind does a sort of reverse engineering and imagines what happened. I can remember this from my childhood when I was asked to remember something but all I could do was to imagine it and was then told that that was right. This 'imagining' is effectively a replaying of neural activity, and the memory is a repeat stimulation of the actual neural pathway that has previously been taken.
There is no specific location for the store of memories with this view, only an extrapolation of the path that would have to have been taken previously to get here. The same method is used to view the future, and the minds recognition of these imaginations is not always divided accurately into past and future. The mind is conceptualising all of this all the time. Time is a concept for the mind to use to understand the present. It imagines the future and the past, and the processes with which it does this, do not necessarily differentiate the two as clearly as we would like to believe.
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When I was a toddler, my eldest sister used to take on the role of teaching me how the world worked. One day she was teaching me the difference between things moving and not moving, by rolling a ball to demonstrate movement and another object (which I can't remember exactly) to demonstrate not moving. But the object which was not moving was to my eyes moving in a wavy manner, and was definitely not, not moving. This was the common way I saw things then, and still can. The stillness that she was trying to demonstrate, did not exist to me. Even the floor and walls were moving! I remember her getting a bit annoyed with me, but I was being completely honest — the stationary object was moving, but I didn't have the language to be able to describe it or explain it.
The phenomenon is due to a state of awareness that I still possess, in which I am able to, at will, turn off the automatic correction of eye abnormalities that the mind makes, and see things as the eye itself really sees them. To see things without the minds filtering. This is best described as wavy and distorting — everything in constant motion, bending and flowing back and forth. Presumably this is due to the gelatinous nature of the eyeball which is constantly being deformed slightly within the eye socket. It can also be rhythmically jerky, which is due to the eye being vibrated by the heartbeat. These are all very unhelpful whilst in locomotion, and are quickly denigrated by the mind as we grow up, into a stable and helpful rendition of our surroundings. I believe the morphing effect may be the same as experienced by people on LSD, though I have never taken any. To walk while seeing like this is like being at sea and is most perturbing — as if it wasn't difficult enough when you are just learning how to walk anyway! I think that toddlers are unsteady on their feet due to the rolling nature of their vision as much as it is due to their unfamiliarity of physical balancing.
Seeing everything as it really is, is a revealing of one of the veils of illusion, albeit a very useful illusion. The filtering that the mind makes creates our reality. This is the creation of experience, and its very nature is illusion.
The same stripping of consciousness can be done with hearing, where all sound loses its objective nature and is experienced as a sort of graduated hiss, though I find this a lot more difficult to do. It is also very difficult to see words as the abstract shapes they really are, and how we used to be able to see them before we were taught to read. These are just some of the things that our minds have distorted reality for the purpose of usefulness. How many are we unaware of?
The almost impossibility to see it as it really is — without the filtering that the mind does — shows us the extent of the illusion that we are engrossed in. This pervades throughout our lives like a dream.