A site dedicated to the rational study of the UMMO affair
D41-8 Play on UMMO - Physio-psychological bases
Daily Life on UMMO-8 [ VCEU-8 ]
Mr. D. Fernando Sesma Manzano
MADRID SPAIN
Language Spanish
We have informed you about the transcendent character of OXUO KEAIA (Art and Technique of PLAY), and we pointed out this transcendence for our Society because our OXUO are not only directed towards the recreation of the individual but fulfil several essential functions. These are:
- Integral bodily development, allowing not only the harmonious growth of the muscular tissues but the balanced formation of the remaining organs of the OEMII.
- To foster and develop the mental faculties of PERCEPTION and REASONING.
- To increase the gregarious and social tendencies of the individual.
- Formation of a series of conditioned reflexes suited to the present stage of the adult.
With these dimensions OXUO KEAIA acquires a genuine therapeutic value, while at the same time perfecting the psychophysiological structure of the OEMII.
All the brothers of our Society, without any coercion from the family or from the UMMOAELEWE (General Council of UMMO, made up of four Hierarchs, although in exceptional cases this number is smaller), acquire from the time they are UUGEE or UUYIE (Children) the mental and somatic habits of OXUO, which they will never abandon until death.
But OXUO KEAIA is a complex art of infinite flexibility and variety. To understand it you will have to give up establishing too close an analogy between it and earthly Games and sports.
In the first place because you must integrate into it the two characteristics underlying these two earthly forms.
Thus you associate with sport the common and outstanding note of bodily development, although the mental faculties undoubtedly play a part in Football, Cricket, Tennis and Karate.
In other games, on the contrary, there is a predominance of strategy, which requires the players to put their reasoning and even their emotional control to the test, while in certain cases the speed of reflexes and even the intervention of chance cannot be disregarded either.
We prefer not to allude to certain forms you call games of Chance, which not only brutalize and atrophy the intellectual faculties of earthly OEMII, but contribute, as in the case of Lotteries and Football Pools, to bringing about an even more unjust distribution of the National Income and hence to obstructing the harmony of the Social Network of this Planet. (We do not refer to the purely Socialist Countries, where with excellent judgement such irrational practices have been abolished).
Thus there arises in the Countries of Earth an enormous variety of Games and sporting forms, linked to the different periods and cultures.
However, we observe a common denominator in all of them. With rare exceptions, they keep to a code or set of inflexible rules.
Not only are the material instruments of each Game standardized (balls, rackets, boards, pieces), but the rules governing the strategy of its development are subject to an inflexible RULEBOOK or laws of the Game.
We have been astonished, for example, to observe how, in matters bordering on social coexistence; episodes of your gregarious life touching on religion, on conduct towards the other OEMII of the restricted circle of relatives and friends, and even those concerning their very health and physical integrity, the Men of EARTH show themselves so ANARCHIC, so irrational, governed only weakly by a weak code that is broken most of the time, and yet in matters touching on the laws of the GAME you reach extremes of exactitude and precision that are truly morbid (typical of certain hysteroid or compulsive psychasthenic patients).
It is not unusual to observe at sporting competitions the use of chronograph equipment that records on optical tape variations of the order of microseconds to establish the precise instant at which an athlete has reached the finishing line, or the exorbitant unction with which chess players set about cancelling an intelligent move by the opponent because the standard number of moves per hour has been exceeded by a tiny increment.
This leads us to deduce that you are indeed capable of developing your Social Network, your customs and your economic policy, as well as your forms of Government, more rationally, at the moment when you stop inverting the terms and establish a more consistent scale of values, in which you place greater disciplinary emphasis on truly transcendent matters and are more tolerant and less punctilious at the low levels of human activity.
For all those rigid rules in the conduct of Games and Sport would be explicable if you had come, as we have, to develop play activity as an integral and transcendent form of education, studying with scientific rigour not only the most suitable forms of OXUO, but verifying by empirical processes in the Psychophysiological laboratory the results of such methods on the organism and on neurocortical activity. But the fact is that the panorama we are able to observe regarding earthly sports and Games is dismal. Many of the rules governing such activities are harmful to the organism, developing, it is true, certain metabolic, histological and mental factors, only to leave the rest utterly neglected, when they are not injured or caused to atrophy. And this last is not unknown to you.
With all this we do not wish to say that our OXUO lacks codified rules altogether. On the contrary, their complexity is such that they must always be programmed by the XANMOO AYUBAA, which is nothing other than a Network of large Computers or, as you would incorrectly call them, artificial BRAINS (not electronically based, like the Earthly ones. See technical reports sent). To such an extent that the players never get to know the whole enormous complexity of the strategy to be developed. (Using this simile will make it easier for you to understand):
Imagine one of the real battles with which the men of Earth are unfortunately so familiar. The soldiers taking part in it know perfectly well the sector in which they are moving. They are even aware at every instant of the strategy they judge most suitable. But they know neither the enemy's tactics nor the strategic character of their own movements that will be most advisable tomorrow. Moreover, both the soldiers and the lower-ranking officers are unaware of the intelligent and broad strategic methods and criteria of the high command.
There are, indeed; rules of theoretical strategy, but at a given instant and for each concrete case it is necessary to adapt those general laws, whose flexibility is necessary if rational efficiency is desired.
We therefore do not conceive of play within the narrow moulds to which you subject it. Thus, for example, the most rational Game among you, which is chess, we consider afflicted with this strategic rigidity, which develops in the cerebral cortex a complex of reflexes and neuronal connections (without educating the rest of the cortical areas). You yourselves can verify how this mental gymnastics, which Chess undoubtedly is, has never developed the mathematical faculties of any earthling. Famous players who among you come to face many boards in a blindfold simultaneous display do not for that reason stand out later in the field of Philosophy, of Theoretical Physics or in the field of Topology. This gymnastics is therefore sterile. It enables those who practise it to know the strategy of the Game more deeply, to be true masters of the opening or of rook endings, but not for that reason, contrary to what some naive persons believe, to become better military strategists or better politicians.
Our OXUO takes place in excavated enclosures, which we call OXUO GAADII. They are pits whose dimensions are not standardized either. Their shape is rectangular, like that of an earthly swimming pool. Their dimensions vary from the gigantic installations of 0.3 KOAE (about 2.9 kilometres long) to the OXUO GAADII of the small colonies of XAABIUANAA (DWELLINGS), which measure 22 x 46 ENMOO with a depth of 12 ENMOO (1 ENMOO is equivalent to 1.87 m).
But these pits are not empty, of course. In the next report we shall send you a graphic, schematic image that will make it easier to understand, since we cannot find a sufficiently expressive earthly simile to compare it with.
A hypothetical observer arriving from Earth to contemplate these installations, so strange to you, would find himself perplexed before a tangled network of long metal bars, irregularly shaped walkways, viscous masses of a translucent gelatinous substance that seem to float in the void, strange flexible tubes through which a person can pass comfortably, and whirlwinds of a vapour-saturated gaseous mass that take the shape of spheres or paraboloids of revolution. All of it in continuous though slow movement. From a UEWA (FLYING CRAFT) that metallic mass seems to boil.
(U-C NOTE: This letter seems to be continued in letter D47-1)
