Mind and consciousness are not identical. Mind has no knowledge of its own - it is a reaction to experience and memory. It can become unhinged in frightening or terrifying circumstances when it can’t name what is happening; when it can’t relate to familiar patterns, it dreads its own extinction. This dread the mind often apprehends as madness.
Consciousness, on the other hand, is behind the mind. It is forever still, unmoving. The spiritual life is about gradually reducing the robotic and emotional movements of the mind until it becomes as still as the consciousness behind it. Immediately this happens there is either a deep insight, a realisation or, in the case of a permanent cessation, the illuminating state and knowledge of immortal life. Only the human mind and emotions stand in the way.
The expansion of individual consciousness is an acutely traumatic process. No precedent exists for it in experience, in memory or instinct. It is too original, radical and truly subjective to be approximated by thought or emotion. The separation from the mind leaves the mind suspended in an unstable and seemingly isolated condition. Fortunately, in the vast majority of cases the separation is very gradual.
The process of awakening towards enlightenment involves encounters with forces and energies that are quite horrific at times (as well as transcendentally beautiful). The person’s life - if he or she is to receive a permanent illumination - is literally turned upside down. Relationships are smashed or rearranged to obliterate the claims of the past; the values, attachments, prejudices, expectations, assumptions, sentiments, the layers of the years of conditioning and the secretions of habit must all go into the dissolving fire of conscious scrutiny. The foundations of the psychological self have to be given the acid test to find out what is essential and what is not. The emotional upheaval can be devastating.
It is a long, long wearying affair. The mind, so unassailably sure of its independent existence among the solid comfortable roots of sense-perception and its conditioned responses, starts to panic at the first weird creaks, as consciousness starts to shine through. No longer able to perceive one tangible world, it senses the presence of an oddly more powerful reality within. Hence the mind of relationships has no frame of reference as there are no relationships in reality.
