Some simple but most important terms: Brain, Mind, Consciousness, Awareness, Mindfulness, and Enlightenment 🌟

The following are the simple but most important terms on the path of spirituality. It is better to understand them as early as possible. These are the terms: Brain, Mind, Consciousness, Awareness, Mindfulness, and Enlightenment.

Brain: Unconditioned Mind.

Mind: Conditioned Brain. 

Consciousness: Experience of the freedom from the conditioning of the mind. 

Subconsciousness: It’s a storage point for any recent memories needed for a quick recall. It serves as the random access memory (RAM) of the mind. It’s more mechanical in nature. Once the conscious mind trains an activity the subconscious mind takes charge of that activity automatically and mechanically. 

Unconsciousness: It’s that part of the mind where all of our memories and past experiences reside. These are those memories that have been repressed through trauma and other experiences. These have simply been consciously forgotten and are no longer important to us for the present. And it’s from these memories and experiences that our beliefs, habits, and behaviors are formed.

Spirituality: It’s a process to know yourself. It’s a process to experience yourself. 

Mindfulness: It’s a method to observe the activities of all the above types of minds - conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. And mindfulness frees us from the conditioning of the mind. 

Enlightenment: Awareness of the experience of the freedom from the conditioning of the mind.

Brain is physical, mind is psychological, and consciousness is spiritual. In no-mind you experience the consciousness. No-mind means the unconditioned mind. Consciousness is of the present, unconsciousness is of the past, and supreme consciousness is of the eternal. It is unborn and deathless. It is beyond time and space. It is beyond the mind and the thought.

Mandukya Upanishad talks about the four states of consciousness: waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, dreamless consciousness, and the awakened consciousness. The fourth consciousness is simply called the fourth or the Turiya. It is the purest form of the consciousness. And it is the formless. And now it is free of all impurities, all identifications and all conditioning. It is that Supreme Consciousness. So, enlightenment is the awareness of this supreme consciousness. All spirituality is the domain of the Enlightened Consciousness.