The brain is the organ of the body which is responsible for analyzing the environment, making predictions and executing actions. It’s not special in any way, every animal has one, that’s what separates animals from plants, even though both are life. It also controls a lot of bodily functions.

What separates humans from animals though, is that our brains, with the help of incessant cruelty of our society, have developed an astonishing capacity to dream, that is, imagining things that do not exist and believing their existence. That is the mind, the dreaming mind. The dreams of the mind are vast and complex, they include your psychological self-portrait, portraits of other people, God, to the extent you believe in it, soul etc. All of this exists solely in the imagination of the dreaming mind, not reality, and is supported by a deep well of emotion, which have been suppressed since the early childhood. A child’s mind is basically trained to dream. The mind is responsible for all human suffering.

Consciousness is what sits at the foundation of the dreaming mind, at the very bottom of it. Discovering consciousness is self-realization, it is awakening to the existence of dreaming. The experience of oneness or unity is basically the long forgotten experience of the brain that is not fragmented into a hundred pieces. When that happens, only consciousness appears real and everything else looks like a dream, appearances. Consciousness becomes the witness of dreaming, and dreaming starts to slowly dissolve into it. Illusions are being dropped. Very few people dissolve their dream completely, most are happy to stay in appearances as lucid dreamers, they keep their minds. Dropping all illusions is very painful.

When the dream dissolves completely into consciousness, consciousness disappears also. Then there’s no mind, just the brain. That’s enlightenment.