Aha you’re veering into one of my favorite spiritual subjects, that of how language changes as mind does.
It’s something I really had to learn how to appreciate when I was exploring David Hawkins, as he really favored the speaking without definite articles, I, you, he, she. Instead he’d find a way to refer to ‘consciousness’ or ‘mind’. I grappled with this madness for months until the mentality dawned on me like a new sunrise.
I won’t inflict that on the people looking to me for spiritual edification. It’s not as cool as it presents. Throwing a baby into the deep end is just going to scare it, not teach it to swim. And you’re not more enlightened because you can abuse the English language. You’re enlightened because you’re enlightened, because you’ve done the work to plumb the depths of existence and the mind, either in this lifetime or one prior.
It is a rather neat way to start to include the reader into a mindset they’re probably not very familiar with. And if not having a decent non-gender-specific pronoun bugs you as it does me, you can work out how to just dump the silly things altogether.
So to answer the question, the way it works is, mind generates concepts that it uses to comprehend things. The things being comprehended don’t have any representation in mind other than as these concepts, which don’t bear much if any relation at all to the things they’re referring to. Mind grows increasingly away from the actual physical world and this growing away is sinking deeper and deeper in delusion.
There is no escape from delusion. There is only the recognition of delusion, techniques to assist in doing so abound in the world. As mind increasingly recognizes this state of ever-present delusion, it quiets down and identification passes to awareness, which is singular and can witness the arising and passing of events and things without being affected by them. Mind still operates, but it’s not being identified with, the operations of the mind do not feed back into awareness and can subside naturally.
Awareness-identification is characterized by witness of more timeless and less ephemeral truths lying underneath the fluttering contents. However the timeless truths are delusions as well, and increasing awareness of this moves identification away from awareness. Where does it move to? What could be higher than awareness but yet still belong to the individual?
It doesn’t move anywhere, it simply disappears. This is enlightenment. At first, it happens in temporary states called satoris, but as the being becomes more and more comfortable with the temporary states, they stick around longer and longer until an inflection point is reached whereby the strange states are not when the being experiences enlightenment, but rather when being is identified, as self, or as awareness.
Alright I’m done. Notice how there aren’t any definite articles in the previous four paragraphs. I spoke of mind, consciousness, being, without referring to the selves these things belong to. It’s a trick of English that just so happens to be useful for conveying the lessons. It might lead you into thinking that I actually believe there’s only one of these things. I don’t, we each have individual minds and beings.
But by not talking personally, by referring only to the things I want you to focus on, it encourages you to put the lower self aside for a minute and focus on the things conjuring up that sense of you. It’s a kind of meditation all on its own, and every time I write in this fashion, I have to work anew to discard identification so I can create insight.
But no, the Buddha didn’t waste his time by trying to teach people to meditate rather than just meditate himself.