What is "Mind?"

John is good at firing off from the adventurist trenches, criticizing objectivity and it's adherents.

PSP: [Nonduality glimpsed through meditation] is very subtle though and can easily be misinterpreted as a self improvement technique mostly because if you haven't experienced letting go of the self then everything is about the self.

Jgill: . . . . you throw these vague conceptual entities into the meditative miasma: BFZZ.

Again, Jgill: Startling epiphanies enforced by the guidance of Zen masters (themselves proselytized by previous generations) and reinforced by considerable time sitting create a powerful tendency to "believe" and to convince others of the enormous implications of those beliefs. Viz, "form is emptiness and emptiness is form" and "objects are not really solid" and "without an observer, objects do not exist", etc.

if you haven't experienced letting go of the self then everything is about the self

Sentience starts where objective functioning leaves off.

I see meditation as a method of making us happier, more creative, and more functional human beings, a way to reprogram the mind/brain. Perhaps if it is reprogrammed enough, it becomes empty as Zen describes, but I haven't experienced that state on any sustained basis.

A simple way to answer the question is to say that consciousness is what goes away when you go under general anesthesia. As with most simple statements there are exceptions, but often enough under general anesthesia, heartbeat, breathing, digestion, kidney filtration, and a host of other biological activities continue more or less as usual while consciousness is notably absent.

Would you say when we're asleep we're on the same level of 'consciousness' of a plant?

Ed: oh, I thought this stuff was beyond description…My bad.

Big Fat Zen Zero ... as Broadway hit...

There are very good reasons why we can’t pin anything down as we think we can.

Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.