What is mind and what is soul? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2015)

Questioner: The soul has a unique identity that goes through all the cycles. And that identity does not change. The soul, with that identity, keeps going through cycle after cycle, till it probably gets salvation. During this passage it adopts or is allocated certain bodies – maybe a bird, maybe a human being, maybe an animal, or maybe a plant.

Then what is the mind? There is a body and we know that the soul enters the body at a particular time, and then the body and the soul have a particular relationship. Then what is ‘mind’? Is it intellect? Is it knowledge? What identity has the mind got?

Acharya Prashant: (Addressing the questioner) It’s always so nice to be talking to you.

So you talked about the ‘transmigration of the soul’ and how it is supposed to have a unique identity and how it goes from body to body and such things. And then you said, “What is the mind?”

Let me put it very simply: whatever one can talk about, is the mind. And nothing more actually needs to be said on that. So if it can be talked about, discussed, put in language, conceptualized, analyzed, defined, then it is the mind. Even if you say, “Something is beyond the mind”, then because you are talking about it, and pointing a finger at it, it is still within the domain of the mind.

What are the characteristics of the things that are inside the mind, that make up the mind, that are the mind?