You are the knower of all - the self. You are the unborn being. You are the supreme Lord: you are non-different from the self which pervades everything. He who has abandoned the idea that there is an object of perception which is other than the self, is not subjected to the defects born of joy and grief. He is known as a yogi. He who is confirmed in his conviction that the infinite consciousness alone exists is instantly freed from the thought of pleasure and is therefore tranquil and self-controlled.

Those who are well versed in the scriptures declare that the fictitious movement of energy in consciousness is known as mind. And the expressions of the mind (like the hissing of the snake) are known as thoughts or ideas, Consciousness minus conceptualization is the eternal Brahman the absolute; consciousness plus conceptualization is thought.

When the inner intelligence is not awakened, it does not really know or understand anything: and what appears to be known through the thoughts is of course not the reality. These thoughts themselves derive their value from consciousness. On account of this borrowed intelligence, thought is able to know a minute fragmented fraction of this cosmic consciousness. The mind blossoms fully only when the light of the infinite shines upon it. Otherwise, though appearing to be intelligent, thought is unable to comprehend anything really, even as the granite figure of the dancer does not dance even when requested to do so. Can a battle-scene painted on a canvas generate the roar of the fighting armies? Can a corpse get up and run? Does the figure of the sun carved on a rock dispel darkness? Similarly, what can the inert mind do? The mind appears to be intelligent and active only because of the inner light of consciousness.

Ignorant people misconstrue the movement of life-force to be the mind: but in fact is nothing more than the prana or life force. But, in the case of those whose intelligence is not fragmented or conditioned by thoughts, it is surely the radiance of the supreme being or self.

The intelligence that identifies itself with certain movements of life-force in the self  (by entertaining notions of 'this is I', 'this is mine) is known as the jiva or the living soul. Intelligence, mind, jiva, etc., are names which are used even by wise men: such entities are not real, however, from the absolute point of view. In truth, there is no mind, no intelligence, no embodied being: the self alone exists at all times. Because it is extremely subtle it seems not to exist, though it exists.

(The above passage is from Swami Venkatesananda's translation of the Yoga Vasistha. There are several editions available. In the United States, there are two editions published by the State University of New York (SUNY PRESS publishes The Concise Yoga Vasistha, and Vasistha's Yoga, and also an edition published in Australia, which is the "dailyreadings" version, and which we used for the above passage, published as The Supreme Yoga. The Australian edition is published and still available from the The Chiltern Yoga Trust.