The mind aspect of an individual human being is that which has/is the capacity to ‘let go/hold on’, ‘to know’, ‘to do’.
My way of seeing is that the living human being is constituted of mind, body and awareness. These three are the
trimodalities of consciousness (aliveness) which consciousness is appended by vis a vis. The human being is born of aggregate phenomena and has arisen relative due to causative factors.
“What is it that is conditioned to respond to a name?”
“What is it that enables ones finger to move or wiggle?”
What is the difference between the action of wiggling ones finger and contemplating wiggling ones finger? Both are enabled by mind, but one is an action and the other is a mental abstraction of the action. Discerning the suchness of mind, body and awareness is key. Words have a function and that is to make sense of experience as well as convey meaning to others which has been inferred into the word through the senses of the individual but often, to the one who does not understand the function of the cognitive process, can become a tangle, a maze, becoming lost in conceptual abstraction. This process is key in the development of reason, of rousing the contemplative mind, the mind of awakening which tends to the moment of learning.
It is in the similar way that one holds onto and let’s go of a physical object that one grasps & apprehends thoughts, mental abstractions, concepts, views and opinions. Often, out of natural ignorance, some come to be lost in thickets of views where they place concepts or ideas in substitute for the flow of unadulterated direct experience, life itself.
The one who sees the causes of suffering in relationship to their own unique situation is able to relinquish suffering born of understanding its cause in relation to ones unique life experience.
Ignorance, attachment and aversion always have some role to play which in turn give rise to other traits that give rise to strife, difficulty and stress.
Agency remains.
The sense of ‘I’, otherwise known as the sense of self, is the minds image that it makes of itself as a natural result of being aware of being aware of itself in relation to its existential predicament. The sense of ‘I’ isn’t all that a living being is and is a mental samskara, an image, born of mind. That which is making sense of itself is what one is and that is what calls itself ‘I’. This is also that which picks up glasses, let’s go of them, picks up a hot cup, let’s go because it is hot and responds to a name. The sense of self isn’t problematic either, more so, it is an attachment to a sense of self born of ignorance, of blindness and not knowing is nature, arising, function, as well as the fixed views, opinions, habits, rooted in ignorance, attachment and aversion that can give rise to problems/stress. One is more than an idea of a self but is that which the notion is born of. This is the blossoming of mindfulness.
One is ‘that which knows’.
Buddha: one who knows, one who is awake, one who understands,
Dhamma: the way things are, that which is actual, in regards to the particulars of the noble way.