One of the best descriptions of the mind comes from an article by Suzanne Oosterwijk and her colleagues that appeared in the Journal Neuroimage in 2012. The authors say:
“During every waking moment of life, a human mind consists of a variety of mental states. These mental states are typically named in commonsense terms, such as emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, love), cognitions (e.g., retrieving a memory, planning the future, concentrating on a task), perceptions (e.g., face perception, color perception, sound perception), and so on.
Author Sunil K. Pandya says:
Mind has been variously defined as that which is responsible for one’s thoughts and feelings, the seat of the faculty of reason or the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason.
Merriam Webster’s dictionary says:
The mind is “the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons.”
Philosopher and Professor Dallas Willard, in his book, Renovation of the Heart, shows the following diagram in which he shows the mind in relation to the soul. On the diagram, he asserts that the mind is the thoughts and emotions.
From the above, I would say the mind consists of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, etc.
And as psychology teaches us, the mind also consists of the conscious and unconscious minds.
Sources
Oosterwijk, Suzanne et al. “States of mind: emotions, body feelings, and thoughts share distributed neural networks” NeuroImage vol. 62,3 (2012): 2110-28.
Pandya, Sunil K. “Understanding brain, mind and soul: contributions from neurology and neurosurgery” Mens sana monographs vol. 9,1 (2011): 129-49.
Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart.
