I would suggest the mind is making sense of an experience, the becoming conscious of the immanent presence of the Divine – but that immanent presence is not limited to the mind.
In fact, I'd say the mind is 'after the event', even if the mind thinks (as they tend to do) that they've registered something before anything else in the corporeal faculty – that's a demonstrable fact of how the mind works in everyday life. The mind contextualises according to what it knows. In that sense the mind is as much an impediment as a translator or facilitator.
I would rather say that 'being' is the medium of revelation.
You should read Denys Turner's The Darkness of God
"In the medieval mystical tradition, the Christian soul meets God in a 'cloud of unknowing', a divine darkness of ignorance. This meeting with God is beyond all knowing and beyond all experiencing."
"Turner argues that the contemporary relevance of medieval mysticism lies precisely in its rejection of 'mystical experience'" – that's is the mind's version of it – "and locates the mystical firmly within the grasp of the ordinary and the everyday."
I think the Buddhist maxim "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" sums it up nicely.
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Descartes said, "Cogito, ergo sum" – "I think, therefore I am"
Descartes was wrong. It is, in fact, "Sum, cogito ergo" – "I am, therefore I think"
Bioscience now reveals that all living cells have cognitive systems that allow them to sense and respond to their environment. This 'cellular cognition' means they can learn and remember, and even at the cellular level, cognitive complexity demonstrates sophisticated regulatory networks and communication capabilities. All this speaks of, at the cellular level, intentionality – that where there is life, even at the most rudimentary organic level, there is mind.
It seems to me that even at the granular, cellular level, there is co-operation. They participate and bring about their own alterations and re-organisations, because they are unified at a far profounder level yet. The meanest cell is capable of becoming something structurally new through dynamic engagement in the external world.
If we attribute a cognitive level of being to such simple structures, not only are they capable of adaption, but have a sense of resistance to ensure their own inherent, internal unity. Thus organisms react, adapt, interact, self-regulate and even innovate – and it's no stretch to suggest these organisms experience and learn, reason and understand. (If I were to wax lyrical I would also suggest they demonstrate a sense of both freedom and sacrifice.)
But what they do evidence is a sense of subjectivity, that is personal unity and identity.
No, that CHARACTERISTIC is in being.
I'd say that 'mind', as you speak of it, it one aspect of an holistic 'body-and-mind' sensorium.
The brain then, is a kind of clearing house. What we call mind or consciousness is just the bit of its activity we're aware off.
I'd say being is so much more than mind.
For the reasons stated above, supported by science and theology, I disagree – I'd say the mind, unaided, is the least way of knowing.
You admit as much yourself in the title of this thread.
St Thomas argued the "Quinque Viae" – The Five Ways to Prove the Existence of God – this is how the mind works.
But philosophers today still argue those proofs back and forth – because it's all in the mind – and St Thomas was not arguing the proof of the Abrahamic God, that God was beyond any such rational and logical argument, and is not a philosophical category.
The way to that God was through phaith, not philosophy (if you'll excuse that dreadful pun) – it's the dark way of unknowing.
Sounds like some kind of really postmodern funk gospel music genre
