Question: You say that consciousness is the reality of the mind. What makes consciousness the reality of the mind?
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First of all, let us be clear about what we mean by reality.
By reality we refer to THAT that does not come and go, that is unchanging throughout time and space. In other words, what is real now, is real tomorrow and has an eternal quality.
Looking at your experience, you will notice that while appearances are constantly changing, consciousness, whatever it is that perceives, does not. That is how you you can understand that consciousness is real, since it is unchanging and eternal. While the images that appear on the screen of consciousness are fleeting, the screen is not. The screen refers to the knowingness of your experience, that is consciousness.
Notice that whatever you perceive, you perceive through consciousness. You know a tree, a thought, a sensation through consciousness, through Aware Presence. Therefore we refer to reality as the reality of consciousness and not as the reality of what appears and disappears.

Thought dissolves as it arises. Consider that in deep sleep or between two thoughts, thought is absent, but consciousness is not. This seeming gap between thoughts and during the absence of thought is the ground of being, the screen out of which images arise. The screen permeates thought as well as all phenomenal arising, but it is not perceived via the senses.

You can look at a tree and a minute later look at your foot… the object changes but consciousness remains pristine and constant… Unchanging.
What matters is to understand, by contemplating your experience,  that there is a reality to your experience and that the reality is that of consciousness and not the reality of form. It is the reality of consciousness that morphs as all appearances, as thought, as perception and as sensation.
That is why it is said that the substance of the phenomenal is the unseen and unmanifest noumenal. The substance of form is formlessness but they are not two.
Once you realize the Self (your true nature), the world, body and mind will cease to be experienced as external and will cease to appear as having an independent reality from consciousness.

The reality of consciousness will reveal itself as itself and as everyone and everything. Non-dual.