The gathering of information is all it can do. It can enable us to study maps but cannot see the territory. It sees only its own projections, the shadows. It mistakes the rope for a snake. The snake has no intrinsic existence, being only a projection of the mind.
Reflection is mind's normal function.
The discharge of that function stands primarily vitiated. By no effort of the mind, however enlightened, can one come to the direct perception of things. The mind's perception is always vitiated by the 'perceiver-perceived' duality, J. Krishnamurti defined right perception as the one where there is neither the perceiver nor the perceived. Patanjali in his Yoga aphorisms says that it is the obserser-observed phenomenon that is the cause of man's suffering. Modern physics too is concerned with the perceiver's intrusion into every act of perception.