The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science

by Culadasa (John Yates)

In mind-system terms, we can program unconscious sub-minds through conscious intention, so that even following the breath becomes an automatic behavior.

Individual sub-minds are highly responsive to conscious intentions. Every time you sit down to practice, it gets easier to stabilize attention on the breath because more sub-minds agree on the benefits of meditating.

Individual sub-minds are highly responsive to conscious intentions.

Positive affect reinforces the activities and intentions of the unconscious sub-minds, so they’re even more likely to be repeated in the future. A negative reaction has the opposite effect.

An unconscious intention that has been repeatedly supported as a conscious intention can give rise to automatic actions.

conscious intentions, repeatedly acted upon, eventually give rise to automatic actions that no longer require conscious intention.

Key Point Two: Executive Functions and the Mind-System Every new skill and novel action results from interactions of the mind-system as a whole in the performance of executive functions. Learning any skill, like meditation or playing an instrument, involves effort, trial and error, evaluation, and correcting your mistakes. During all of these learning activities, unconscious sub-minds are interacting collectively in consciousness to create new programs for individual sub-minds. They can also override individual programs at any time. With repetition, the individual sub-minds become programmed so that in the future, whenever it’s appropriate, they automatically repeat the same activity. In other words, consciously practicing a skill trains unconscious sub-minds to perform their new tasks perfectly.

executive function in the creation of new behavioral programs to deal with novel events

The Narrating Mind The narrating mind22 is a sub-mind of the much larger discriminating mind. However, it has a very special role and importance all its own.23 It takes in all the information projected by other sub-minds, combining, integrating, and organizing it into a meaningful summary. The narrating mind then produces a very specific kind of mind moment called a binding moment of consciousness. The narrating mind, and the binding moments it produces, are such a subtle and ubiquitous part of the mind-system that they are easily overlooked, just as a fish might overlook the very water in which it swims. However, their subtlety belies their importance.

binding moment of consciousness.

The output of the narrating mind is particularly easy to put into words, but language involves a completely different part of the mind.

narrating mind

Figure 42. The narrating mind is a sub-mind of the much larger discriminating mind. However, it has a very special role and importance all its own. It takes in all the information projected into consciousness by other sub-minds.

It weaves that content into a series of “episodes” in an ongoing story, which is then projected back into the conscious mind as a binding moment of consciousness. This chronicle of the mind’s ongoing conscious activities then becomes available to the rest of the mind-system.

narrating mind,

The Sense of Self and Other The “I” of the narrating mind is nothing more than a fictional but convenient construct used to organize all the separate conscious experiences occurring in the mind-system. Our very concept of Self is none other than this narrative “I,” the center of gravity that holds the story together.

Likewise, the “it” is another imaginary construct of the narrating mind, a convenient fiction imputed to exist in order to link the different parts of the story together. The truth is we never actually experience any entity corresponding to “it.” All that was experienced were the image, concept, hedonic feeling, and any emotion that arose in consciousness. This is an important point, so take some time to think about it.

The narrating mind uses this “I-It” or “Self-Other” structure to organize the information coming from the many different sub-minds in a meaningful way. But the discriminating mind assumes the “I” and the “it” are actual entities, concretizing the Self-Other construct so it seems real and substantial. Thus, the narrating mind’s fictional “I” becomes the discriminating mind’s ego-Self, and the “it” is seen as the cause for the hedonic feelings and emotions that arise. That fundamental misperception leads to the generation of intentions rooted in desire and

In the example above, those intentions might lead to grabbing binoculars to see the bird more clearly—or to pursuing the bird, capturing the bird, buying another bird to keep in a cage, or even killing and stuffing the bird for future enjoyment! The earlier sequence of causally connected episodes gets extended: “I saw it, I recognized it, I enjoyed it, I wanted it, I pursued it, I obtained it, and I enjoyed it again.” Then of course, inevitably, “I lost it, and I grieved.”

The narrating mind combines separate conscious events from many different sub-minds into a story, which it projects back into consciousness.

In summary, the narrating mind just combines separate conscious events from many different sub-minds into a story, which it projects back into consciousness. But our self-awareness—that ongoing, intuitive sense of being a separate “self” in relationship with a world of objects—comes from how the discriminating mind interprets those stories.

Metacognitive Introspective Awareness

Introspective awareness means being aware of the mental objects appearing in peripheral awareness, such as thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, and so forth. Metacognitive introspective awareness is the ability to continuously observe not just mental objects, but the activity and overall state of the mind.

Metacognitive introspective awareness is the ability to continuously observe not just mental objects, but the activity and overall state of the mind.

introspective awareness

binding moments of introspective awareness

Developing this type of meta-awareness, being able to perceive the state and activity of the mind clearly and continuously, is at the heart of your future meditation progress.

metacognitive awareness provides the ongoing context for your meditations in the later Stages.

Recall that the conscious mind doesn’t actually do anything. Consciousness is a process of information exchange between unconscious sub-minds.

The basic, enduring sense of “self,” of a separate doer of deeds and experiencer of events, is nothing more than a useful but fictional construct of the narrating mind, reified by the discriminating mind.

the mind-system is a dynamic self-programing system, one that’s constantly changing itself.

Every event large or small, internal or external, makes its mark, and repeated events produce a kind of “habit-energy” that accumulates over time. The results are astounding: the mind-system creates an entire world from its own mental representations, which it constantly adds to and revises;

The final key point is that the experience of consciousness itself is the result of the shared receptivity of unconscious sub-minds to the content passing through the conscious mind.

The Mind-System model serves as the foundation for these later discussions. In particular, if you grasp the true nature of the mind-system, it helps you avoid the problems created by the illusion of being a Self in charge of “your mind.”

Particularly important are the powerful feelings of happiness and contentment that arise as the mind-system begins to work together as a more cohesive, integrated, and harmonious whole. This is called unification of mind, and happens because more and more sub-minds unite around a single conscious intention—the intention to meditate—and continues as you progress through the Stages.

is to subdue subtle distractions and develop metacognitive introspective awareness.

Set and hold the intention to establish a clearly defined scope of attention, and completely ignore subtle distractions.

These intentions will mature into the highly developed skills of stable attention and mindfulness, and you will achieve both exclusive, single-pointed attentio...

The meditator leads, the elephant and the...

As the mind becomes pacified, the practice becomes easier and more satisfying. The meditator no longer has to use the goad as much, and can lo...

The rabbit, which is completely white, watches from the side of the road as the meditator, el...

The first step is to achieve exclusive attention, also called single-pointed attention.1 When you can focus exclusively on the meditation object despite competing stimuli, attention no longer alternates to subtle distractions. Next, you must sustain exclusive attention long enough that mental objects start to fade from

Your second goal, which you’ll work on at the same time, is to develop metacognitive introspective awareness, an awareness of the mind itself. You accomplish this by holding a clear intention to continuously observe the state and activities of your mind, while still maintaining exclusive attention.

You have mastered Stage Six when attention rarely alternates with bodily sensations and ambient sounds, thoughts are at most infrequent and fleeting, and metacognitive awareness is continuous. When you can sustain exclusive attention together with powerful mindfulness for long periods, you have reached the second major Milestone, and are a Skilled Meditator.

Developing exclusive focus means ignoring subtle distractions.

The quality of exclusive focus depends as much on stabilizing the scope of attention as it does fixating on an object.

you must first clearly define and stabilize your scope of attention. Then, you completely ignore everything outside that scope.

The quality of exclusive focus depends as much on stabilizing the scope of your attention as it does fixating on an object.

Consistently sustained exclusive attention leads to a dramatic decrease in the number and frequency of mental objects projected into consciousness by the thinking/emotional mind.

pacifying the mind