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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

You enter Stage Seven as a skilled meditator—you can achieve uninterrupted, exclusive attention, along with a powerful mindfulness that includes continuous metacognitive awareness.

Until there is unification, unconscious sub-minds create instability. With complete pacification, the meditator can drop all effort, and the mind settles into an unprecedented state of inner calm and clarity.

Complete Pacification of the Discriminating Mind

Complete pacification of the mind means the competing agendas of all the individual thinking/emotional sub-minds get set aside in favor of a single, consciously held intention.

To completely pacify the discriminating mind, keep doing what you’ve been doing. You don’t pacify your mind. It happens when you repeatedly achieve exclusive attention and sustain it for as long as possible.

Habituating the Mind to Exclusive Attention

Constant repetition habituates the discriminating mind to exclusive attention and increasingly powerful mindfulness, until we have the experience of complete pacification and effortlessness.

Pacification doesn’t mean the discriminating sub-minds go dormant. They actively participate in the intention to sustain exclusive attention, which is why it becomes effortless.

The path to complete pacification can be summed up in a single word, diligence. Diligence means constantly persevering.

diligence underlies both vigilant introspective awareness, as well as the effortful intention needed for exclusive attention.

Effortlessness means attention is placed on the object and stays there because there’s nothing trying to draw it away. Then, and only then, is there complete pacification, meaning diligence, effort, and vigilance can cease.

Effortlessness means attention is placed on the object and stays there because there’s nothing in the background trying to draw it away.

the real antidote is confidence in your abilities and trust that it’s a process that just takes time to mature.

When you feel stuck, restless, and doubtful, cultivate an attitude of acceptance and patience. Take as much satisfaction as possible in how far you’ve come, and remind yourself of the rewards that will surely follow

three

an investigation into the nature of thoughts through introspective awareness;

an intense form of close following;

practicing the “pleas...

Observing the breath has become quite automatic by now, and this practice requires only a partial shift of conscious power from attention to metacognitive awareness. Because you’re maintaining exclusive attention on the breath, pacification of the discriminating mind continues.

When the mind is engaged in the present without grasping, neither looking to the future or the past, then joy, happiness, and energy arise.

Close Following

Here, you’re giving the mind an activity to perform that produces novel experiences. You may experience the breath sensations as separate moments of consciousness, or simply as vibrations.

“Things” don’t actually exist. “Process” is all there is. This perceptual state will become an Insight experience from which you can gain Insight into emptiness.

If you can re-enter this “vibratory” experience, you can gain a clear Insight into

You may realize that all there ever was, is, or will be is an ongoing process of constant change that cannot be grasped or clung to.

“Things”

Then, if you can overcome the mind’s resistance enough to go in and out of this perceptual state repeatedly, it will become an Insight experience from...

Dharma teachers often speak about the world as being merely a projection of the mind. This direct experience of the mind creating meaning out of emptiness allows us to understand exactly what they’re referring to.

Dharma teachers often speak of the world as a mere projection of the mind. This direct experience of the mind creating meaning out of emptiness allows you to understand exactly what they’re referring to.

Pleasure Jhāna Practice

The pleasure jhānas help counter the tediousness of this Stage, and the state of flow in jhāna induces a temporary unification of mind that promote more lasting unification, speeding up your progress..

The pleasure jhānas are particularly helpful in countering the tediousness of this Stage. More importantly, the state of flow in jhāna induces a temporary unification of mind, which in turn promotes more lasting unification, thus speeding up your progress through Stage Seven.

When you have achieved this level of access concentration,7 without shifting your attention from the breath, explore peripheral awareness to find a pleasant sensation. They can be just about anywhere, but try looking in the hands, the middle of the chest, or the face.

Distraction Due to Strange Sensations

Intense and unusual sensations can be very powerful distractions. It’s almost as though the senses produce these strange sensations in an attempt to catch your attention.

These phenomena will arise and pass away according to their own agenda. Don’t chase after them, but don’t push them away either. Just let them come, let them be, and let them go.

Effortlessness is like learning to ride a bike. There’s that moment when you realize that if you just keep pedaling, the bike stays upright by itself. In meditation, you learn to let go when the time is right, moving into effortlessness.

If you drop diligence too often and too soon, your practice becomes inconsistent, which can hold you back. Wait until you have some sign that the time may be right.

This process has three profound effects: mindfulness keeps improving, as does the “magic of mindfulness;”

deep unconscious material rises to the surface, allowing for further purification;

profound Insight becomes m...

More unification produces a larger consensus of sub-minds tuned in to the information appearing in consciousness.

This has far-reaching consequences.

more unification produces a larger consensus of sub-minds tuned in to the information appearing in consciousness.

Unification changes this by increasing the size of the receptive “audience.” This larger audience is tuned in to the meditation object, and to anything else that may appear in consciousness as well—including Insight experiences.

Increasing the Power of Mindfulness

Mindfulness improves dramatically. You’ll feel more fully present with whatever appears in consciousness, and the experience of knowing will have more power and “richness.”

At the adept level, mindfulness can still be quite powerful even when you’re dull due to fatigue or illness. So not only can you practice when you’re dull, you should.

Unifying the mind also enhances the magic of mindfulness. As the audience for conscious experience expands, the amount of information assimilation and reprogramming increases proportionally.

For an Insight experience to actually reprogram our intuitive view of reality, the relevant information must reach a large enough audience of sub-minds. What makes a mere Insight experience into a transformative Insight is how many sub-minds of the mind-system share in the experience.