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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

Unification also affects how deeply Insight penetrates. As the information sinks deeper and deeper into the unconscious mind, a weak Insight becomes a powerful Insight.

Unification also affects how deeply Insight penetrates. As the information provided by an Insight experience sinks deeper and deeper into the unconscious mind, the Insight matures. A weak Insight becomes a powerful Insight.

new information gets assimilated by the sub-minds that are tuned in, forcing them to revise their “reality constructs.”

At some point the transformation created by Insight becomes so widely established in the mind-system that our...

That’s why unifying the mind is so important for a...

Further Purificatio...

purification of mind: for sub-minds to unify, conflicting goals and priorities must first be resolved.

Since conflict resolution and integration can only occur in consciousness, the effect of this pressure from below was to force the buried content preventing unification up into consciousness to be purified.

The exclusive focus and pacification of mind in Stage Seven created the perfect opportunity for both deeply buried and ex...

This is the hidden story behind the subjective experienc...

Purification is important for minimizing the psychological trauma that can accompany Insight. With the greatly increased potential for Insight in the adept Stages, purification is more crucial than ever.

purification is important for minimizing the psychological trauma that can accompany the Insights leading up to Awakening

How a Cessation Experience Becomes Transformative Insight

cessation event.4 A cessation event is where unconscious sub-minds remain tuned in and receptive to the contents of consciousness, while at the same time, none of them project any content into consciousness. Then, consciousness ceases—completely

During that period, at the level of consciousness there is a complete cessation of mental fabrications of any kind—of the illusory, mind-generated world that otherwise dominates every conscious moment. This, of course, also entails a complete cessation of craving, intention, and suffering. The only information that tuned in sub-minds receive during this event is the fact of a total absence.

What makes this cessation experience the most powerful of all Insight experiences is what happens in the last few moments of consciousness leading up to the cessation.

First, an object arises in consciousness that would normally produce craving. It can be almost anything.

However, what happens next is quite unusual: the mind doesn’t respond with the habitual craving and clinging. Rather, it fully understands the object from the perspective of Insight: as a mental construct, completely “empty” of any real substance, impermanent, and a cause of suffering.

The discriminating sub-minds have the Insight that everything ever known, including the Self, was nothing but a fabrication of the mind. The sensory sub-minds have the Insight that the only information that isn’t purely mind-generated is the input from the sense organs.

the intention of all the tuned in sub-minds was to observe objects of consciousness, as with popular “noting” practices, all that’s subsequently recalled is an absence, a gap.

if the intention was to be metacognitively aware of the state and activities of the mind, we would remember having been fully conscious, but not conscious of anything. We would recall having a pure consciousness experience (PCE), or an experience of consciousness without an object (CWO).

The cessation event itself is not a mental construct, but subsequent interpretations are entirely constructed, based on the views and beliefs held by the person doing the interpreting.

To be clear, there is no actual “experience” of “consciousness without an object” during the cessation event, nor could there possibly be. That experience, like any other, is a construct of the mind, and in this case is generated after the cessation event has already

How the memory of a cessation event is interpreted retrospectively takes many forms, depending on the views and beliefs held by the person whose mind is doing the interpreting. Thus, the cessation event itself is not a mental construct, but the subsequent interpretations are entirely constructed.

Realizing that all phenomenal experience, including the Self, are mere mental constructs, and therefore “empty” of any real substance, radically transforms how the mind functions.

The transformative power of a cessation event depends on how unified the mind was. Only the parts of the mind-system that were tuned in during the cessation are affected.

The information exchange process we call consciousness is “special” only because we experience it subjectively. Subjective experience seems to be limited to information exchange at the highest level in the mind-system.

Our conscious experience of ourselves and the people, things, and events we know as “reality” consists entirely of highly processed mental constructs that have already been extensively combined, analyzed, and interpreted before they become conscious.

It consists largely of binding moments; all the individual bits of sensory information have already been extensively combined, analyzed, and interpreted before we ever become conscious of them.

This means that our conscious experience of ourselves and the people, things, and events we know as “reality” is made up entirely of highly processed mental constructs.

Information Processing in the S...

This process of information exchange within sub-minds is exactly like what we call consciousness at the highest level of the mind-system. But because it happens at a deeper level, it can never be part of our conscious experience.

Sensory information is communicated between sensory minds in the form of sense-percepts that are meaningful to the entire mind-system. Sense-percepts are the lingua franca of the mind-system.

Sense-percepts are the lingua franca of the mind-system.

This is precisely analogous to what we call consciousness when speaking of the mind-system as a whole, but it happens at a deeper level, and isn’t part of our conscious experience.

what we become conscious of are mostly binding moments of consciousness, each containing a filtered, pre-sorted, and pre-assembled synopsis of the vast amount of information continuously flowing into the brain from the eyes.

The narrating mind performs the highest level of information binding within the mind-system as a whole.

Although dominated by high-level binding and narrative moments of consciousness, the richness of conscious experience comes from sense-percepts and lower-level binding moments.

This richness increases proportionally when the content of consciousness shifts toward more low-level information processing, and away from complex binding, abstract thinking, and story-telling. The increased richness and detail that comes with being more “fully present” is an example of such a shift.

Applying the Revised Model to Meditation Experiences

This is because intentionally directed and effortlessly sustained attention has a powerful effect on what appears in peripheral awareness.

when we preferentially attend to lower-level binding moments and basic sense-percepts, it narrows the overall range of mind moments, making these stand out much more prominently.

Sustained, selective attention allows us to observe the many different levels of information processing that convert raw sensory data into familiar conscious experience.

As the proportion of simple sense-percepts increased in both attention and peripheral awareness, perception shifted to become more direct and less conceptual, and you experienced individual sense-percepts directly.

In later Stages, you will also start to realize how our sense of time and space are the result of unconscious binding activities.

What we actually experience in consciousness, therefore, are binding moments, with the sense of time already imbedded in each moment. In more everyday terms, what we experience as “real time” is actually after-the-fact. Time is, in a sense, packaged into mind moments by the unconscious sub-minds, to be unpacked later in consciousness.

The Nature of Consciousness

Consciousness is simply the fact of information exchange, and refers specifically to information exchange occurring at the highest level in the mind-system. But information exchange happens at every other level in the mind-system, too. Information exchange anywhere, in any form, is the result of shared receptivity, and shared receptivity is an expression of interconnectedness.

consciousness is simply the inevitable result of the interconnectedness of different parts of the brain, and of the shared receptivity that results in information exchange between them.

What we have called the conscious mind is not a place after all. It is simply the fact of information exchange at the highest level in the mind-system. Information exchange is the result of shared receptivity, and an expression of interconnectedness.