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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

Each and every neural circuit in the brain, even if it is the simplest of reflexes consisting of only two linked neurons, has the property of shared receptivity; the output of one neuron becomes input for all of the other neurons in the circuit. Individual neural circuits are linked together in the brain to produce more complex circuits.

natural individual is defined by the shared receptivity and consequent exchange of information between its component parts. It’s our inner interconnectedness, rather than an external boundary, that gives us our individuality.

Each of these structures—person, brain systems and circuits, cells, molecules, atoms, and so forth—is a natural individual. A natural individual is an entity defined by the shared receptivity and consequent exchange of information between its component

This also implies that the process of information exchange called “consciousness” at the level of a person is no different from what is happening at all these other levels as

Indeed, every structure—from atoms to persons to the universe as a whole—constitutes a natural individual by virtue of shared receptivity and information exchange.

every structure we have identified—from atoms to persons to the universe as a whole—constitutes a natural individual by virtue of shared receptivity and information exchange. From this perspective, what we call consciousness is just a single, limited example of something that pervades the entire universe at every level.

Think of your mind as an unknown territory where no one else has been, and no one but you can go. You alone are responsible for how you proceed, and how you use your skills and develop your mind.

The second major goal is complete pacification of the senses, which produces physical pliancy and fully developed meditative joy

pacify the senses, you will exclude all sense objects from attention while sustaining metacognitive awareness. To cultivate meditative joy, you don’t need to do anything different or special, just keep practicing. It will arise naturally once the sensory minds grow quiet and the mind as a whole becomes sufficiently unified.

You’ve mastered Stage Eight when your eyes perceive only an inner light, your ears perceive only an inner sound, your body is suffused with pleasure and comfort, and your mental state is one of intense joy.

Exercising the Newly Comp...

Mental pliancy gives you effortlessly stable attention and sustained, powerful mindfulness, particularly in the form of metacognitive introspective awareness.

While sustained exclusive attention played a crucial role in developing your concentration, it’s no longer a requirement. You’ll soon discover you no longer need a specific focus of attention at all.

only practice momentary attention with physical sensations or the mind-generated sensations that arise due to pacification. Once you’re confident you can do this without losing exclusive attention or metacognitive awareness, try switching to mental objects like affective reactions and emotions, such as pleasure from hearing birds outside the window, or annoyance at an itch.

Meditating on Arising and Passing Away

You may have noticed before how phenomena arise and pass away, but the swiftness of your mind and the clarity of your perception now exceed anything you’ve experienced before.

Attention emphasizes the object of consciousness. Now, the emphasis shifts away from attention, toward greater metacognitive awareness; away from the object, toward the act of knowing itself.

Choiceless Attention

The practice of choiceless attention involves allowing attention to move freely in pursuit of the objects that arrive with the strongest intention to become objects of attention.

a powerful consensus of unified sub-minds has chosen to allow such objects to become the focus of attention. Monitoring this free movement of attention with metacognitive introspective awareness is an effective exercise for making this awareness more powerful.

since the discriminating mind is pacified and there’s mental pliancy, mental objects don’t predominate as they normally would.

The strong, continuous quality of metacognitive awareness makes the practice of momentary attention into one of observing the mind itself as an ongoing process.

Most important, however, is the strong,

continuous metacognitive quality of awareness

present as the objects of attention constantly change. This makes the whole experience into one of observing the mind itself as an ongoing process, rather than merely experiencing the ...

Meditation on Dependent Arising As metacognitive awareness grows stronger, the causal relationships between various sensory and mental events become clearer. This happens because one of the basic functions of peripheral awareness is to perceive the relationships of objects to each other and to the whole. In this meditation, you follow mental events as they occur in sequence. Specifically, consciousness of a sensation or thought (contact), is followed by an affective response (feeling), leading to desire or aversion (craving), then to the arising of an intention to act (“becoming”), and finally to the action itself (“birth”). This is also called following the “links” of dependent arising,2 the causal relationship between mental processes described in traditional Buddhist literature. By intentionally tracking these causal links with attention, the Meditation on Dependent Arising makes metacognitive awareness more powerful and provides Insight into how mental processes unfold.

The goal of meditating on dependent arising is an intuitive understanding of the causal processes that lead us to act and react as we do.

As with choiceless attention, this meditation practice strongly exercises metacognitive awareness. Here, however, there is a more specific goal: to acquire an intuitive understanding of the causal processes that drive our ongoing mental activities, and which lead us to act and react as we do. If we bring our understanding of how these chains of association work into daily life, we’re less likely to react out of aversion or craving, and more likely to act from a place of wisdom. The meditation on dependent arising can have a powerful transformative effect, especially when combined with the practice of Mindful Review (Appendix E).

There are degrees of unification of mind. The degree of unification determines how much pacification and joy we experience consciously.

Unification of mind really refers to unification of unconscious sub-minds, and there are degrees of unification, depending on the extent of their cooperation. The degree of unification determines how much pacification and joy we experience consciously.

Even with pacification, the sense organs keep functioning normally. Sensory information is still available, if and when we want it, but doesn’t appear in consciousness unless we intentionally call it up.

First, when you exercise exclusive attention, you completely ignore sensations that arise in peripheral awareness. This deprives them of the attentional “energy” needed to sustain them, so they fade away.

Second, when you cultivate metacognitive introspective awareness, you do so at the expense of ordinary extrospective awareness; that is, by turning awareness inward, you deny awareness to normal, external sensory input.

all you have to do is keep exercising exclusive attention and cultivating metacognitive awareness using the practices for Exercising the Newly Compliant Mind until the senses are fully pacified. There is only one major obstacle that you must first overcome: unusual, mind-generated sensations.

We think of joy as a simple emotional experience. It’s actually a comprehensive mental state that evokes a specific pattern of mental behavior affecting attention, perception, and feelings.

First, it predisposes us to notice and preferentially attend to what is beautiful, wholesome, pleasant, and satisfying. At the same time, things that are ugly, unwholesome, or unpleasant tend not to draw or hold attention.

Second, the perceptions arising in a joyful mind, no matter what we happen to attend to, always emphasize the positive aspects. The glass will be perceived as half full, rather than as half empty, or neither full nor empty.

Finally, joy causes our feelings about everything to shift toward the positive end of the spectrum. Something ordinarily experienced as mildly pleasant becomes extremely pleasant. Something neutral, like th...

the positive affect produced by joy encourages a favorable re-interpretation of conscious experiences that threaten to undermine joy, further adding to its resilience.

Joy seems to be the default state of a unified mind

Once the mind is sufficiently unified, meditative joy arises spontaneously. As with regular joy, meditative joy generates happiness, referred to as the bliss of mental pliancy.

As with regular joy, meditative joy generates happiness, referred to as the bliss of mental pliancy

feedback loop: joy causes happiness and physical pleasure, happiness and physical pleasure increase unification, and unification causes meditative joy.

Jhānas are flow states that can help you take advantage of the positive feedback loop between unification, joy, and happiness.

Meditative absorptions (jhāna) are flow states that can also help you take advantage of the positive feedback loop between unification, joy, and happiness. That’s why the jhānas are so useful in the adept Stages. Once some joy and happiness are present, absorption intensifies the joy and happiness, and a temporary but very strong unification results. When we repeat this often enough, our mind becomes habituated to unification.

In the un-unified mind, much of the mental energy gets used up in inner conflicts, many of them unconscious. When the mind begins to unify, the available energy increases, but until it’s complete, the energy flow is turbulent.

Finding the Still Point and Realizing the Witness

Finding the Still Point allows us to “step outside” our reactions to pacification and the arising of pīti. This creates enough detachment to let these processes unfold naturally by themselves.

Inevitably, you start to notice that the mind really isn’t that quiet after all, except when compared to everything outside of it. At the same time, you’ll become aware of an even greater stillness at the core of your moment-to-moment experience. This is called the Still Point. Find that Still Point, and make its stillness the focus of your attention. Relegate everything else to peripheral awareness, letting things remain or pass away as they will. Enjoy the Still Point, resting in it as often and for as long as you like. The strange sensations of pacification and the energies of pīti will just blend in with everything else in the background of awareness while attention rests unperturbed. Unification will continue. By doing this practice and investigating the Still Point, it becomes obvious that this is where all observation happens. The Still Point, in other words, is the metaphorical “vantage point” from which metacognitive awareness occurs—except that it’s now become the “seat” of metacognitive attention. And the focus of your attention is the subjective experience of looking at the mind and the material world from a totally detached perspective.

As you keep observing, you may also discover the so-called “Witness,” the subjective experience of a pure, unmoving, and unmoved observer who is unaffected by whatever is observed.