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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

no matter which technique you happen to use, always remember to keep an attitude of interest, exploration, relaxation, and enjoyment.

Stage One: Staying in the Present

As you continue your walking practice, use the techniques of Nine-Part Stepping and Following Sensations, described below, to make your attention ever more stable, and your perception sharper and clearer. Peripheral awareness should become increasingly metacognitive. In sitting meditation, you allow extrospective awareness to fall away, and metacognitive awareness becomes primarily introspective. In walking meditation, however, extrospective awareness always remains strong. This means the metacognitive experience is one of watching the mind while the mind simultaneously attends to sensations in the feet and remains aware of the environment. Moments of metacognitive introspective awareness take the arising and passing away of moments of attention and moments of extrospective awareness as their object.

Nine-Part Stepping Meditation While walking very slowly, divide each of the three parts of a single step—lifting, moving and placing—into three smaller parts, for a total of nine distinct parts. Where exactly you make these divisions is completely up to you, but I’ll describe how I do it to help get you started. The first part of lifting is where the heel and middle part of the foot leave the ground; the second part is where the ball of the foot comes up; and the third is where the toes break contact with the ground. The first part of moving is when the foot rises vertically in the air; the second part is when it moves forward horizontally; the third part is where it’s lowered toward the ground. When walking very slowly like this, I find it more natural to place the front of my foot on the ground first, rather than the heel. The first part of placing is where the toes and ball of the foot make contact; the second part is where the rest of the foot makes contact; the third part is the shifting of weight onto the foot. One you have decided how to divide your steps, practice clearly distinguishing each of the nine parts with every step. Following Sensations of Walking Once it’s easy for you to identify all nine parts in every step, you’re ready to try following specific sensations in each of the nine parts. Begin by clearly identifying one distinctive and recurring sensation in each of the nine parts. The most challenging ones to find will be during the three parts of the mov...

mundane

selective encoding.

selective combination.

Some common synonyms for mental absorption are concentration, complete attention, immersion, and being engrossed or enthralled.

jhānas differ from other mental absorptions in three important ways:

the absorption is wholesome;

the jhāna factors are...

the absorption occurs in the context ...

And what sort of mental absorption did he praise? There is the case where a monk—quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful (mental) qualities—enters and remains in the first jhāna…

directed and sustained attention (vitakka and vicara);

meditative joy (pīti);

bodily pleasure and mental happiness, or pleasure/happiness...

equanimity (u...

Unification of mind (citt...

“People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both the sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence.”

We can summarize these three points by saying that jhāna refers specifically to

1) wholesome absorptions,

2) of the type that constitute “flow”...

3) occurring in me...

The second mode of practice employs metacognitive introspective awareness to investigate the nature of both the mind and the objects projected into consciousness by unconscious sub-minds.

Extrospective and introspective awareness work together with, and in support of, paying appropriate attention to what matters most in the current situation.

As mindfulness grows more powerful, it becomes mindfulness with clear comprehension.1 This means you also have metacognitive awareness of why you’re doing, saying, thinking, and feeling what you are, and whether or not it’s suitable in the present situation, in terms of both your immediate goals and your personal values and aspirations. Ultimately, every act of body, speech, and mind is the proper object of mindfulness with clear comprehension.

an event is unwholesome if it causes harm and suffering to yourself or others that is unnecessary and could be avoided

Part One: Mindfulness

This part of the practice can be summed up in three words: regret, resolve, and recompense

Summary: This first part of the practice focuses on how mindful you were at the time of the event as you apply mindfulness retrospectively to what happened and its consequences. Through this kind of reflection, you can train yourself to mindfully observe these same acts of body, speech, and mind as they unfold in real time. You’ll be more continuously mindful in general, and more fully mindful when it matters most. At first, even though this practice helps you to become more mindful, that won’t always immediately change what you think, feel, say, or do. This is normal. Some patterns of behavior are more deeply ingrained than others. Over time, however, your behavior will change. The second part of the Mindful Review helps by allowing you to better understand the roots of your behavior.

Part Two: Mindfulness with Clear Comprehension Mindfulness with clear comprehension means knowing our underlying motives and intentions, and how they relate to our personal values and aspirations.

of the great advantages of śamatha is that it makes it easier to confront the Insights into impermanence, emptiness, the pervasive nature of suffering, and the insubstantiality of the Self that produce Awakening.

Metacognitive awareness: metacognitive introspective awareness.

Impermanence is anicca

the lubricating “moisture” of śamatha: the joy, tranquility, and equanimity that make it so much easier to confront the disturbing and fearful experiences of Insight into impermanence, emptiness, and suffering.

Nor does it mean awareness in the general sense, which includes both conscious awareness and non-conscious awareness.

3

brainstem and the cerebral cortex.

Abhidhamma

4

The question of how information from different senses gets combined is one aspect of a much larger question known in cognitive science as the “binding problem.” Specifically, the process by which different sensory modalities are combined is called perceptual binding. The process by which something currently sensed is combined with memories and stored concepts to produce recognition and identification is cognitive binding. The process by which internal and external information of every kind is combined to produce the experience of a unitary “world” or “reality” is called phenomenal binding. It’s through binding moments that the products of these different binding processes become conscious.

Laṅkāvatāra and the Abhidhamma

A sense-percept is the basic sense datum from which perceptions and concepts are formed.

The study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the sensory mind actively and pre-consciously organizes, interprets, and attempts to make sense of its input.

The narrating mind is best described as a sub-mind of the discriminating mind. However, the Yogācārins, who first described it, regarded it as a distinct mind within the mind-system as a whole. The Yogācāra description of the mind-system built on the earlier Abhidhamma view of the mind as consisting of nothing but the six types of consciousness, the five external senses plus the “mind sense.” (Incidentally, it is because the Abhidhammists equated the mind with the six consciousnesses, making no clear distinction between the two, that the words viññana (Pali) and vijñāna (Sanskrit) can be translated as either “consciousness” or “mind.”) To these six, the Yogācārins added a seventh: the unconscious mind, or ālaya-vijñāna. When they recognized the presence of binding consciousness, and its importance within the mind-system as a whole, they designated it as an eighth mind, placing it between the other six consciousnesses and the unconscious mind. The Yogācāra thus describe the mind-system as consisting of eight minds (aṣṭa-vijñāna). The first five correspond to the physical sense consciousnesses (visual, caksur-vijñāna; auditory, śrotra-vijñāna; olfactory, ghrāṇa-vijñāna; gustatory, jihvā-vijñāna; and somatosensory, kāya-vijñāna). The sixth corresponds to the mind-sense, or consciousness of mental objects (mano-vijñāna). Binding moments of consciousness produced by the narrating mind are the seventh (manas-vijñāna). And the eighth mind is the unconscious mind (ālaya-vijñāna) t...

Full Awakening is when the discriminating mind no longer generates intentions based on this fundamental misperception.

In classical Buddhist terminology, the narrative “I” is the source of a mental affliction called “the conceit I am,” or the “inherent sense of self.” The conceptualized “self” produced by discriminating sub-minds gives rise to the fetter of “personality view,” of attachment to the ego-construct as self-existently real. Upon “stream-entry” (sotāpanna), the fetter of “personality view,” or belief in the reality of the mind-constructed self, is shed. However, both the narrative “I,” and the inherent sense of being a separate self that it gives rise to, remain until the fourth and final stage of Awakening, arahant-ship. The narrating mind of an arahant continues to use the self-other construct, since it’s essential to performing that mind’s natural function, but the narrative “I” no longer gives rise to the sense of being a separate self.

Studies show it is much easier to ignore non-task-related stimuli (distractions) when many task-related stimuli are present. Therefore, greatly increasing the quantity of task-related stimuli by expanding the scope of attention provides a quicker, more effective way to accomplish the same result.

People sometimes refer to this higher perspective as “being in the witness state” when it involves attention. The “witness” just observes mental events and activities from a detached perspective without reacting to them. This is a valuable practice that we’ll discuss later in more detail. The “witness” label is helpfully descriptive, provided you don’t mistakenly identify this “witness” as some kind of “true self.” But whether as awareness or attention, metacognitive introspection has a special, non-reactive quality, which is a result of this higher, and therefore more distanced perspective.