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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

These tasks engage the mind by giving it a challenge. At first, the sensations seem to come and go so quickly and are so subtle that it’s truly a challenge. Yet with practice, these tasks will stabilize your attention on the meditation object.

Will power is not very effective for sustaining attention, so your mind must find further challenges to keep it actively engaged.

Focusing on the Meditation Object without Losing Peripheral Awareness

Don’t limit peripheral awareness. To cultivate mindfulness, allow sounds, sensations, thoughts, memories, and feelings to continue in the background.

let it come, let it be, and let it go

The Meditation Object Will Not Always Be at the Center of Attention

It doesn’t matter whether the breath is the center of attention or in the background. Feel satisfied so long as the meditation object remains in the field of conscious awareness.

“You” Are Not in Control of “Your” Mind

there is no self in control of the mind, and therefore nobody to blame! The mind is a collective of mental processes operating either through consensus, or through a very temporary dominance of one process over the others.

In short, there is no “you” who’s the boss of “your” mind. Ultimately, meditation means training a complex, multi-part system (the mind) to work cooperatively, coherently, and consistently through a shared consensus toward common goals. If you can embrace that fact and let go of the notions of “I,” “me,” and “my mind,” your practice will go much more smoothly.

Calming the Monkey-mind

“Monkey-mind” makes you feel restless, and must be dealt with differently than ordinary mind-wandering.

The basic rule for training the mind in meditation is to always intentionally select the locus of attention

Overcoming Impatience and Cultivating Joy

Disappointment that meditation isn’t meeting your expectations gets combined with worldly desire for some alternative form of gratification.

A mind in conflict and disharmony prevents

The less harmony among different parts of your mind, the more dissatisfaction and impatience you’ll feel. The more impatience, the greater the disharmony, creating a feedback loop.

The best way to avoid or resolve impatience is to enjoy your practice.

to consistently focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects of your meditation.

Always recall that success comes through repetition with a relaxed attitude, rather than from effortful striving.

By making meditation satisfying and enjoyable, the part of the mind that wants to meditate can get the other parts to stop resisting and join in. Mental processes come into harmony. As the mind becomes more unified, there’s less internal conflict. Attention grows more stable, and feelings of pleasure and happiness increase. As they increase, the different mental processes come into greater and greater harmony until the mind enters a state of joy, creating a “harmony-joy” feedback loop—the opposite of the disharmony-dissatisfaction-impatience loop.

In each Stage, cultivate peace, contentment, happiness, and joy at every opportunity.

Bringing the different parts of the mind into harmony is crucial for achieving one of the major goals of meditation, unification of mind. Therefore, in each Stage, cultivate peace, contentment, happiness, and joy at every opportunity. Also, create these feelings in every wholesome way you can in daily life and bring this joy to your practice.

Conclusion

You have mastered this Stage when you can consistently maintain your focus on the meditation object for minutes, while mind-wandering lasts only seconds.

Extended Continuity of Attention and Overcoming Forgetting

invoke introspective attention frequently,

and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness.

intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible.

Practice Goals for Stage Three

The main goal for this Stage is to overcome forgetting

use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to actively engage with the meditation object and extend periods of uninterrupted attention;

you’ll cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of lab...

How Forgetting Happens

this alternating attention creates a scattering of attention to distractions. These are the distractions that potentially cause forgetting.

A distraction is anything that competes with the meditation object for your attention. To stop forgetting, you must understand and work with distractions.

and gross.

These subtle distractions, along with peripheral awareness, are what make up the “background” of conscious experience.

Distractions that stay in the background are subtle distractions.

Gross distractions take center stage, so the meditation object slips into the background.

Subtle distractions are always present. When one of them becomes a gross distraction,

if it occupies attention strongly enough or long enough,

you forget about the m...

once attention tires of that distraction, it moves on to something else. Mind-wandering begins.

Overcoming Forgetting

Extended periods of stable attention are achieved using the technique of following the breath from Stage Two.

However, in this Stage, you’ll look at the breath sensations in much greater detail, and will learn the related technique of connecting

The other key to overcoming forgetting is cultivating introspective awareness. This allows you to see the distractions that are ...

The practices of labeling and checking in will deve...

To overcome forgetting,