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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

MY PURPOSE in writing this book was to create a detailed and comprehensive meditation manual that is easy to use. Much has been written about the many benefits of meditation and its contributions to emotional, psychological, and social well-being. But there is surprisingly little information available on how the mind works and how to train it. This is an attempt to fill that conspicuous need.

But even so, these peak experiences aren’t the ultimate benefit of meditation.

Direct knowledge of the true nature of reality and the permanent liberation from suffering describes the only genuinely satisfactory goal of the spiritual path. A mind with this type of Insight experiences life, and death, as a great adventure, with the clear purpose of manifesting love and compassion toward all beings.

The beauty and significance of a life well lived consists not in the works we leave behind, or in what history has to say about us. It comes from the quality of conscious experience that infuses our every waking moment, and from the impact we have on others. “Know thyself ” is the advice of sages. To live life consciously and creatively as a work of art, we need to understand the raw material we have to work with.

The Buddha said that, with proper training, it should take no longer than seven years,2 and can happen even more quickly.

By integrating this information and my own experiences with the insights of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, I’ve “reverse-engineered” traditional meditation instructions to create a contemporary map of meditation. It’s divided into ten progressive Stages to be used in charting your progress. While the structure of this presentation comes directly from traditional teachings, Asanga in particular, the meditation instructions that flesh it out do not.

Śamatha has five characteristics: effortlessly stable attention (samādhi),13 powerful mindfulness (sati), joy, tranquility, and equanimity.14

The Insights called vipassanā are not intellectual. Rather, they are experientially based, deeply intuitive realizations that transcend, and ultimately shatter, our commonly held beliefs and understandings. The five most important of these are Insights into impermanence, emptiness, the nature of suffering, the causal interdependence of all phenomena, and the illusion of the separate self (i.e., “no-Self ”).16 You can experience the first four of these Insights using stable attention (sama-dhi)17 and mindfulness (sati)18 to investigate phenomena (dhamma vicaya)19 with persistence and energy (viriya).20 The fifth, Insight into no-Self, is the culminating Insight that actually produces Awakening, because only by overcoming our false, self-centered worldview can we realize our true nature. But this crucial Insight requires, in addition to the first four Insights, that the mind also be in a state of śamatha, filled with deep tranquility and equanimity.21

For both śamatha and vipassana-, you need stable attention (sama-dhi) and mindfulness (sati).

Until you have at least a moderate degree of stability, “mindfulness practice” will consist mostly of mind-wandering, physical discomfort, drowsiness, and frustration. Like two wings of a bird, both stable attention and mindfulness are needed, and when they are cultivated together, the destination of this flight is śamatha and vipassanā.25

Also, brief episodes of śamatha can occur long before you become an adept practitioner. Insight can happen at any time as well. This means a temporary convergence of śamatha and vipassanā is possible, and can lead to Awakening at any Stage. In this sense, Awakening is somewhat unpredictable, almost like an accident. Although the possibility of Awakening exists at any time, the probability increases steadily as you progress through the Stages. Therefore, Awakening is an accident, but continued practice will make you accident-prone. You’re training your mind throughout the Ten Stages, cultivating all the qualities of śamatha. As you progress, the mind inevitably becomes more and more fertile for the seeds of Insight to ripen and blossom into Awakening.

You can use the Ten Stages approach in combination with, or as a precursor to, any of the many Mahayana or Theravada practices.

Here’s a brief summary of the book’s structure so you have an idea where you’re headed. It begins with an overview of all Ten Stages and the Four Milestone Achievements that mark your progress through the Stages. Detailed chapters on each Stage follow, with a series of Interludes that come between the Stages.

If you ever find yourself feeling adrift, uncertain about where the path is headed, the chapter to reread is, “An Overview of the Ten Stages.” Finally, you can consult as needed a series of useful stand-alone appendices and a glossary at the end of the book. Beginners are particularly encouraged to read the appendix on walking meditation and to incorporate walking immediately into their daily practice. The other appendices cover analytical meditations, loving-kindness practice, meditative absorptions (the jhānas), and a review practice to help you bring your daily life in line with your meditation practice.

Each of the Ten Stages on the path to becoming an adept meditator is defined in terms of certain skills that you have to master. Only when you have mastered the skills of a particular Stage will you be able to master the next Stage.

Some books give the impression that it takes many, many years or even decades to become an adept meditator. This simply isn’t true! For householders who practice properly, it’s possible to master the Ten Stages within a few months or years.

The most important factor for improving quickly is a clear understanding of each Stage. That means recognizing the mental faculties you need to cultivate, as well as the correct methods to overcome specific obstacles. It also means not getting ahead of yourself. Be systematic and practice at the appropriate level. Just as a scalpel is more effective for surgery than a large knife, skillful means and positive reinforcement are much better for pacifying the mind than blind, stubborn persistence. Finesse and patience pay off.

This Stage is about developing a consistent and diligent meditation practice. Being consistent means setting a clear daily schedule for when you’re going to meditate, and sticking to it except when there are circumstances beyond your control. Diligence means engaging wholeheartedly in the practice rather than spending your time on the cushion planning or daydreaming.

Stage Two involves the simple practice of keeping your attention on the breath.

Stages Two and Three are similar, but mind-wandering gets shorter and shorter until it stops altogether. The biggest challenge during this Stage is forgetting, but sleepiness often becomes a problem as well.

MILESTONE ONE: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION TO THE MEDITATION OBJECT The first Milestone is continuous attention to the meditation object, which you achieve at the end of Stage Three. Before this, you’re a beginner—a person who meditates, rather than a skilled meditator. When you reach this Milestone, you’re no longer a novice, prone to forgetting, mind-wandering, or dozing off. By mastering Stages One through Three, you have acquired the basic, first-level skills on the way to stable attention. You can now do something that no ordinary, untrained person can.2 You will build on this initial skill set3 over the course of the next three Stages to become a truly skilled meditator.

You can stay focused on the breath more or less continuously, but attention still shifts rapidly back and forth between the breath and various distractions.

MILESTONE TWO: SUSTAINED EXCLUSIVE FOCUS OF ATTENTION With mastery of Stages Four through Six, your attention no longer alternates back and forth from the breath to distractions in the background. You can focus on the meditation object to the exclusion of everything else, and your scope of attention is also stable. Dullness has completely disappeared, and mindfulness takes the form of a powerful metacognitive introspective awareness.

You have accomplished the two major objectives of meditative training: stable attention and powerful mindfulness. With these abilities you’re now a skilled meditator, and have achieved the second Milestone.

MILESTONE THREE: EFFORTLESS STABILITY OF ATTENTION The third Milestone is marked by effortlessly sustained exclusive attention together with powerful mindfulness.6 This state is called mental pliancy, and occurs because of the complete pacification of the discriminating mind, meaning mental chatter and discursive analysis have stopped. Different parts of the mind are no longer so resistant or preoccupied with other things, and diverse mental processes begin to coalesce around a single purpose. This unification of mind means that, rather than struggling against itself, the mind functions more as a coherent, harmonious whole. You have completed the transition from being a skilled meditator to an adept meditator.

MILESTONE FOUR: PERSISTENCE OF THE MENTAL QUALITIES OF AN ADEPT When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities you experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions, so your daily life is imbued with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity.11 This is the fourth and final Milestone and marks the culmination of an adept meditator’s training.

In reality, all we’re “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intention—nothing more. In fact, while it may not be obvious, all our achievements originate from intentions. Consider learning to play catch. As a child, you may have wanted to play catch, but at first your arm and hand just didn’t move in quite the right way. However, by sustaining the intention to catch the ball, after much practice, your arm and hand eventually performed the task whenever you wanted. “You” don’t play catch. Instead, you just intend to catch the ball, and the rest follows. “You” intend, and the body acts.

While useful, the lists of goals, obstacles, skills, and mastery provided in this discussion so far can obscure just how simple the underlying process really is: intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits.

As with planting seeds, at each Stage you sow the appropriate intentions in the soil of the mind.

Conscious experience takes two different forms, attention and peripheral awareness. Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our conscious experience.

The way attention and peripheral awareness work together is a lot like the relationship between visual focus and peripheral vision.

It’s important to realize attention and peripheral awareness are two different ways of “knowing” the world.2 Each has its virtues as well as its shortcomings. Attention singles out some small part of the content of the field of conscious awareness from the rest in order to analyze and interpret it. On the other hand, peripheral awareness is more holistic, open, and inclusive, and provides the overall context for conscious experience. It has more to do with the relationships of objects to one another and to the whole. In this book, whenever the term awareness is used, it refers to peripheral awareness. It never means attention.3 The distinction between the two is key. The failure to recognize this distinction creates considerable confusion.

In meditation, we work with both attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness, the two main practice objectives of meditation.

This is the very essence of meditation: we reprogram unconscious mental processes by repeating basic tasks over and over with a clear intention. We’ll talk more about how this simple activity changes unconscious processes when we introduce the MindSystem model in the Fifth Interlude.

Mindfulness allows us to recognize our options, choose our responses wisely, and take control over the direction of our lives. It also gives us the power to change our past conditioning and become the person we want to be. Most importantly, mindfulness leads to Insight, Wisdom, and Awakening.

Attention analyzes our experience, and peripheral awareness provides the context. When one or the other doesn’t do its job, or when there isn’t enough interaction between the two, then we respond to situations less effectively. We may overreact, make poor decisions, or misinterpret what’s going on.

The condition in which the mind “stands back” to observe its own state and activities is called metacognitive introspective awareness.13

Why aren’t we naturally more mindful? Why does mindfulness have to be cultivated? There are two main reasons. First, most of us have never really learned to use peripheral awareness effectively. Second, we don’t have enough conscious power to sustain mindfulness, especially at the times when we need it most.

These varying experiences show the range of the conscious capabilities of our minds. Compare your normal level of consciousness with that of an athlete in the zone, or with a person in an emergency. You’ll realize that daily life consists mostly of different degrees of dullness and mindlessness. As you progress through each Stage in this practice, you move steadily away from dullness toward enhanced states of consciousness that support increased mindfulness.

The two main objectives of meditation practice are: Developing stable attention. Cultivating powerful mindfulness that optimizes the interaction between attention and awareness. A famous analogy in Zen compares the mind to a pool of water. This is a helpful way to think about the training and goals of meditation. If the water is agitated, churned up by wind and currents, it doesn’t provide a clear reflection, nor can we see to the bottom. But as the water calms, the debris that made the pool muddy begins to settle, and the water itself becomes clear. A calm pool also reflects the sky and clouds perfectly.

The goal for Stage One is to develop a regular meditation practice. Put all your effort into forming and holding a conscious intention to sit down and meditate for a set period every day, and to practice diligently for the duration of the sit.

There are two goals for Stage One. First, you’ll learn how to prepare for practice, and to use a simple method to enter meditation gradually. Second, and more important, is to establish a consistent daily practice where you meditate to the best of your ability throughout every session.

I recommend the following Six-Point Preparation to new students. You should prepare for meditation just as you would for other activities, by thinking and planning beforehand. Memorize these Six Points and go through them as soon as you sit down. You can even review them in your head while on the way to your meditation spot. They are: motivation, goals, expectations, diligence, distractions, and posture.

At first, your goals can be simple, such as not giving up and daydreaming, or remaining patient when your mind wanders or you get drowsy. Understanding the Stages and which one you’re at is a powerful tool for setting realistic goals, so periodically revisit the Overview.

Resolve to hold the goals you’ve set very lightly, to find enjoyment in every meditation no matter what happens, and to savor any achievement. Simply sitting down to practice is an accomplishment.

Resolve to practice diligently for the entire session, regardless of how your meditation goes.

It’s important to know your state of mind before you begin to meditate. Perform a quick inventory of the things in your life that could come up as distractions, such as a problem at work or an argument with a friend. Check to see if your mind is occupied by any worries about the future, regrets about the past, doubts, or other annoyances. (It will help to review the Five Hindrances described in the Second Interlude.) Acknowledge these thoughts and emotions, whatever they are, and resolve to set them aside if they arise.

It doesn’t matter how long you spend on the Preparation for Meditation, because it is a form of meditation. If your mind wanders, bring it back using the techniques described for breath meditation. The more often you do it, the faster it goes.

First, the breath is always with you. Second, it allows you to be a completely passive observer. You don’t need to do anything, such as repeat a mantra, generate a visualization, or rely on any special item like a candle, icon, or kasiṇa.

Whenever we refer to the “breath” as the meditation object, we actually mean the sensations produced by breathing, not some visualization or idea of the breath going in and out. When I direct you to observe the “breath” in the chest or abdomen, I mean the sensations of movement, pressure, and touch occurring there as you breathe in and out. When I say the “breath at the nose,” I mean the sensations of temperature, pressure, and air moving on the skin anywhere around the tip of the nose, the rim, inside the nostrils, or on the upper lip just below the nostrils.