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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

Seemingly brilliant insights are a much more pleasant kind of gross distraction. For instance, you may find new ways of dealing with personal problems. Or you may gain insights into your mind and behavior, or into profound philosophical and metaphysical concepts. These insights can emerge unbidden from the unconscious, appearing in peripheral awareness and tempting you to take notice. Other times, they suddenly spring onto center stage. These insights are often quite valid and very useful—which is what makes them so seductive as potential distractions.

Therefore, your mind is better able to create and link novel ideas together, and can better appreciate the significance of those ideas. If you choose to pursue thinking about them, keeping your breath in peripheral awareness, you will be pleasantly surprised by how much your powers of discursive thinking have improved. In fact, your focus will be stronger than ever. You will feel excited and satisfied when you reflect on some brilliant conclusion. But then it becomes difficult to return to the breath—which usually leads you to look for something else to think about, or to get up from the cushion altogether.

Your initial insights may indeed be significant, but as your mind continues to dredge up material, their quality will decline. They may seem profound during meditation, but if you examine them afterward, they often appear trivial. In this way, they are a lot like the “brilliant ideas” that sometimes happen under the influence of recreational drugs.2 Whether they are significant or trivial, the point is the same: discursive brilliance quickly becomes a trap, drawing you away from the practice again and again.

Overcoming this obstacle is easy. Just avoid falling into the trap. If you have meaningful insights, make a mental note of them and resolve to address them after meditating. Return your focus to the breath. It also helps if you resolve to set aside a time specifically for analytical meditation

Sometimes, a powerful thought keeps returning. When this happens, acknowledge and accept it, then make it your temporary meditation object. However, don’t analyze its content. Instead, apply a label to the thought: for example, “thinking, thinking,” or “thought arising.” This will help you keep an objective distance. Hold the thought in attention until its intensity subsides. This might take a few minutes and need to be repeated several times during the meditation. Once the intensity subsides, return to the breath. You can use this approach in other situations, too. In general, whenever you can’t disregard a powerful distraction, finesse the situation by intentionally making it your new meditation object.

This disruptive material comes from past emotional and psychological challenges, and the more of these you’ve faced, the more you’ll encounter. Some may be quite traumatic, such as sexual abuse, the loss of a parent, or childhood bullying. But major challenges aren’t the only cause. Lesser trials that easily go unrecognized, like teasing, parental favoritism, or the pains of adolescence, play their part as well.

Yet remember, nothing in meditation is ever random or meaningless. You may not know where some painful emotion or vision came from, but no matter how bizarre or unpleasant it may seem, you can be sure that something in your history caused it.

Whether you know the cause or not isn’t important. You can be sure that everything arising during meditation forms part of your psychic makeup. None of it is unimportant or beside the point. Images arise because they symbolize material your mind isn’t comfortable confronting more directly. Learn to fully embrace everything that surfaces. They are hidden parts of your psyche. More importantly, understand and rejoice in the fact that, when this material comes to the surface, it’s an act of purification and a critical step toward developing śamatha. In the stillness of meditation, the magic of mindfulness integrates this difficult content buried in the unconscious in a healthy and healing way.

You want to create some objective distance from these unpleasant emotions. Verbalizations are important for this. If you have the thought, “I am angry,” replace it with the thought, “Anger is arising.” This kind of rephrasing isn’t just useful to avoid getting tangled up in emotions. It’s simply more accurate. You’re not these feelings. There is no self in emotions.

Do your best to dissociate from these emotions, keeping the role of an objective observer, even though that can be challenging. “Dissociating” doesn’t mean you don’t feel the emotions fully, or that you try to pour cold water on them. It means you let the emotions come into consciousness and do their dance, without getting absorbed in them.

Every emotion has its own characteristic sensations and related bodily movements.

Only when you’re ready, turn your attention from the physical to the mental aspects of the emotion. Without getting caught up in your subjective experience, try to find a label that accurately describes the emotion (e.g., anxiety, guilt, lust) and quality (e.g., intense, vague, agitating). Notice what kinds of thoughts the emotion triggers. Is the emotion getting more or less intense, or staying fairly constant? Perhaps the emotion is transforming. For example, anxiety can morph into fear, and fear into anger, and anger into guilt. Again, it’s helpful to use verbal labels, such as “anxiety is arising,” to remain objective.

In summary, when the mind is quieted through meditation, charged emotions, thoughts, and visions well up from the unconscious into consciousness. There, they become gross distractions. To overcome them, simply make them the object of your attention, acknowledging and accepting them until they fade away on their own. That’s it! It’s not important to consider why you’re having these thoughts or where they come from. That kind of discursive analysis takes you away from the real work of meditation. In fact, there’s no need to do anything at all.

Having someone to talk to can be very helpful, provided they know how to be a good listener. However, never listen to anyone’s advice unless it comes from a meditation teacher with experience in these purifications, or a professionally trained counselor. If anyone else starts offering you advice, thank them for their help and gracefully change the subject.

To help you intensify your focus, use the practices of following and connecting described in Stage Three. In Stage Four, connecting is particularly useful: you observe changes in the breath over time and notice, or “connect,” how those changes correspond to shifts in your state of mind.

Dullness occurs when we turn the mind inward, which reduces the constant flow of thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind energized and alert. Therefore, the overall energy level of the mind drops.4 With less stimulation, the brain winds down toward sleep, and the mind grows dull. This normally happens when we’re fatigued or at bedtime.

There are three simple steps for defeating strong dullness. The first step is to recognize its presence and rouse your mind out of it using an appropriate antidote. This can be a challenge. When the dullness is deep enough, to the point that you’re drowsy, you will have no introspective awareness to alert you to the problem. You only realize there’s dullness after you find yourself nodding off, snoring, or dreaming. If this happens, try to wake yourself up completely. And if it’s only progressive subtle dullness you’re experiencing, rouse yourself from that as well. With either type of dullness, you must first re-energize the mind.

A well-trained mind won’t slip into strong dullness except when extremely fatigued. Eventually, even progressive subtle dullness will rarely occur. You will still experience stable subtle dullness until you overcome it in Stage Five.

When you’re experiencing strong dullness, use the antidotes described in Stage Three to rouse yourself. For instance, take a few deep breaths and exhale forcibly through your mouth, creating resistance by pursing your lips. Or try clenching all your muscles, holding them for a few seconds, and suddenly release and relax. Repeat this several times. Another helpful method is to suck in your gut while tightening and releasing the perineum. These are all invigorating and work well if the dullness isn’t too strong. For very strong dullness, try walking meditation for a few minutes, or meditate while standing.

When dullness doesn’t return for at least three to five minutes, you can be confident that the antidote was strong enough and that you’ve lifted yourself out fully.

The basic rule is, do whatever’s necessary to re-energize the mind to a state of full alertness.

During this Stage, dullness will often return no matter how strongly you rouse yourself. So always be vigilant. Don’t be surprised or disappointed when it returns. Just keep practicing, and be encouraged: the sooner you catch dullness, the more easily you can rouse the mind, and the closer you are to overcoming strong dullness completely.

You have mastered Stage Four when you’re free from both gross distractions and strong dullness. Physical sensations, thoughts, memories, and emotions still arise, but they no longer draw attention away. Dullness no longer leads to drowsiness, nor causes perception of the breath sensations to grow dim or take on hypnagogic distortions. By the end of Stage Four, you can direct and sustain your attention at will. This is a unique and powerful ability.

The strength of your mindfulness has also reached an important threshold. Attention can precisely examine every part of the breath with little effort. Your perception of the meditation object has become nonverbal and nondiscursive. Also, awareness has grown more powerful, and can clearly discern how the breath changes over time. With such strong attention and clear awareness, the words of the Buddha take on new significance: Breathing in a long breath, he knows he breathes in a long breath; breathing out a long breath, he knows he breathes out a long breath.

In this model, the different types of moments of consciousness vary according to which of our senses provides the “object” in a given moment. In all, there are seven kinds of moments. The first five are obvious, since they correspond to the physical senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. The sixth category, maybe less obvious, is called the mind sense,4 meaning it includes mental objects like thoughts and emotions. Finally, there is a seventh type of consciousness, called binding consciousness, that integrates the information provided by the other senses. Let’s take a closer look at these different kinds of moments of consciousness.

Only if you diligently practice following the breath, observing ever-finer details, will you train your mind to produce more moments of attention to actual breath sensations.

Non-perceiving mind moments7 are another important part of the Moments of Consciousness model. These are potential rather than actual moments of consciousness. No perception occurs because none of the sense organs provides them with any content. But nevertheless, they are real mental events, replacing perceiving moments of consciousness, and they are associated with a feeling of pleasure. Non-perceiving mind moments are interspersed among perceiving moments of consciousness.

Intention also exerts a powerful influence on how many of the upcoming mind moments will be perceiving rather than non-perceiving. A strong intention to perceive anything results in more perceiving moments, and vice versa. This, in turn, has a strong effect on the activity and energy levels of the mind. In contrast, intention is completely absent from non-perceiving mind moments. Therefore, they are also non-intending mind moments. Just as the intention of perceiving moments leads to more perceiving moments, the lack of intention in non-perceiving moments results in more non-perceiving moments, meaning dullness grows stronger.

According to this model, the phenomena of forgetting, gross and subtle distractions, and exclusive focus all exist along a continuum. Where each is located on that continuum depends on only one thing: the proportion of moments of attention in a given period whose object is the sensations of the breath, versus some distraction. With forgetting, there are no moments of attention with the breath as the object, only moments with distractions as the object. With gross distractions, there are more moments devoted to the distraction than to the breath. With subtle distractions, there are more moments devoted to the breath than to the distraction. Finally, the exclusive focus of an advanced practitioner lies on the far end of the spectrum, because all content is related to a single, clearly defined theme—distractions rarely, if ever, become objects of moments of attention.

Up to this point, you’ve been cultivating moments of peripheral awareness that were mostly extrospective. Now, from Stage Five onward, you’ll practice increasing the moments of introspective awareness, eventually leading to a new level of metacognitive introspective awareness. That is, you will be aware of your state of mind in every moment, even as you focus on the breath.

Therefore even more perceiving moments become non-perceiving and non-intending moments. If there’s no intervention, this cycle turns the stable subtle dullness of daily life into the progressive subtle dullness of meditation. If this isn’t checked, it becomes strong dullness and drowsiness.

The goal of Stage Five is to overcome subtle dullness and increase the power of mindfulness. Set and hold the intention to notice and immediately correct for subtle dullness. Powerful mindfulness will become a habit of the mind.

At the start of Stage Five, attention is much more stable. You’re free from gross distraction, but still experience subtle distraction. You’ve also overcome strong dullness and progressive subtle dullness, but remain in a state of stable subtle dullness.

This new level of stable attention is precisely what makes us more vulnerable to slipping into a deeper state of sustained subtle dullness. That’s because the mental agitation that stimulated the mind and helped keep us awake in the earlier Stages has subsided.

Subtle dullness has three characteristics: (1) the vividness and clarity of the meditation object decline; (2) both extrospective and introspective peripheral awareness fade; (3) there is a comfortable, relaxed, and pleasant feeling. These occur together, though only one or two may be obvious at a time. We need to learn to identify these characteristics in order to know when subtle dullness is growing deeper.

This is exactly the kind of deeper, but still stable, subtle dullness that can arise in meditation and be intentionally cultivated if we don’t understand what’s happening. We can train ourselves to remain in this state for extended periods. As mentioned, such dullness can make us think we’ve achieved the exclusive focus and blissful states of the later Stages. When our practice is this enjoyable, there’s a strong temptation to see ourselves as adept meditators. Once again, pleasurable subtle dullness is a trap and a dead end.

The best way to detect subtle dullness is by making introspective awareness stronger. The key to doing that is intention. In Stages Two and Three, you intentionally emphasized continuous extrospective awareness. Now, you must strengthen your introspective awareness. Hold the intention to remain continuously aware of what’s happening in the mind, moment by moment.

short, stay continuously vigilant about changes in the degree of dullness or alertness of your mind over time.

Another way to counter subtle dullness is by expanding the scope of your attention to include the sensations of the body. This works to energize the mind because we automatically use more conscious power to observe sensations in a larger area. You will even find that your scope of attention tends to spontaneously expand at this Stage. For instance, you might find yourself observing the sensations of the breath in both the chest and abdomen when you were intending to focus only on the nose.

You’re already using one method that increases the power of mindfulness: holding the intention to maintain bright peripheral awareness while observing the meditation object as clearly and vividly as you did in your best meditations. The body-scanning method in the description that follows provides an even more powerful tool for increasing mindfulness.1 Here is the method, step by step.

Consider the foot as an example. Shift the attention to the front half of one foot. Thoroughly examine all the sensations in that part of the foot without losing awareness of the breath. Investigate the foot sensations to see if any of them change with the in- or the out-breath. (When you first start, you will probably not notice any changes.) Repeat this with the back half of the same foot. Then, move to the calf and lower leg, again examining all the sensations while looking for any specifically connected to the breath. Repeat this for the other foot and leg.

There is no special significance to suggesting the foot as the starting point. You could just as easily choose the top of one ear and then progress over the scalp and face. Where you start and the order you go in doesn’t matter. Just start wherever suits you best. Eventually, you want to closely examine the sensations in every single part of the body, first in small, highly focused areas, then in larger ones. Always maintain peripheral awareness of the breath at the abdomen as you search for any breath-related sensations in other parts of the body.

Working your way through the body, you’ll eventually reach areas where you can readily observe changes in sensations that clearly correspond to the breath cycle. These will almost certainly include the upper back, chest, and abdomen, and possibly the lower back, shoulders, and upper arms as well. These breath-related sensations are comparatively gross, produced by changes in pressure and body parts moving against clothing or each other. Eventually, however, you’ll be able to detect very subtle changes related to the breath in every part of the body.

Mastering this Stage doesn’t involve reaching any particular level of mindfulness. Your mindfulness will continue to grow stronger through all the later Stages. Rather, it is the ability to consistently sustain and increase your overall mindfulness in each meditation session. Your meditations will steadily improve with each sitting.

You enter Stage Seven as a skilled meditator—you can achieve uninterrupted, exclusive attention, along with a powerful mindfulness that includes continuous metacognitive awareness.

Stage Seven is about the transition from being a skilled meditator to an adept meditator, one who can consistently achieve and effortlessly maintain exclusive attention and powerful mindfulness. Achieving effortlessness is your goal for this Stage. Effortlessness requires complete pacification of the discriminating mind, which is also the essential first step in unification of mind1 (see Sixth Interlude). Until there is unification, unconscious sub-minds continue to be at odds with each other, creating instability. With complete pacification, however, there is enough unification that the mind is compliant and rarely needs correction. Thus an adept meditator can drop all vigilance and effort, allowing the mind to settle into an unprecedented state of inner calm and clarity.

I personally had a long stretch of tedious practice at this Stage. I didn’t know it was a normal part of the process and remember thinking, “My concentration is nearly perfect. I sit day after day, and this is all I have to show for it? What’s the point? Where’s the rapture and bliss I’ve heard about?” Unfortunately, I quit practicing for quite a while as a result. This can be a dangerous time for your progress because of boredom and doubt, but it’s easier to tolerate if you understand what’s going on and are expecting it.

This practice is a more intense version of the following the breath technique you learned earlier. Only this time, you want to identify even more thoroughly the many distinct sensations that constitute the “breath at the nostrils.” Set your intention to follow the microscopic movements of sensations. As you focus in more and more, you might discern half a dozen or (many) more different sensations for each in- and out-breath.

If you’re lucky perception will shift one more time. The still frames will dissolve, becoming something too rapid for the mind to clearly discern. You’ll then experience the breath sensations as the rapid flickering on and off of separate moments of consciousness, or simply as vibrations. Some meditators interpret this experience of “momentariness” as the universe continuously coming into and going out of existence.

The mind jumps back, so to speak, to a place where things are recognizable once again, where it can apply familiar labels and concepts to what is being experienced. This is an Insight experience. If you can re-enter this “vibratory” experience, you can gain a clear Insight into impermanence.