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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

These realizations happen if you’re really lucky, but there are two significant caveats. First, if you spend a lot of time doing this practice, you’ll have a spillover into your daily life. You’ll see everything as impermanent, which can really throw you off. Familiar feelings of certainty and purpose disappear, which can produce a sense of hopelessness, even despair. Things lose their usual importance, and life can seem pointless. And it’s all the more disconcerting because these emotions have no logical basis in conscious experience, and seem to come from nowhere. In fact, they are produced by unconscious mental processes trying to assimilate your meditation experiences. In the Theravada tradition, this state is called the “knowledges of suffering” (dukkha ñanas) and is in some ways comparable to the “dark night of the soul” in the Christian mystical tradition. (See the section on Insight Experiences and the Attainment of Insight in the Sixth Interlude.) These insights into impermanence and emptiness can create aversion to practicing, but stopping your practice is probably the worst thing you can do in this situation.

The pleasure jhānas are a more powerful and satisfying absorption than the whole-body jhānas. As the name indicates, you use pleasurable sensations as your meditation object. The pleasure jhānas are particularly helpful in countering the tediousness of this Stage. More important, the state of flow in jhāna induces a temporary unification of mind, which in turn promotes more lasting unification, thus speeding up your progress through Stage Seven. To have access to the pleasure jhānas, you’ll need exclusive attention to the breath at the nose.

At this Stage, you may also re-encounter the purification process you experienced in Stage Four. This comprises another major set of distractions, including strong emotions, disturbing images, powerful memories, and other volatile material. This purification process is extremely important. In fact, your progress through the remaining Stages depends on it, so welcome this process if it arises. Deal with these issues in exactly the same manner as in Stage Four. If you need to, reread that chapter and refresh your memory.

Stage Eight is about conditioning the mind to sustain a high degree of unification even in the face of the hindrances. Then, meditative joy is fully developed, and the glue has “set.”

You have mastered Stage Seven when you can consistently achieve effortlessness. The restless tendency of attention to follow objects in peripheral awareness has been tamed. When you first sit down, you still need to go through a “settling in” process—you’ll count your breaths, sharpen your attention and awareness, and diligently ignore everything, until the mind is pacified and competing intentions disappear. Then you can let go and cruise. When you can consistently achieve effortlessness and stay there for all or most of the sit, you have become an adept practitioner. You have reached the third Milestone Achievement and are ready to move to the next Stage.

Unification plays the same role in Insight as it does in personality change. For an Insight experience to actually reprogram our intuitive view of reality, the relevant information must reach a large enough audience of sub-minds. What makes a mere Insight experience into a transformative Insight is how many sub-minds of the mind-system share in the experience. We can have a profound spiritual experience, yet the effects may be short-lived. There simply weren’t enough sub-minds unified around the experience—tuned in to the information in consciousness—to produce a major transformation.

The revision is simple, but the implications are profound: the same basic structure of the mind-system is repeated at many different levels. This means that each unconscious mind, communicating via the conscious mind, also consists of a collection of its own sub-minds. For instance, the auditory mind that sends information into consciousness also has a collection of connected sub-minds. These are responsible for a variety of processes such as pitch, intensity, duration, and so forth. Each of these sub-minds is in turn a collection of sub-sub-minds, and this structure keeps repeating itself down to the very simplest of mental processes.

The goal of Stage Eight is complete pacification of the senses and the full arising of meditative joy.

You begin Stage Eight as an adept practitioner. You can consistently pacify the discriminating mind and enter a state of mental pliancy. In other words, you have effortlessly stable attention and powerful mindfulness. Each sit, it can take a while to reach effortlessness, and sometimes you’ll stay at Stage Six or Seven the whole time. But you should be able to reach mental pliancy fairly regularly and remain there for the rest of the sit.

In this practice, you closely investigate the arising and passing away of various phenomena with attention. While practicing momentary concentration, you probably already noticed how particular sensations or affective reactions arise, then quickly pass away—often to be immediately replaced by a new but closely related object. For example, if the object is an ongoing sound, you will find it actually consists of a series of separate sounds arising and passing away one after another. If it’s a single, brief noise, you’ll notice that even after the actual sound has stopped, it continues to reverberate in the mind. If it’s an emotion or mental state, you’ll notice that it’s actually made of a series of closely related but different mental states, arising and passing in waves. Other times, the new object will be something quite different, but you’ll notice there’s a causal relationship between it and the last object to pass away. For example, if someone sneezes, as the sound disappears, it may be immediately followed by an image of a person sneezing. When that image passes, it might be replaced by a thought about catching a cold. You can make any of these objects your focus of attention.

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.7 A warning is in order here. You will likely feel that you have discovered the true Self, the ultimate ground of all experience.

Don’t judge yourself or your practice by whether or not you discover the Witness, or whether or not you have Insight into no-Self. Those will happen in time. Meanwhile, the Still Point meditation is a powerful method for achieving the goals for this Stage: unification, pacification of the senses, and meditative joy.

These are deeper than the whole-body or pleasure jhānas, and are called “luminous” because the object of meditation used for entering the first jhāna is the illumination phenomenon. This inner light is often called a nimitta,10 and the sensations of the breath are abandoned in favor of this luminous nimitta. Because it is mind-generated, rather than being a true sensory object, it allows all sensory content to be completely excluded from consciousness.

You’ve mastered Stage Eight when you achieve physical pliancy and meditative joy almost every time you sit. Experiencing periods of Grade V pīti once or twice—or even every third or fourth time you sit—is not yet true mastery. Consistency is key.

In Stages Nine and Ten, you fully unify the mind, moving from a state of highly excited meditative joy and happiness1 to one of serene joy and happiness. The resulting śamatha has five qualities of mind: fully stable attention, powerful mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity.

You have mastered Stage Nine when you consistently achieve stable attention and mindfulness, accompanied by joy and tranquility. Equanimity is also present, and grows much stronger in the Tenth and final Stage. Together, these five factors constitute the state of śamatha. However, when you get off the cushion, these qualities all rapidly fade. You’re ready now to begin the work of Stage Ten.

All five factors of śamatha are present in Stage Ten. Each time you sit, you quickly enter a state where attention is stable, mindfulness is powerful, and the unified mind rests in a state of joy accompanied by tranquility and equanimity. However, these quickly fade when you rise from the cushion. Your goal for this Stage is to reach a point where śamatha persists between sittings, permeating your everyday life. This is the one real change left in the perfection of śamatha. Then, śamatha becomes the “normal” condition for the adept meditator. The distinction between meditation and non-meditation largely disappears.

Stage Ten is ideal for doing any type of Insight practice. You can do Close Following, the Meditation on Arising and Passing Away, Choiceless Attention, the Meditation on Dependent Arising, Realizing the Witness, or anything else. Your mind is also in a perfect state to practice the luminous jhānas as well. Through these practices, Insight accumulates and matures, and the experience of Awakening quickly follows.

On mastering Stage Ten, the mind is described as unsurpassable.1 It’s an ideal instrument for achieving and deepening profound Insight into the true nature of reality and a liberation that is not subject to passing away. The following sequence from the Buddha describes the process by which mastery is achieved:

The goal beyond Stage Ten is to use the power of śamatha for the continued deepening of Insight, and to progress to the highest level of complete Awakening.

The flame represents the great final effort to achieve Awakening (bodhi). To the power of śamatha (samādhi, sati, pīti, passadhi, upekkhā) he has added energy (viriya) and investigation (dhamma vicaya), thus completing the Seven Factors of Awakening. The sword represents the Insight wisdom (vipassanā) obtained through investigation and is used to cut through ignorance and mental defilements.

The more often you cultivate these feelings, the easier it becomes to generate them.

It’s not uncommon for people to object to this practice because they find it contrived. Please don’t judge it until you’ve tried it. This is one of the most powerful meditation practices known for transforming the way your mind works.

The Pāli word jhāna can refer either to meditation in general, or to one specific type of advanced meditative state. Jhāna originally comes from the verb jhāyati, meaning to meditate, and the traditional word for meditator is jhāyim. Some have playfully compared the word jhāna to the verb jhāpeti, which means to burn up, because jhāna practice literally “burns up” mental defilements.1