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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

The Novice—Stages One through Three

STAGE ONE: ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE

Goals: Develop a regular meditation practice.

Obstacles: Resistance, procrastination, fatigue, impatience, boredom, lack of motivation.

Skills: Creating practice routines, setting specific practice goals, generating strong motivation, cultiv...

Mastery: Never missing a daily prac...

STAGE TWO: INTERRUPTED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMIN...

This sequence is so important it’s worth committing to memory—the untrained mind produces distractions that lead to forgetting, which results in mind-wandering.

Goals: Shorten the periods of mind-wandering and extend the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object.

Obstacles: Mind-wandering, monkey-mind, and impatience.

Skills: Reinforcing spontaneous introspective awareness and learning to sustain attention on the meditation object. Spontaneous introspective awareness is the “aha” moment when you suddenly realize there’s a disconnect between what you wanted to do (watch the breath) and what you’re actually doing (thinking about something else). Appreciating this moment ca...

Mastery: You can sustain attention on the meditation object for minutes, while most periods of mind-wand...

STAGE THREE: EXTENDED ATTENTION AND OVERCO...

Goals: Overcome forgetting and falling asleep.

Obstacles: Distractions, forgetting, mind-wandering, and sleepiness.

Skills: Use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to extend the periods of uninterrupted attention, and become familiar with how forgetting happens. Cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in. These techn...

Mastery: Rarely forgetting the breath or ...

MILESTONE ONE: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION TO THE ME...

The Skilled Meditator—Stages Four through Six

STAGE FOUR: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING GROSS DISTRACTION AND STRONG DULLNESS

Goal: Overcome gross distraction and strong dullness.

Obstacles: Distractions, pain and discomfort, intellectual insights, emotionally charged visions and memories.

Skills: Developing continuous introspective awareness allows you to make corrections before subtle distractions become gross distractions, and before subtle dullness becomes strong dullness. Learning to work with pain. Pur...

Mastery: Gross distractions no longer push the breath into the background, and breath sensations don’t fade or become...

STAGE FIVE: OVERCOMING SUBTLE DULLNESS AND INCREA...

Goal: To overcome subtle dullness and increase the power of mindfulness.

Obstacles: Subtle dullness is difficult to recognize, creates an illusion of stable attention, and is seductively pleasant.

Skills: Cultivating even stronger and more continuous introspective awareness to detect and correct for subtle dullness. Learning a new body-scanning technique to he...

Mastery: You can sustain or even increase the power of your mindfulness during ...

STAGE SIX: SUBDUING SUBTLE ...

Goal: To subdue subtle distractions and develop metacognitive introspective awareness.4

Obstacles: The tendency for attention to alternate to the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and other mental objects in peripheral awareness.

Skills: Defining your scope of attention more precisely than before, and ignoring everything outside that scope until subtle distractions fade away. Developing a much more refined and selective awareness of the mind itself, called metacognitive introspective awareness. You will also use a method called “expe...

Mastery: Subtle distractions have almost entirely disappeared, and you have unwavering exclusive attention t...

MILESTONE TWO: SUSTAINED EXCLUSIVE FOCU...

The Transition—Stage Seven

STAGE SEVEN: EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION AND UNIFYING THE MIND

Goal: Effortlessly sustained exclusive attention and powerful mindfulness.

Obstacles: Distractions and dullness will return if you stop exerting effort. You must keep sustaining effort until exclusive attention and mindfulness become automatic, then effort will no longer be necessary. Boredom, restlessness, and doubt tend to arise during this time. Also, bizarre sensations and involuntary body movements can distract you from your practice. Knowing when to drop all effort is the next obstacle. But making effort has become a habit, so it’s hard to stop.

Methods:5 Practicing patiently and diligently will bring you to the threshold of effortlessness. It will get you past all the boredom and doubt, as well as the bizarre sensations and movements. Purposely relaxing your effort from time to time will let you know when effort and vigilance are no longer necessary. Then you can work on letting go o...

Mastery: You can drop all effort, and the mind still maintains an unprecedented degree...

MILESTONE THREE: EFFORTLESS STABILITY...

The Adept Meditator—Stages Eight through Ten

STAGE EIGHT: MENTAL PLIANCY AND PACIFYING THE SENSES

Goal: Complete pacification of the senses and the full arising of meditative joy.

Obstacles: The primary challenge is not to be distracted or distressed by the variety of extraordinary experiences during this Stage: unusual, and often unpleasant, sensations, involuntary movements, feelings of strong energy currents in the body, and intense joy. Simply let them be.

Method: Practicing effortless attention and introspective awareness will naturally lead to continued unification, pacification of the senses, and the arising of meditative joy. Jhāna and other Insight ...

Mastery: When the eyes perceive only an inner light, the ears perceive only an inner sound, the body is suffused with a sense of pleasure and comfort, and your mental state is one of intense joy. With this mental and physical pliancy, you can si...

STAGE NINE: MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PLIANCY AND CALMING THE INTENSI...

Goal: The maturation of meditative joy, producing tranquility and equanimity.