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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

the Beatles introduced Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation to the West. This marked the true beginning of my meditation career.

“Don’t take my word for anything I teach, don’t accept it on my authority. Come and see for yourself.” Kema explained that everything the Buddha taught was available to anyone willing to take the time and train the mind to discover it for themselves.

When life is lived in a fully conscious way, with wisdom, we can eventually overcome all harmful emotions and behavior. We won’t experience greed, even in the face of lack. Nor will we have ill will, even when confronted by aggression and hostility. When our speech and action comes from a place of wisdom and compassion, they will always produce better results than when driven by greed and anger.

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, cultivating discipline and diligence. Mastery: Never missing a daily practice session.

STAGE TWO: INTERRUPTED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING 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 causes it to happen faster and faster, so the periods of mind-wandering get shorter and shorter. Mastery: You can sustain attention on the meditation object for minutes, while most periods of mind-wandering last only a few seconds.

STAGE THREE: EXTENDED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING FORGETTING

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 techniques allow you to catch distractions before they lead to forgetting. Mastery: Rarely forgetting the breath or falling asleep.

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.

Whenever a distraction becomes the primary focus of your attention, it pushes the meditation object into the background. This is called gross distraction. But when the mind grows calm, there tends to be another problem, strong dullness. To deal with both of these challenges, you develop continuous introspective awareness to alert you to their presence. 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. Purifying the mind of past trauma and unwholesome conditioning. Mastery: Gross distractions no longer push the breath into the background, and breath sensations don’t fade or become distorted due to strong dullness.

STAGE FIVE: OVERCOMING SUBTLE DULLNESS AND INCREASING MINDFULNESS

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 help you increase the power of your mindfulness. Mastery: You can sustain or even increase the power of your mindfulness during each meditation session.

STAGE SIX: SUBDUING SUBTLE DISTRACTION

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 “experiencing the whole body with the breath” to further subdue potential distractions. Mastery: Subtle distractions have almost entirely disappeared, and you have unwavering exclusive attention together with vivid mindfulness.

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 of the need to be in control. Various Insight and jhāna practices add variety at this Stage. Mastery: You can drop all effort, and the mind still maintains an unprecedented degree of stability and clarity.

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 practices are very productive as part of this process. 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 sit for hours without dullness, distraction, or physical discomfort.

Six-Point Preparation for Meditation 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. 1. FIRE UP YOUR MOTIVATION After you sit down, the first thing to do is to remind yourself why you’ve chosen to meditate. Perhaps it’s to have a little more peace of mind and improve your mental skills, or it could be to achieve Awakening. Or maybe it’s just because you know you’ll feel better for the rest of the day if you meditate than if you don’t. Don’t judge your reasons as being good or bad, just acknowledge and accept them as they are. Having a clear sense of purpose will fire up your motivation and help you deal with any feelings of restlessness or resistance. 2. SET REASONABLE GOALS Goals give direction, and it’s important they be realistic so you’re not disappointed.

Ask yourself what you hope to accomplish in this particular session. Think about the problems you’ve been working on in recent sits, and decide how you can best apply yourself to the practice today. Then choose a goal for this sit that’s reasonable given your recent progress. 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. 3. BEWARE OF EXPECTATIONS You should set goals and practice diligently to achieve them, but be careful of ambitious expectations about where you “should be.” You can easily set yourself up for disappointment. 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. There will be sessions where it’s easy to focus. This is the fruit of your previous practice. But don’t expect to notice obvious progress each time you sit. There will be plateaus where nothing seems to change for days or weeks. Today, you may have less stability of attention or mindfulness than you did weeks or even months ago. That’s normal, so stay relaxed. Make your effort diligent, yet joyful. Don’t get caught up in expectations. And always remember, there is no such thing as a “bad” meditation. 4. COMMIT TO DILIGENCE Diligence me...

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. You may not be wholly successful, but just setting the intention will make them easier to handle. 6. ADJUST YOUR POSTURE Before you begin, review your posture and get comfortable. Here’s a checklist: • Adjust any supports you use to help you sit comfortably. • Your head, neck, and back should be aligned, leaning neither forward nor backward, nor to the side. • Your shoulders should be even and your hands level with each other so your muscles are balanced. • Your lips should be closed, your teeth slightly apart, and your tongue against the roof of your mouth, with the tip against the back of your upper teeth. • Start with your eyes closed and angled slightly downward, as though you were reading a book. This creates the least tension in your forehead and face. If you prefer, leave your eyes slightly open, with your gaze directed at the floor in front of you. Your eyes will move during meditation, but when you notic...

A Gradual Four-Step Transition to the Meditation Object