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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

Meditation is the art of fully conscious living.

What we make of our life—the sum total of thoughts, emotions, words, and actions that fill the brief interval between birth and death—is our one great creative masterpiece.

The meditation landscape in the West is a vibrant but confusing place. Tibetan practices emphasize elaborate visualizations or sophisticated analytical meditations, whereas Zen strips meditation down to the bare bones, giving you minimal instructions like, “Just sit.” Some Theravada teachers emphasize rigorously cultivating mindfulness to the exclusion of stable, focused attention, while others insist that intense concentration leading to deep meditative absorption7 is best.

These terms are: śamatha9 (tranquility or calm abiding), vipassanā10 (Insight), samādhi (concentration or stable attention), and sati (mindfulness).

Śamatha and vipassanā are both generated using stable attention (samādhi) and mindfulness (sati). Although it’s possible to cultivate either śamatha or vipassanā independently of one another, both are necessary for Awakening.

Śamatha has five characteristics: effortlessly stable attention (samādhi),13 powerful mindfulness (sati), joy, tranquility, and equanimity.14 The complete state of śamatha results from working with stable attention and mindfulness until joy emerges. Joy then gradually matures into tranquility, and equanimity arises out of that tranquility.

Vipassanā refers specifically to Insight into the true nature of reality that radically transforms our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. However, meditation also produces many other very useful “mundane insights,” such as a better understanding of our own personality, social interactions, human behavior in general, and how the everyday world works. It can give us flashes of creative brilliance or intellectual epiphanies that solve problems or help us make new discoveries. These useful insights are not vipassanā, however, because they neither transform us personally, nor our understanding of reality, in any profound way. 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 (samādhi)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...

For both śamatha and vipassanā, you need stable attention (samādhi) and mindfulness (sati).22 Unfortunately, many meditation traditions split samādhi and sati, linking concentration practice exclusively to śamatha, and mindfulness practice exclusively to vipassanā.23 This creates all sorts of problems and misunderstandings, such as emphasizing mindfulness at the expense of stable attention, or vice versa. Stable, hyper-focused attention without mindfulness leads only to a state of blissful dullness: a complete dead end.24 But, just as stable attention without mindfulness is a dead end, the opposite is also true. You simply cannot develop mindfulness without stable attention. 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

The Ten Stages provide a systematic process for developing stable attention and mindfulness together, in balance, with śamatha and vipassanā as outcomes. The most accurate and useful description of this method is “Śamatha-Vipassanā meditation,” or “the practice of Tranquility and Insight.”

As your practice progresses, you will frequently find yourself navigating several Stages at the same time, moving back and forth between them over weeks, days, or even during a single session. This is perfectly normal. You can also expect to have times when you seem to have jumped to a more advanced Stage, as well as days when you seem to have gone backward. In every case, the important thing is to practice according to whatever is happening in your meditation in the present.

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.1 What you need is a regular daily sitting practice of one to two hours per day in combination with some of the supplemental practices described in the appendices. Meditation retreats are quite helpful, but ones lasting months or years are certainly not necessary. Diligent daily meditation, combined with occasional longer periods of practice, will be enough for success.

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.

THE NOVICE MEDITATOR Stage One: Establishing a Practice Stage Two: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering Stage Three: Extended Attention and Overcoming Forgetting Milestone One: Continuous Attention to the Meditation Object THE SKILLED MEDITATOR Stage Four: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and Strong Dullness Stage Five: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing Mindfulness Stage Six: Subduing Subtle Distraction Milestone Two: Sustained Exclusive Focus of Attention THE TRANSITION Stage Seven: Exclusive Attention and Unifying the Mind Milestone Three: Effortless Stability of Attention THE ADEPT MEDITATOR Stage Eight: Mental Pliancy and Pacifying the Senses Stage Nine: Mental and Physical Pliancy and Calming the Intensity of Meditative Joy Stage Ten: Tranquility and Equanimity Milestone Four: Persistence of the Mental Qualities of an Adept

STAGE ONE: ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE 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. 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 Stage Two involves the simple practice of keeping your attention on the breath. This is easier said than done. You will discover that attention is easily captured by a distraction, making you forget that you’re supposed to be paying attention to the breath. Forgetting quickly leads to mind-wandering, which can last a few seconds, several minutes, or the entire meditation session. 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. In Stage Two, you only work with the last event—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 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. 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.

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.

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

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.

All you’re really “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intentions—nothing more.

Intentions repeatedly sustained over the course of many meditation sessions give rise to frequently repeated mental acts, which eventually become habits of the mind. At every Stage, all “you” really do is patiently and persistently hold intentions to respond in specific ways to whatever happens during your meditation. Setting and holding the right intentions is what’s essential. If your intention is strong, the appropriate responses will occur, and the practice will unfold in a very natural and predictable way.

Once again, repeatedly sustained intentions lead to repeated mental actions, which become mental habits—the habits of mind that lead to joy, equanimity, and Insight.

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. This simple formula is at the heart of every Stage.

STAGE ONE: 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. When your intentions are clear and strong, the appropriate actions naturally follow, and you’ll find yourself regularly sitting down to meditate. If this doesn’t happen, instead of chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, work on strengthening your motivation and intentions.

STAGE TWO: Willpower can’t prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering, while gently but firmly redirecting attention back to the breath. Then, intend to engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In time, the simple actions flowing from these three intentions will become mental habits. Periods of mind-wandering will become shorter, periods of attention to the breath will grow longer, and you’ll have achieved your goal.

STAGE THREE: Set your intention to invoke introspective attention frequently, before you’ve forgotten the breath or fallen asleep, and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness. Also, intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible. These three intentions and the actions they produce are simply ...

STAGES FOUR THROUGH SIX: Set and hold the intention to be vigilant so that introspective awareness becomes continuous, and notice and immediately correct for dullness and distraction. These intentions will mature into the highly developed skills of stable attention and mindfulness. You overcome every type of dullness and distraction, achi...

STAGE SEVEN: Everything becomes even simpler. With the conscious intention to continuously guard against dullness and distraction, the mind becomes completely accustomed to ef...

STAGES EIGHT THROUGH TEN: Your intention is simply to keep practicing, using skills that are now completely effortless. In Stage Eight, effortlessly sustained exclusive attention produces mental and physical pliancy, pleasure, and joy. In Stage Nine, simply abiding in the state of meditative joy causes profound tranquility and equanimity to arise. In Stage Ten, just by continuing to practice regularly, the profound joy and happiness, tranquility, and equanimity you experience in meditation persists between meditation sessions, infusing your daily life as well.

As with planting seeds, at each Stage you sow the appropriate intentions in the soil of the mind. Water these intentions with the diligence of regular practice, and protect them from the destructive pests of procrastination, doubt, desire, aversion, and agitation. These intentions will naturally flower into a specific series of mental events that mature to produce the fruits of your practice.

Consciousness1 consists of whatever we’re experiencing in the moment. It’s a lot like vision: just as the objects in our field of vision change from one moment to the next, objects in our field of conscious awareness, like sights, sounds, smells, and other external phenomena, also arise and pass away.

Conscious experience takes two different forms, attention and peripheral awareness. Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our conscious experience. At the same time, however, we can be more generally aware of things in the background. For example, right now your attention is focused on what you’re reading. At the same time you’re also aware of other sights, sounds, smells, and sensations in the periphery.

Just as with vision, we’re more fully conscious of the object in the focus of our attention, but we remain conscious of the many objects in peripheral awareness as well. When we shift our focus, what had been at the center of attention moves to the periphery. As attention moves from one object to another—from the conversation to the mug of tea—we become more fully conscious of each object in turn, while remaining peripherally aware of the others.

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. You work with attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness—the two main objectives of meditation.

1. Posture a. Whether you sit in a chair or on a cushion on the floor, make yourself as comfortable as possible with your back straight. b. Get your back, neck, and head in alignment, front-to-back and side-to-side. c. I recommend closed eyes to start with, but you can keep them open if you prefer. 2. Relax a. While maintaining a straight back, release any tension in the body. b. Relax your mind. Take some moments to appreciate the fact that you’re gifting yourself with time away from all the usual tasks and worries of your life. 3. Intention and Breath a. Resolve to practice diligently for the entire meditation session no matter how it goes. b. Breathe through your nose as naturally as possible without trying to control your breath. c. Bring your attention to the sensations associated with the breath in and around your nostrils or upper lip. Another option is to center your attention on the sensations associated with breathing in the abdomen. See which of these is the easiest for you to focus on and then stick with that one, at least for the sit at hand. This is your meditation object. d. Allow your attention to stay centered on your meditation object while your peripheral awareness remains relaxed and open to anything that arises (e.g., sounds in the environment, physical sensations in the body, thoughts in the background). e. Try to keep your attention centered on the meditation object. Inevitably, your mind will get distracted and drift away. As soon as you recognize t...

Stable attention is the ability to intentionally direct and sustain the focus of attention, as well as to control the scope of attention. Intentionally directing and sustaining attention simply means that we learn to choose which object we’re going to attend to, and keep our attention continuously fixed on it. Controlling the scope of attention means training the mind to adjust how wide or narrow our focus is, and being more selective and intentional about what is included and excluded.

To develop intentionally directed, stable attention, you must first have a clear understanding of its opposite, spontaneous movements of attention. Attention moves spontaneously in three different ways: scanning, getting captured, and alternating. Scanning is when our focus moves from object to object, searching the outer world or the contents of our mind for something of interest. Getting captured happens when an object, like a thought, bodily sensation, or some external stimulus, suddenly captures our attention.

The third type of spontaneous movement, alternating attention, is a subtler kind of scattered attention only apparent to an experienced meditator. To be clear, everyone’s attention alternates, whether they meditate or not. The difference is that the non-meditator doesn’t experience his or her attention as alternating. Instead, there is the illusion of paying attention to two or more things simultaneously. What’s actually happening is that the focus of attention is moving very quickly among several different objects, but staying with each one for about the same amount of time overall. It’s the kind of attention we have when multitasking. If you’re doodling in class while listening to the professor, your focus is moving so swiftly that there doesn’t seem to be a break in your attention to each object.

Intentionally directed and sustained attention means spontaneous movements of attention stop.

Beginning in the very first Stages (Two and Three), you exercise and strengthen your ability to intentionally direct attention. But that’s only half the work. After directing your attention to the breath, you’ll soon find that your mind has wandered off. For this reason, you also have to learn how to sustain attention.5 This means you want to stop all spontaneous movements of attention. Now, sustaining attention is trickier than directing attention. Why? It’s possible to voluntarily direct attention. However, the part of the mind that sustains attention for more than a few moments works entirely unconsciously.

Any information held in consciousness is communicated to the unconscious. Formulating the conscious intention to focus on the meditation object provides a new piece of information for unconscious processes to take into account. Holding this intention, together with returning our attention to the breath over and over whenever we get distracted, informs the unconscious weighing process that keeping the focus on the breath is important. You start throwing mental darts at the target of sustained attention in Stage Two. By Stage Four, you have developed a consistent ability to keep your attention on the meditation object.

Exclusive attention7 to one object, also called single-pointedness, is very different from alternating attention. Exclusive attention doesn’t move back and forth between distractions and our intended focus. In Stages One through Five, you greatly improve your overall stability of attention, but you only achieve exclusive attention in Stage Six.

Repeating simple tasks with a clear intention can reprogram unconscious mental processes. This can completely transform who you are as a person.

The second part of cultivating introspective awareness involves checking in using introspective attention. Instead of waiting for introspective awareness to arise spontaneously, as you’ve done until now, you intentionally turn your attention inward to see what’s happening in the mind. Doing this check-in requires longer periods of stable attention. That’s why following and connecting are so important at this Stage. These techniques give you more stable attention, making it easier to momentarily shift attention and see what’s happening in the mind. Instead of waiting for introspective awareness to arise spontaneously, check in periodically using introspective attention. Yes, checking in disrupts your focus on the breath, but when you pause to reflect on everything happening in your mind, attention needs to shift. At this Stage, this is not only completely okay, it’s actually the key to cultivating introspective awareness. What you’re really doing is training and strengthening introspective awareness by using attention, making awareness of the mind’s activity a habit.

Train yourself to check in regularly with introspective attention. To start, try every half-dozen breaths or so—but don’t start counting them. Checking in should become a habit. Each time you check in with attention, you strengthen the power and consistency of introspective awareness. Also, the more often checking in leads to discovering gross distraction and tightening up your focus, the less often you will forget the breath.