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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

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...