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

635 Pages·2015·10.53 MB·English

by  John Yates (Culadasa)

CONTENTS
Praise for The Mind Illuminated
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Introduction
An Overview of the Ten Stages
First Interlude: Conscious Experience and the Objectives of Meditation
Stage One: Establishing A Practice
Second Interlude: The Hindrances and Problems
Stage Two: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering
Stage Three: Extended Continuity of Attention and Overcoming Forgetting
Third Interlude: How Mindfulness Works
Stage Four: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and
Strong Dullness
Fourth Interlude: The Moments of Consciousness Model
Stage Five: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing Mindfulness
Fifth Interlude: The Mind-System
Stage Six: Subduing Subtle Distractions
Sixth Interlude: The Stages of an Adept
Stage Seven: Exclusive Attention and Unifying the Mind
Seventh Interlude: The Nature of Mind and Consciousness
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
Final Thoughts
Appendix A: Walking Meditation
Appendix B: Analytical Meditation
Appendix C: Loving-Kindness Meditation
Appendix D: The Jhānas
Appendix E: Mindful Review
Appendix F: Insight and the “Dark Night”
Glossary
Index
Notes
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1.
Table 2. The Ten Stages and Four Milestones
Table 3. Comparison of Peripheral Awareness and Attention
Table 4. Preparation for Meditation
Table 5. The Five Hindrances
Table 6. The Seven Problems and Their Antidotes
Table 6. The Seven Problems and Their Antidotes
Table 7. Comparing the Jhānas
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Progression through the stages is not linear: Expect to be moving
between stages over several sits
Figure 2: If the skills and insights you learn on the cushion don’t infuse
your daily life, progress will be quite slow. It’s like filling a leaky bucket.
Figure 3. Getting annoyed with every instance of mind wandering is like
tearing up the garden to get rid of the weeds.
Figure 4. Conscious awareness consists of whatever you are experiencing
in the moment.
Figure 5. You may listen intently to what a person is saying while you are
peripherally aware of other things.
Figure 6. Attention and awareness are two different ways of knowing the
world. Attention singles out some small part of the field of conscious
awareness to analyze and interpret it. Peripheral awareness provides the
overall context for conscious experience.
Figure 7. Attention moves spontaneously in three different ways: scanning,
getting captured, and alternating. Scanning is when your focus moves from
object to object, searching for something of interest. If attention doesn’t
find anything, it returns to its original focus.
Figure 8. The third kind of spontaneous movement is where attention
alternates between two or more things.
Figure 9. Introspective peripheral awareness means the objects in
consciousness are internal—thoughts, feelings, states and activities of mind.
Figure 10. The four-step transition to the meditation object. Step One—
Establish an open, relaxed awareness and attention, letting in everything,
but give priority to sensations over thoughts.
Figure 11. Sometimes you’ll do almost anything to put off sitting. But the
simple act of sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation
object is the essential first step from which everything else flows.
Figure 12. Following the breath engages the mind by giving it a challenge,
and can be treated like a game. Find the beginnings and endings of each
part of the breath cycle, and the pauses in between. Then try to observe all
these points with equal clarity.
Figure 13. One part of your mind might wear a big hat marked “I” for a
short period of time, but it has no inherent ability to keep that up for long.
Inevitably, some other mental process with a different agenda and different
conditioning takes over and becomes the “I”.
Figure 14. The “mind” is not a single thing, but a rather a collective of
many different mental processes. Each has its own purpose and goals, but
all try to serve the happiness and well-being of the whole. When you’re
dissatisfied with your practice, different parts of the mind urge you toward
other sources of gratification. Trying to stay focused on the breath can feel
like herding cats.
Figure 15. By making meditation satisfying and enjoyable, the part of the
mind that wants to meditate can get the other parts to stop resisting and join
in.
Figure 16. How forgetting happens. At first your attention alternates
between the distraction and the meditation object.
Figure 17. Labeling. Practice identifying the distraction with a quick and
simple label.
Figure 18. Handling pain and discomfort. When unpleasant sensations
arise, ignore them as long as you can. Resist the urge to move to find relief.
Figure 19. Subtle dullness is a comfortable state in which you can still
follow the breath but not vividly or intensely.
Figure 20. The different levels mindfulness works at can be compared to
dealing with a thornbush. At the first level of mindfulness, you can learn to
dodge the thornbush.
Figure 21. Overcoming gross distraction. Step 1—Recognize when a gross
distraction is present,
Figure 22. The strategy for dealing with pain begins with ignoring
unpleasant sensations for as long as possible.
Figure 23. After sustained investigation, pain often resolves itself because
you have stopped resisting and accepted its presence.
Figure 24. Exciting insights can be a powerful distraction.
Figure 25. Memories and disturbing emotions from the unconscious mind
can well up into consciousness.
Figure 26. Connecting: Compare the different parts of your breath cycle
with the corresponding parts of the previous breath cycle. Is the current in-
breath or out-breath longer or shorter when compared to the previous
breath? Has the length of the pauses changed? Do the in-breath, out-breath,
or pauses change when there’s more or less subtle distraction, or more or
less dullness?
Figure 27. In all, there are seven kinds of moments of consciousness. The
first five correspond to the physical senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and
touch. The sixth category is called the mind sense, meaning it includes
mental objects like thoughts and emotions. Finally, there is a seventh type
of consciousness, called binding consciousness, that integrates the
information provided by the other senses.
Figure 28. If the contents of one moment are gone before the next arises,
how do we ever put it all together so we can understand what’s actually
happening? The content of separate moments gets briefly stored in
“working” memory,” where the moments are combined and integrated with
each other. The “product” is projected into consciousness as a “binding
moment” of consciousness.
Figure 29. Any moment of consciousness is either a moment of attention or
of peripheral awareness. If it’s a moment of peripheral awareness, it will be
broad, inclusive, and holistic—regardless of which of the seven categories
it belongs to. A moment of attention, on the other hand, will isolate one
particular aspect of experience to focus on.
Figure 30. Sitting on a deck in the mountains, gazing out at the view, each
moment of visual awareness includes a variety of objects—mountains,
trees, birds—all at the same time. Auditory moments of awareness include
everything in the audible background—birdsong, wind in the trees, a
babbling brook. On the other hand, moments of visual attention might be
restricted to just the birds you’re watching, and auditory attention to the
sounds the birds are making. Binding moments of attention and awareness
take the content from the preceding sensory moments and combine them
into a whole.
Figure 31. Ordinary conscious experience includes a significant proportion
of non-perceiving mind moments.
Figure 32. Intention in one moment determines what subsequent moments
of consciousness will take as their objects. The stronger your intention to
attend to something, the more moments of attention are focused on that
object. The lack of intention in non-perceiving mind moments leads to more
non-perceiving moments and increased dullness.
Figure 33. In-breath—Most moments of consciousness are moments of
attention with the breath as their object, but others have knee pain or
thoughts about lunch as their object. Attention isn’t actually moving
between the breath and these distractions. Successive moments of attention
hold different objects. Interspersed among these moments of attention are
moments of peripheral awareness of other bodily sensations.
Out-breath—If the pain in your knee draws your attention, a greater
proportion of moments of attention are devoted to knee pain than to the
breath. The pain is now a gross distraction, and the breath slips away into
the background.
Figure 34. According to this model, the phenomena of forgetting, gross and
subtle distraction, and exclusive focus all exist along a continuum. Where
each is located on that continuum depends on only one thing: the proportion
of the moments of attention in a given period whose object is the sensations
of the breath versus some distraction.
Figure 35. As the proportion of non-perceiving moments increases, we
experience more subtle dullness. Increase it even more, and we experience
strong dullness. When the proportion becomes great enough, we fall asleep.
Figure 36. Body Scanning. Systematically investigate discrete body areas,
examining all sensations, but looking in particular for sensations that
change with the breath. As you get better at this, begin combining smaller
areas until you can observe sensations with equal clarity in large body
regions. Any time you realize you’re in a state where perception is much
more powerful than before, shift your focus back to the breath at the nose.
Sustain this heightened perception as long as you can, and when it declines,
return to the body scan.
Figure 37. The mind-system consists of the conscious mind and the
unconscious mind. The unconscious mind exchanges information with the
conscious mind.
Figure 38. The unconscious part of the mind-system is divided into two
major parts: the sensory mind and the discriminating mind. The sensory and
discriminating minds are each composed of many individual sub-minds that
function simultaneously and autonomously.
Figure 39. The visual mind projects a collection of sense-percepts into
consciousness in the form of an image, which then becomes available to the
thinking/emotional mind.
Figure 40. The conscious mind is like the “boardroom of the mind-system”
where information is exchanged and discussed, and decisions are made.
Figure 41. If, while meditating, the smell of coffee arrives in awareness
associated with a strong enough intention, attention may move to the smell,
and even the thought of “having a latte.” Fortunately, we aren’t entirely at
the mercy of these unconscious intentions, and conscious intentions can
overcome spontaneous movements of attention.
Figure 42. The narrating mind is a sub-mind of the much larger
discriminating mind. However, it has a very special role and importance all
its own. It takes in all the information projected into consciousness by other
sub-minds.
Figure 43. When the visual mind processes information from the eyes, an
image is projected into consciousness. But in this “seeing,” there is only the
seen. When the image is further processed by the discriminating mind, a
conceptual representation is then projected into consciousness. But in this
“recognizing,” there is only the recognized concept. If the image and its
associations are pleasant, an appropriate emotion is projected into
consciousness. But in this “feeling”, there is only the felt pleasure.
Figure 44. Attention moves spontaneously because unconscious sub-minds
project things into consciousness with an intention to become an object of
attention. When annoyance at the sound of a barking dog arrives with a
strong intention to be an object of attention, this conflicts with your
intention to follow the breath. Attention alternates between the breath and
the distraction, and whichever receives more support and energy from the
mind system gets the most attention.
Figure 45. When you can clearly observe all the breath sensations occurring
in the body, at once, there’s no attention to spare and distractions are
ignored. Thoughts from your discriminating sub-minds may keep
“knocking on the door” of consciousness, but they can’t get a “word” in
edgewise. After a while, they just quit trying.
Figure 46. The flow of energy becomes a circular and continuous
movement between the body core and extremities, and the base of the spine
and the head. You might also perceive a continuous energy exchange with
the universe around you, through the top of the head, the base of the spine,
and the palms of the hands and soles of the feet.
Figure 47. Mindfulness can continue to improve even when there is
absolutely no dullness, because mindfulness depends not only on the
number of perceiving mind moments, but also on how much unification
there is. The larger the audience for the contents of consciousness, the more
mindfulness you have.
Figure 48. The Moments of Consciousness model attributes dullness to the
presence of low-energy, objectless, non-perceiving mind moments,
interspersed among perceiving moments of consciousness.
Figure 49. Consider a situation where unconscious sub-minds remain tuned
in and receptive to the contents of consciousness, while at the same time,
none of them project any content into consciousness. Consciousness would
cease—completely. There would be a complete cessation of mental
fabrications of any kind, including cravings, intentions, and suffering.
Figure 50. The mind-system consists of the conscious mind, which is a
locus where information is exchanged between unconscious sensory and
discriminating minds. This same basic structure is repeated within each of
the unconscious minds. The auditory mind has a collection of sub-minds
responsible for a variety of processes, such as pitch, intensity, and so forth,
all connected by an information exchange locus.
Figure 51. Information from all the different senses gets projected into a
“consciousness-like,” (but unconscious) information exchange locus. This
allows the different sensory minds to exchange information with each other,
and for the binding together of information from different sensory
modalities. Knowing which person is saying the words you hear is an
example of this type of pre-conscious binding.
Figure 52. The visual mind is made up of many different visual sub-minds,
each of which processes different kinds of information coming from the
eyes—color, brightness, contrast, lines, shape, motion, etc. They
communicate with each other by projecting information into a
“consciousness-like” location that all the other visual sub-minds have
access to so they can incorporate it into their own processing activities. This
is precisely analogous to what we call consciousness when speaking of the
mind-system as a whole, but it happens at a deeper level, and isn’t part of
our conscious experience.
Figure 53. Practicing momentary concentration involves intentionally
allowing your attention to go to objects in peripheral awareness. You’ll
have the familiar experience of attention alternating between the breath and
the sensation or other object you’ve chosen. Earlier, we would have called
these subtle distractions, however, with effortless control of attention, the