- You are not in control of your mind. There is no doer of deeds or experiencer of events. *
The Mind Illuminated serves as a how-to guide to the practice of Buddhist meditation, known as Vipassanā. Yate’s approach is a left-brained, step by step guide with rigorous definitions. He breaks every concept into multiple sub-concepts, introduces different paradigms when relevant, and presents a roughly linear path of progression along with the goals and signposts that should exist along the way.
10 steps of awareness
- Establish a Practice
- Interrupted attention and overcoming mind wandering
- Extended Attention and overcoming forgetting
- Continuous attention and overcoming gross distraction and strong dullness. *← I am here on most days *
- Overcoming subtle dullness and increasing mindfulness ← I am here on good days
- Subduing subtle distraction
- Sustained Exclusive attention and unifying the mind
- Mental Pliancy and pacifying the senses
- Mental and physical pliancy, calming meditative joy
- Tranquility and equanimity
By chapter 1, I had a much clearer understanding of my own practice, what reasonable targets would be, and what it takes to get there. According to Yates, it is possible to achieve the desired effects of meditation with 1-2 hours of meditation every day for 2 months. His explanations meshed well with my experience, and it’s enough to make me want to commit to the necessary hour-a-day ritual, but only time will tell if such an intention is enough to rise above the cacophony of everyday life.
Spontaneous introspective awareness: the moment you realize you are distracted from the original intent of study. One should encouraging awareness by rewarding introspective awareness.
**Metacognitive introspective awareness: **using peripheral awareness as a means to monitor the brain chatter that is happening in the mind.
Gross Distractions/Subtle Distractions: Gross distractions are ones that take the full attention of your mind and cause you to forget the original intention of focus. Subtle distractions appear in the periphery, but do not sap attention unless they become gross distractions.
Extrospection: focusing on perceptions outside one’s own mind. **Mindfulness uncertainty principle: ** You cannot use your attention as a means of metacognitive introspective awareness, as attention is the tool that does the thinking. Moments of consciousness model: Consciousness is made up of quantized moments and is discontinuous throughout time. Subminds: Consciousness is a post-hoc narrative layered upon recursive structures of neural networks. There are many complicated minds that do not raise to the bar of consciousness, but do substantial processing between the signals and the conclusions that reach consciousness.
Note: The author was recently accused of adultery and asked to resign from his position at a spiritual teaching center. Through the first few chapters, I was wary of the book. But as I continued reading, Yate’s behavior served as a reminder for what to expect out of the limits of contemplative practice. It can help but not cure many ills, and living a virtuous life is an all encompassing challenge that meditation alone cannot solve. The few references to sexual drive and fantasies and other barriers to insight felt more honest to me, and there weren’t claims countermanded by failings of character from the author itself.