📚 The Mind Illuminated
The mind illuminated (TMI) is among the first books I read in 2017 when I discovered Buddhism. It is a comprehensive encyclopedia of the challenges, theory, and techniques that a meditator needs on The Path.
The 10 stages in the book are inspired by previous scholar writing. And it draws heavily on a multitude of techniques from different buddhist traditions without championing one idea over another in particular.
I originally started reading the book in 2017 when I wanted to acquire more focus and concentration at work. To this day, i keep on revising the book because as my meditation practice matures, some elements become more obvious today.
The 10 stages
The stages can be simplified in the following:
- Establish the practice
- ‘Aha’ moments when attention recognizes it lost focus on the breath
- Less forgetting, mind wandering and sleepiness
- Purifications and overcoming gross distractions
- Sustain or even increase the power of mindfulness
- Metacognitive Introspective Awareness
- Jhanas and Insight (Vipassanā)
- Pacification of sense, and rise of meditative joy
- Tranquitlity and Equanimity replacing joy
- Effortless stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity persist away from the cushion
The stages are not sequential, and thus it is possible for anyone to have an experience of an advances stage. However, that experience might not be sustainable due to the lack of experience.
Instead, it’s best for us meditators to recognize in which stage we most likely are, in order to recognize the challenges we are most likely to face, and best practice to deal with them. For example, I remember when I went over stage 4, I experienced random moments of joy and sadness during the way, without any underlying explanation. Turned out, this is called purification. It is the result of the Mindfulness muscle working on its own outside of the meditation practice. Thus, on an unconscious level, memories are being processed. In this case, it is best to do less mindfulness meditation, and instead explore analytical meditation. This is a style of meditation where we ask a question and wait and see what answers rises and manifests in consciousness. The goal is to help the unconscious put into words that experience it is having.
With practice, I discovered that either putting the right word to describe the experience, or finding the exact spot in the body where the experience is expressing itself, provides a great feeling of relief in the face of disturbing emotions.
The theory
The book covert a great deal of buddhist philosophy. While there might be a tendency to read it in one go, it often proved useful to me to take the time to explore what each idea means. For example, the concept of pacification of the mind, or the doctrine of Impermanence, in particular the impermanence of the self. All of these are often relatively short to explain, and yet, experiencing them - in particular the impermanence of the self - can be nerve wrecking experiences.