Inspired by: The Mind Illuminated

Motivation

Few books I’ve read in my life have been as clear, concise, and practically useful as The Mind Illuminated, by John Yates, aka Culadasa. He was a meditator, teacher, and author with a background in neuroscience and Buddhism. In this post I’d like to outline a few points from his book which have stuck with me over the years, and helped develop my meditation practice. At the same time, I’ll add a few thoughts of my own as an armchair neuroscience fan, and meditator.

The Mind Illuminated is a modern explanation of a meditative practice known as Samatha, and based on the Anapanasati Sutta (Discourse on Breath-Mindfulness) and the Elephant Path (A great explanation of the thangka painting, symbology, and related meditation is available here, or Way to Heaven.)

It describes, in Culadasa’s words, stages, which can be identified through the types of hindrances one encounters in practice. For example Stage 1 is characterised by not meditating, or not meditating daily. In this stage we develop motivation to practice.

The stages of Samatha, as presented in TMI, range from 1 to 8, starting from not meditating, and progressing to deep vipassana meditation, or insight meditation. The Samatha practice is meant to aid the development of concentration and mindfulness. Then, when Vipassana is practiced, it’s with a stable and unified mind, which is said to enhance the quality of insight. In The Mind Illuminated, the later stages are considered Vipassana practice to some degree.

Mindfulness is the optimal interaction between attention and awareness.

Throughout the various stages of practice, one is confronted by obstacles, hindrances, for which there are “antidotes”. When one identifies (becomes aware of) a hindrance, such as distraction, an adequate antidote is applied, such as recollection of prior intention.

Once motivation to sit and practice meditation has lead to actual sitting for some period of time, we’re in stage 2. Culadasa describes a transitional practice to center yourself, get comfortable, relax the body and align the posture, and make a resolution to practice in a certain manner, i.e. set an intention.

My practice involves a brief body scan, where I let attention be occupied by small regions of the body in a descending order, beginning with the top of the head, and reaching the feet. A small internal voice gives instructions in the form, “relax your head, relax your neck, relax your shoulders, relax your arms, relax your hands, relax your chest, relax your belly, relax your back, relax your hips, relax your legs, relax your feet”.

At the same time that the mind observes the body and we relax, small adjustments to posture keep the head ‘as if suspended by a string from above’, the spine elongated, shoulders relaxed, the tip of the tongue behind the front upper teeth, lightly touching the palette. A second pass through of the body scan repeats the same process, however the small voice is more precise, “relax the head, relax the top of the head, the sides of the head, the face, the neck, relax the shoulders, relax the upper arms, relax the forearms, relax the hands, relax the fingers, etc..” A third pass, again more precise, and here try to be as precise as you can, distinguishing each region of the body. Work your way through the body, feeling and relaxing each small part with a small voice. Relax the eyebrows, relax the cheeks, relax the jaw, relax the pinky finger, relax each joint of each finger, etc.. This can lead to, at the end of this initial transition, “relax your breath, relax your sense of touch, of taste, of smell, of hearing, of sight, relax your mind.” Throughout all this alert relaxation, maintain an extended posture, head suspended “by a string”, chin slightly tucked, tongue tip lightly touching.

Now, we instantiate our intention. We make a resolution, again in a small internal voice. I usually tell myself something such as, “I resolve to practice for 20 minutes; to maintain attention focused on the sensation of the breath, at the tip of the nose.” Essentially this tells us, the duration of our task, what we will attend to, and where this will happen. We can now begin to practice, tuning attention to our defined object of concentration.

Intention

And this is where the fun part begins! We’ve given ourselves a task, by setting an intention. We’re creating a reference point for ourselves, by clearly defining the task. Now we can become more aware of how attention behaves, whether or not we are ‘accomplishing’ the task in the moment. I think of this like a basketball hoop. We could just throw a ball into the air over and over, but having a hoop to aim at let’s us judge our accuracy and consistency a bit more easily. The reference point creates an expectation in awareness which can be analysed for error. The object of meditation is the target. If we’re not focused on the target we’re “distracted”.

It’s important to note already that although we set an intention to concentrate on an object, this task is actually secondary in some ways to the meta task, of remaining aware of what attention is doing. The frequency and intensity of distraction begins to subside, as awareness and attention optimise their interactions. This ‘optimal interaction between attention and awareness’ is how Culadasa describes mindfulness.

In the 2nd and 3rd stages, attention is frequently occupied by distractions. In the beginning, we may start to look for the object, the sensation of the breath at the tip of the nose, but it can be lost amongst all the mental constructs, such as discursive thoughts (inner verbal commentary), emotional constructs, or unrelated bodily sensations (beyond the object’s locus) that remain after transitioning through the body scan…. and we might only just glimpse it, before without us realising, attention has become occupied by something else. This is a distraction, and in the beginning we may not realise we’re distracted for some time, practically letting the mind wander into a full blown dream… Before remembering our prior intention, and identifying our “gross distraction”.

For example, we may find a sensation of temperature change at the tip of the nostril, cool on inhalation, warm on exhalation, but the slippery “monkey-mind”((never stops swinging from branch to branch, grasping at and clinging to anything within reach)) jumps from that warmth at the nostrils, to the movement of the belly, to a thought about the future, perhaps something we will do later like cook, and then the details of the recipe, and the ingredients, sights and smells of the dish,… And suddenly, we will recall, I am meditating, my intention was to focus on the sensation of the breath at the tip of my nose, how did I get so wrapped up in this cooking scenario? ((The intention set initially creates a ‘future memory’. This is the form of memory which reminds us to do something when the time comes. Here, attention was occupied with distraction, so awareness detects a prediction error, i.e. we remember our intention has been forgotten. We are reducing the Hibert space between the predicted task occupying attention and the actual task.))

As Culadasa explains, this is the interaction of awareness and attention. Awareness is an aspect of mind which is characterised by some breadth, when compared to the narrow scope of attention. In fact, although attention can move very quickly, changing it’s contents up to 10x per second, it is so ‘narrow’ as to only be occupied by a single abstraction((An abstraction can be thought of as the topology of a mental construct, conceived as a high dimensional polytope, in vector space derived from neuronal network activity. In some terms, an abstraction is a singular iconic trigger, interconnected with a multitude of post experiences, sensations, and expectations. We might consider the abstraction ‘Apple’, as the surface of a polytope in representational space, whose volume is filled by any relevant constructs, such as shape, colour, texture, taste, odeur, or other memories of our encounters with this icon in the past)) at a given moment.

As awareness contains the intention that was set at the beginning of the sit, and it eventually notices that attention is occupied by a distraction, and intervenes, reminding us of the original intention we’d set. This ahha moment, where awareness and attention interact, leads them to function in harmony. This cultivates mindfulness, and is described as the unification of mind.

We abstractly consider ourselves to be singular organisms. What is there to unify? Here we are taking about unification of the many facets of ourselves around a singular intention, as sometimes various aspects have contradictory intentions. For example, we may want to focus on the meditation object, but also to think about dinner plans. Through the meditation practice of returning attention to the object of meditation, we unite these facets of ourselves through repeated recall of a singular intention.

Making Friends

Another mediator, and Tibetan monk whose teaching I appreciate, Mingyur Rinpoché, has said, meditation is learning to become friends with yourself. The Tibetan term for meditation, སྒོམ, ghom, means to become familiar. Becoming friends, he explains, is merely a matter of passing time together with someone, doing something both people enjoy. In this case, becoming friends with ourselves, means the many facets of our minds learn to work in unison, around a singular intention, by cradling attention in awareness. In the early stages, this is undertaken through giving the monkey-mind a task which we know from experience, it will enjoy, like counting, or later, feeling breath sensations.

As awareness recalls attention to the object, we can be appreciative, and feel a sense of satisfaction that, as expected, we did get distracted, and then we also noticed the distraction! We do some positive reinforcement, thanking awareness for bringing us back to the task at hand. This is a process of cultivating compassion for oneself and others that is developed in the practice of Metta.

Mindfulness

I think of awareness as memory in a broad sense. It’s a map, or a model, that we continuously update, that contains what we know about our world. This includes the environment, internal mental states and somatic sensations, as well as a model of how these other models can interact. So for all intents and purposes, awareness is a set of states that have been predicted to be a certain way, and according to our best evidence (from sensory information) they still actually are as predicted. Awareness is, in that sense, the set of unchanged states((comparing expectation from the past with actual experience in the present)) in memory. Attention then, would be the set of predictive states that need updating, having signaled some error in the prediction, conflicting with new signals. When awareness has predicted something and there is an error in that prediction, attention is the updating of the model.

In some sense, attention is in the “foreground”. Attention is occupied by any new experience that was not preconceived accurately, and inductively drawn our interest. As we read, attention is on the page, on the meaning of the text. Awareness is then the background of the mind. Awareness contains the visual information around the book or screen that contains the words we’re reading… e.g. the floor, wall, but also sounds, somatic sensations of breath of weight of the body, sensation of our clothes, odeurs, as well as so other states of the models, predicted without noticeable error… Even our sense of embodiment, agency, wakefulness, reality, etc..

When we direct attention to the small locus of somatic sensation that is the breath sensation at the tip of the nostrils, we simplify things for ourselves. No longer faced with the hustle and bustle of daily life, eyes closed, relaxed and motionless, focusing attention inward toward sensation. Using awareness to observe how attention ‘moves’, ‘holds’, ‘is occupied by’, or is ‘attuned to’ the intended object becomes the exercise. We progress from stage two to three and four, by stabilising attention, and eliminating gross distractions. We sit for extended periods of time, say minutes in a row, with attention quietly poised on the subtle sensations we’ve intended. There may be some ‘alert’ from awareness that a potential distraction is forming from the sub-conscious space, and rather than enhance and construct it with attention being attracted there, awareness keeps attention stable, and directed toward the intended object.

An occasional distraction may arise, and gain attention’s focus, but it is immediately noticed, if it wasn’t preemptively ignored. As we move from stage 4 to five and 6, we build mind power, allowing us to stay alert and keep attention bright. This means we’re focusing attention on more and more subtle sensations, and we begin unifying the mind through an intention to feel our breath in the whole body.

Of course this post will gloss over the detailed instruction found in TMI, but to summarize, the intermediate process as I see it, is a bit like fitness training for mindfulness. A kind of metacognitive memory training. At moments, we push and exert effort, breaking new ground, experiencing growth, like a shoot emerging from a seed. Then we ‘deload’, take a step back, relax effort, and refresh energy levels before diving in again. This ‘progressive overloading’ expands the subcritical state, and cultivates ‘mind power’ as explained in TMI. It’s a natural process that unfolds at its own pace, given the right conditions.

Theta and Gamma

As the nature of the intended object becomes more and more subtle, and more refined, or sublimed, it can be easy to become distracted if mind power is insufficient. This is a stage which can resemble the sensation of being in your warm comfortable bed in the moments before dozing off. However, the goal is not to sleep, but to remain alert and relaxed. You can start to have sensations in these stages that arise unexpectedly, and break the stream of attention. This is known as Piti, and can take a variety of forms.

As piti subsides, and we pass from the sensation of the breath in the whole body to the pleasurable quality of that sensation, a slightly more refined object for attention, we can start to feel Sukkha, or contentment.

From here, what are described as the last stages, are referred to as jhanas, or deep jhanas. These states are characterised by progressively fewer qualities, terminating in states referred to as “neither perceiving nor not perceiving”. But if you are at this point, we are no longer in blog post territory.

From the armchair

Personally, my experience is that this process of developing mindfulness is beneficial in itself. ((Unifying the sub-minds through practicing around intention, increasing mental power through unification of function, cultivating compassion for oneself and others, and optimizing the interactions of attention and awareness.)) From my armchair neuroscience perspective, there are a few other thoughts to play around with.

• Emotion as a mental image constructed from somatic sensation to help navigate the environment successfully,
• reveals how practice meditation, as the task of harmonizing different forms of memory discussed as attention and awareness, enhances the mind body dialogue,
• and let’s us experience subconscious mental constructs which require attention.
• There is also an unperceived effect, in resting with a compassionate and loving attitude, on the subconscious broadly. This feeds back, between a physiological state, and a generalized mental construct that is self correcting. The process creates a sustained subcriticality.
• A final interesting aside regards recent work on subjective and objective forms of recall. Here researchers demonstrate that subjective episodic recall gives us a broad access to even miniscule tangential details, while more objective recall enables single details to be compared with a broad range of contexts or other details or objects.

What I start to realise is that perception, as we experience our senses and our minds, is an extremely delicate construct. It contains patterns that we’ve learned since conception, as predictions, which mesh imperceptibly into signals that our senses have gleamed from the environment in the present. It is entirely a dynamic ‘energetic’ state, that is ensconced in electro chemical material architecture. The density and seamlessness of our experience, dependent on innumerable peta-scopic events occurring simultaneously, and interdependently.