Victor M Fontane
As all institutional religions and spiritual practices has one thing in common and is overcoming suffering and mental fulfillment as an everlasting solution. So, a Tibetan Monk named Asanga who lived 800 years after the Buddha, about 1700 years ago, wrote about a detailed sequence of steps for deeper mindfulness. The book, “The Sequence of Meditation” describe ten steps of mindful meditation detailed later in a book called “The Mind Illuminated” written by John Yates.
Ten steps or stages of mindfulness.
Novice Meditator
Stage 1: Establishing a practice
Goal: Develop a regulator meditation practice.
Obstacles: Resistance, procrastination, fatigue, impatience, boredom, lack of motivation.
Skills: Creating practice routines, setting specific practice goals, generating strong motivation, cultivating discipline and diligence.
Mastery: Never missing a session.
Stage 2: Interrupted attention and overcoming mind wandering
Goal: Shorten the period of mind wandering.
Obstacles: Mind wandering, monkey-mind and impatience.
Skills: Reinforcing spontaneous ‘introspective awareness’ – awareness of thoughts, feelings, and states and activities of mind – and learning to sustain attention on the meditation object.
Mastery: You can sustain attention on the meditation object for minutes, whilst most periods of mind wandering last only a few seconds.
Stage 3: Extended attention and overcoming forgetting
Goal: Overcome forgetting and falling asleep.
Obstacles: Distractions, forgetting, mind wandering, and sleepiness.
Skills: Use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to extended periods of uninterrupted attention, and become familiar with how forgetting happens.
Mastery: Rarely forgetting the breath or falling asleep.
Milestone 1: Continuous attention on the meditation object.
Skilled Meditator
Stage 4: Continuous attention and overcoming gross distraction and strong dullness
Goal: Overcoming gross distraction and strong dullness.
Obstacles: Distractions, pain and discomfort, intellectual insights, emotionally charged visions and memories.
Skills: Developing continuous introspective awareness allows you to make corrections before subtle distractions become gross distractions, and before subtle dullness becomes strong dullness. Learning to work with pain. Purifying the mind of past trauma and unwholesome conditioning.
Mastery: Gross distractions no longer push the breath into the background and breath sensations don’t fade or become distorted due to strong dullness.
Stage 5: Overcoming subtle dullness and increasing mindfulness
Goal: To overcome subtle dullness and increase the power of mindfulness.
Obstacles: Subtle dullness is difficult to recognise, creates an illusion of stable attention, and is seductively pleasant.
Skills: Cultivating even stronger and more continuous introspective awareness to detect and correct for subtle dullness. Learning a new body scanning technique to help increase the power of your mindfulness.
Mastery: You can sustain or even increase the power of your mindfulness during each meditation session.
Stage 6: Subduing subtle distraction
Goal: To subdue subtle distractions and develop ‘metacognitive introspective awareness’ – introspective awareness in which the mind “stands back” and observes its own state and activities.
Obstacles: The tendency for attention to alternate to the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and other mental objects in ‘periphery awareness’ – a general cognizance of sensory information; mental objects like thoughts, memories, and feelings; and the overall state and activity of the mind.
Skills: Defining your scope of attention more precisely than before, and ignoring everything outside that scope until subtle distractions fade away.
Mastery: Subtle distractions have almost entirely disappeared, and you have unwavering exclusive attention, together with vivid mindfulness.
Milestone 2: Sustained exclusive focus of attention.
Transition
Stage 7 (the transition): Exclusive attention and unifying the mind
Goal: Effortlessly sustained attention and powerful mindfulness.
Obstacles: Distractions and dullness will return if you stop exerting effort. Keep sustaining effort until exclusive attention and mindfulness become automatic, then effort will no longer be necessary. Boredom, restlessness and doubt, bizarre sensations and involuntary body movements can distract you from your practice.
Methods: Practicing patiently and diligently, bringing you to the threshold of effortlessness.
Mastery: You can drop all effort, and the mind still maintains an unprecedented degree of stability and clarity.
Milestone 3: Effortless stability of attention.
Adept Meditator
Stage 8: Mental pliancy and pacifying the senses
Goal: Complete pacification of the senses and the full arising of meditative joy.
Obstacles: The primary challenge is not be distracted or distressed by the variety of extraordinary experiences.
Method: Practicing effortless attention and introspective awareness will naturally lead to continued unification, pacification of the senses, and arising of meditative joy.
Mastery: When the eyes perceive only an inner light, the ears perceive only an inner sound, the body is suffused with a sense of pleasure and comfort, and your mental state of one of intense joy.
Stage 9: Mental and physical pliancy and calming the intensity or meditative joy
Goal: The maturation of meditative joy, producing tranquillity and equanimity.
Obstacles: The intensity of meditative joy can perturb the mind, becoming a distraction and disrupting your practice.
Method: Becoming familiar with meditative joy through continued practice until the excitement fades, replaced by tranquillity and equanimity.
Mastery: Consistently evoking mental and physical pliancy, accompanied by profound tranquillity and equanimity.
Stage 10: Tranquillity and equanimity
You enter the stage with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquillity and equanimity.
Milestone 4: Persistence of the mental qualities of an adept.
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