The Mind Illuminated, by Culadasa, is a fantastic, step-by-step meditation guide. The book leads the practitioner through a series of ten Stages developing calm, stable attention. Each stage is set of specific practices and a set of criteria to let you know when you’ve developed enough to move to the next Stage. The goal of the book is, realistically(!), to induce an Awakening : a permanently altering experience, after which the annoyances of life recede into the background and the foreground experience of living is one of joy and compassion and equanimity. An Awakening is a completely realistic goal – it is a probabilistic event that usually occurs somewhere around Stage 7 or 8.

As good as The Mind Illuminated is, there a numerous tips and tricks that wouldn’t fit into an already 500 page book. There are places where the text is unclear, and places where the emphasis, is, in my opinion, incorrect. The neuroscience in the book is quite old. The mutually beneficial ties to psychology and psychotherapy are largely unexplored.

This website is my attempt to place The Mind Illuminated in a slightly larger context, the things a practitioner would talk about with other practitioners or a teacher. The hope is that the material here would help speed the progress of a practitioner through the Stages, while avoiding some of the cul-de-sacs.

My name is Al Hough. I am not a certified TMI instructor. I did, however, complete all ten Stages in TMI, and I did have an Awakening. I have guided several students through the whole process, and I have helped numerous students who were stuck in one place or another in TMI to get unstuck. This website is largely drawn from that experience. I hope it helps you too.

I have also included some material on what to do post awakening. The book (reasonably) doesn’t even attempt to provide direction here, but there is a real gap in available material.