Step by step guide to an experience of enlightenment.
This is a step by step guide designed to give a meditator a taste of awakening or enlightenment. In other words, it aims to spark a profound shift in awareness, an experience of consciousness that feels entirely different from ordinary perception. It reveals that your life unfolds within a vast, limitless field of luminous awakened awareness and love, which is your true nature.
It's often accompanied by movement in your heart, spontaneous gratitude, devotion, compassion etc. If you didn't already pick this up, to even get a taste of this awareness is big and may cause a reorientation in your life and a reevaluation of what is important. Reality may never be seen in the same way again. But because this is done through meditation you are always in control. The experience is much more like tip toeing into a body of water rather than jumping randomly out of the sky into the middle of a giant lake. At any moment you can and will, just because that's the way the mind naturally reacts, hop back to the shore.
Daniel Brown worked with Judson Brewer’s lab to scan experienced meditators in ordinary distraction, in timeless and boundless awareness, in natural non doing awareness, and in stable awakened awareness. They found strong high frequency gamma activity in the anterior cingulate during the holding of the view, and a shift into high gamma activity in a parietal region associated with moving from local to global awareness during awakening. This suggested a distinct neural signature for awakened awareness. Plans were made to study complete purification and flourishing as well.
Other related studies include work by Richie Davidson and Matthieu Ricard showing high gamma activity in Tibetan adepts during non dual awareness, and Zoran Josipovic’s research identifying network level changes in the brain during non dual awareness practice. Together, these studies point to a unique and trainable mode of consciousness with its own neural markers.
Tibetan Buddhism contains the idea of levels of awareness. This step by step guide along with its meditations will take the practioner deeper and deeper into awareness through graduated levels until one enters into this state of awakened awareness.
These steps use Map 1 described within the 3 maps system developed by Daniel P. Brown based on Tibetan Buddhist practices. The first map is described from minute 34 in Sacred Sundays with Dr. Daniel Brown, Ph.D. Additionally I've added other information from his books and other resources.
It uses the mantra from the Heart Sutra or The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom to structure the steps. The Heart Sutra can be a bit cryptic but is said to contain the entire path to enlightenment within it. The mantra is
Gate
Gate
Paragate
Parasamgate
Bodhi Svaha
or
Gone,
Gone,
Gone Way Beyond,
Gone Way Way Beyond,
Ooh What a Realization.
How this mantra is used in a step by step form to lead you to the experience of enlightenment is detailed below.
Step 1: GATEGone - Awareness gone beyond thought |
Using shamatha meditation (one-pointed or three-pointed focus), we start operating out of awareness rather than thought. When one gets skilled enough, thoughts calm and can completely stop. The sense of self, which is itself a thought, can also quiet so you experience stretches of time without a self. |
Method: Shamatha |
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Indicators of Progress: You are ready for step 2 when sustained attention becomes natural, and the constant hum of thinking grows faint until long stretches of complete quiet appear. In that quiet, thoughts are recognized as simple constructions that arise within the field of awareness, while awareness remains steady, bright, and untouched. |
Step 2: Second GATEGone way beyond - Awareness itself gone beyond self representation |
In step 1 we are operating out of awareness, but there is still something directing the meditation. Now we shift the basis from thought to awareness and recognize awareness is doing the meditation. This meditation helps us escape the limited perspective of our head, where we think we exist and realize that our awareness permeates all of reality. That awareness outside, is us. |
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Method: Emptiness-of-Self Practice |
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Indicators of Progress: You are ready for Step Three when the sense of a doer has dissolved and meditation continues on its own without effort. Awareness has become the natural vantage point and no longer feels located behind the eyes or inside the head. Self centered thought is faint, and attention stays steady without a watcher. Experience feels open, simple, and spacious. |
Step 3: PARAGATEGone way beyond - Gone way beyond the convention of time to ocean-like changeless boundless awareness as your basis of operation |
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Method: Emptiness of Time Practice |
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You question and deconstruct the felt sense of time, moment by moment:
This collapses the cognitive act of temporalizing experience. Aspects of awareness such as timelessness, changelessness, and ever-presentness get revealed, entering the boundless field where awakened awareness can be recognized. |
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Indicators of Progress: You are ready for Step Four when awareness feels timeless and unmoving while events rise and fall within it. The sense of past and future has become thin, and experience appears as one continuous present. Boundaries dissolve easily and the field of awareness feels vast and open. Nothing needs to be changed or managed, and the mind rests naturally in a quiet, centerless expanse. |
Step 4: PARASAMGATEGone way way beyond - Gone way way beyond the localization of individual consciousness in your information processing system |
Method: Direct Introduction / Pointing Out |
Always right here is a brilliant field of limitless awakened awareness love that is your true nature. Emptiness is the path, clearing away clouds that block the sun of your Buddha nature. When you can enter the state incorporating steps 1–3, awakened awareness is right there, but you may still need someone to help you recognize it. This is where the teacher points it out. There are two ways to recognize it:
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Indicators of Progress: You have completed Step Four when awareness recognizes itself directly without effort. There is a clear shift in the basis of experience, and awareness stands out as bright, open, and self knowing. The sense of a meditator does not return in that moment, and a natural response of wonder or gratitude arises. The recognition is unmistakable and distinctly different from any calm or focused state. |
BODHI SVAHA - Oooh what a realization |
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This is not a step but the effect of realizing your own Buddha nature via all the steps. The effect of this realization includes:
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