_The Mind Illuminated_ Hasn't changed my life yet but it might (found it three days ago out on hoopla.com). I say this as someone who has given meditation practice a good college try (more than a year at a time of daily practice) on a couple of occasions. Most books say just keep going and you will eventually fart pixie dust. This book says you can reach advanced practice in under a year BUT requires a consistent one hour a day which might be a deal breaker. This book gets very specific about technique, achievements and expectations which is unique in my experience. And the author is not saying you need to find a "mentor/guide". If you have seen a better book I would love to hear about it.
It has changed my life to some degree- very clearly and significantly.
Yet, I read only one chapter and following the advice and instruction to the letter for almost a month.
I am feeling the deep joy from meditating just ten minutes. I know I am not supposed to get attached to this deep bliss feeling, but it validates my efforts.
I read the first chapter a few months back, but did not really start following it until I started reading W. Rahula's What the Buddha Taught and Bhante Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English.
I am deeply attracted to the Theravada Buddhism philosophy. And there is no place of blind faith in it.
So, my serious attempt to meditation started after I learned more about Buddha and his way. I had to try it.
I much more calm and composed. With better concentration and more self-control. Procrastination has left me. And I have insights much easier than before. I am an overally better thinker, now. And I give the credit to meditation.
A great counterpart to this book might be Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. The Mind Illuminated is a technical manual for meditation practice; Everyday Zen is more about how to think of the rest of your life while you’re not meditating as practice. (It’s not much about Zen specifically either; it’s author just happened to be a practitioner of Zen.)
I would say TMI is much more technical because it's written for the "Hardcore Dharma" community which is far more technique-oriented than Goenka. Goenka doesn't approach the stages of insight adaptively, which can easily frustrate practitioners of mindfulness whose first intro to meditation is body-scanning. I would rank body-scanning as one of the least efficacious techniques with very poor results when applied to the physical pain that often results from long sits.
Good meditation teaching is equipping the practitioner with a toolset with the right tool applied for the appropriate stage of practice.
TMI and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha are necessarily complex because they are treating the entire path toward nibbana as a segmented map of attainment. I can think of virtually no technique which can be applied from the beginning to the end except for very difficult-to-approach techniques such as shikantaza ("just sitting") or the ekayana ("one vehicle") techniques of the Quanzhen ("complete reality") Chinese Buddhism schools. If you think TMI is obtuse try and approach the Shurangama Sutra which is really a mindfuck. But here's the thing: unconditioned existence is a mindfuck so we often need "lesser" graduated techniques to approach the paradoxical nature of reality.
TMI does do a good job of not providing difficult techniques, but the I think Goenka explains watching the breath much more simply and better. He emphasises not grasping or being averse to what arises, and only working with your reality in that moment instead of wishing for things to be different. TMI does mention some of those points but I found the way Goenka reemphasised them to be very helpful
