Here’s one more person whose meditation practice was really helped by The Mind Illuminated. For me, what you describe was definitely not the case. Rather my problem was that previous meditation instructions had taken me to a stage whose challenge (subtle dullness, in TMI’s terms) I didn’t know how to overcome, and then I ended up doing the wrong things over and over, blocking my progress. TMI gave me concrete instructions for what I should be doing to overcome that challenge, I followed them, and have been getting much farther since.
Here’s one more person whose meditation practice was really helped by The Mind Illuminated. For me, what you describe was definitely not the case. Rather my problem was that previous meditation instructions had taken me to a stage whose challenge (subtle dullness, in TMI’s terms) I didn’t know how to overcome, and then I ended up doing the wrong things over and over, blocking my progress. TMI gave me concrete instructions for what I should be doing to overcome that challenge, I followed them, and have been getting much farther since.