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Culadasa (John Yates) (June 28, 1945 – ) is an American meditation teacher and contemplative philosopher of mind with a background in both the Theravadan and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. He is a bestselling author of a meditation book on concentration, insight, and jhāna practice, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.

Culadasa founded Dharma Treasure Buddhist Sangha in Tucson, Arizona. He regularly teaches retreats in North America and leads online Dharma Treasure teacher training courses.

Academic and Personal Life
Culadasa received his Ph.D. in cardiac physiology from the University of Manitoba and taught physiology and neuroscience at the college level for many years. He later worked in the field of complementary healthcare, serving as the founding director of the West Coast College of Massage Therapy. He authored Physician’s Guide to Therapeutic Massage, a textbook on the medical research supporting the benefits of massage.

In 1996, Culadasa and his wife moved to Arizona to deepen their Buddhist practice, as well as to pursue an interest in shamanic and Native American spiritual practices. They operate a meditation retreat center in Cochise Stronghold, a natural fortress that served as the home base for the Chiricahua Apache and their chief Cochise.

Lineage
Culadasa was the student of Upasaka Kema Ananda and Jotidhamma Bhikkhu, who were themselves both students of Namgyal Rinpoche (George Leslie Dawson). Dawson was a Canadian-born Buddhist teacher originally ordained in the Theravadan tradition as Ananda Bodhi and later recognized by the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa as a reincarnation of the Namgyal tulku. He was the first publicly-recognized Western reincarnation of a Tibetan master.

Views on Meditation
Culadasa teaches samatha-vipassana, a method for cultivating stable attention, powerful mindfulness, and insight. He draws on the stages of meditation outlined in the Indian Buddhist teacher Asanga’s Ground of Hearers in order to create progressive meditation instructions for cultivating calm abiding.

He distinguishes between two distinct modes of cognition, attention and awareness, both of which he asserts are necessary for success in meditation. He defines attention as the faculty of mind that isolates one object from the field of conscious experience for top-down analysis so that it can be identified, labeled, categorized, and its significance evaluated. He defines awareness as the faculty of mind that takes in the entire field of conscious experience at once. It is bottom-up, minimally conceptual, and concerned with relationships of objects to each other and to the whole of experience. Culadasa maintains that both these faculties work together — awareness stabilizes attention, and attention trains awareness — and that meditation involves training both faculties to interact in an optimal manner. He calls mindfulness the optimal interaction between attention and awareness for a given situation.

Culadasa defines meditative absorption or jhāna as a mentally wholesome flow state occurring in the context of meditation. Therefore, unlike many Buddhist teachers, he doesn’t believe jhāna is accessible using only a single method. It can be accessed at multiple depths using a variety of suitable objects, ranging from breath sensations experienced throughout the body at the shallower end, up to the mental counterpart of the sensations of the breath at the deeper end.

Philosophy of Mind
Culadasa’s writing and teaching synthesize ancient Buddhist models of mind and perception with contemporary thought from the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He identifies an affinity between the Yogachara school’s Lankavatara Sutra and the writings of artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky; both describe the mind as a collection — or in Minsky’s words, a “society” — of smaller sub-minds or processes that interact together to create a functional conscious mind. Culadasa further draws on the work of philosopher Gregg Rosenberg, who defines consciousness as a process of information exchange between loci that possess a shared receptivity with each other.

Drawing on these sources, Culadasa describes the conscious mind as a kind of “mind-system,” a hierarchy of sub-minds interacting with each other through conscious information exchange in order to generate perceptions and behaviors. He maintains such a perspective corroborates the Buddhist teaching of anatta or non-self. In other words, the mind is not a monolithic entity in the form of an ethereal soul or ego-self. Rather, it is a dynamic, decentralized, open system or process evolving over time.