Ep13: Mind Illuminated - Culadasa
Culadasa is a meditation master with more than four decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravadin Buddhist traditions. A former professor, he taught physiology and neuroscience for many years, and later worked in the field of complementary and alternative medicine.
Culadasa’s book ‘The Mind Illuminated’ has been described as ‘a rare and valuable treasure’ and has been enormously popular among dedicated meditators for it’s incredible clarity and usability even to very advanced stages of practice.
In this interview we talk about how Culdasa’s traumatic upbringing led to him to being homeless on the streets at 15 years old and why even years in Catholic seminary didn’t provide the answers he was looking for. We discuss his initially frustrated attempts at meditation practice, the colourful cast of characters of his teachers, and the one key discovery changed everything.
Topics Included:
Culadasa’s traumatic upbringing
Running away from home at 15 and the search for truth
Entering Catholic seminary in search of the truth
Experiments with psychedelics in the 60s
Early attempts at meditation and learning Transcendental Meditation
Discovering Buddhism
What was lacking in the seminary
Doctrinal disagreements with Catholicism
Virtuoso Buddhism vs village Buddhism
Living on the streets and recovering from a traumatic childhood
Achieving a PhD with no high school education
Glimpses of emptiness
Meeting Upasaka Kema Ananda in Winnipeg, Manitoba
Encountering Namgyal Rinpoche (aka George Dawson)
Blending Kagyu and Theravadan practice
Struggles with the Mahasi meditation technique
Introduction to shamata (calm-abiding) practice
Common misunderstandings about shamata
Key distinctions about attention and awareness
Revisiting Mahasi-style meditation
Stages of samadhi
Culadasa’s personal journey of insight
How Culadasa attained stream entry
Falling away from meditation and taking up shamanism
Further path attainments
Second path practice and meditation on mind states
Craving and dissatisfaction
Mara I have seen you!
The mechanics of path attainments
The two edged sword of the human mind
Developing compassion
Waking up, cleaning up, and growing up
Implications of facing death
To find our more about Culadasa, visit: https://dharmatreasure.org/
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James