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The One You Feed

Culadasa on How the Mind Works

The One You Feed

Eric Zimmer

Education, Self-improvement, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Buddhism, Mental Health

4.62.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Culadasa is a meditation master with over 4 decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhist traditions. He taught classes in neuroscience and psychology at the Universities of Calgary and Brittish Columbia. He now lives in the Arizona wilderness and leads the Dharma Treasure Buddhist Sanga. His book on meditation, The Mind Illuminated, is the book Eric calls the best book on meditation he's ever read. This is a two-part interview. In this episode, part one, Eric and Culadasa talk about how the mind and brain works - knowledge that is essential to understand before one can successfully implement the meditation techniques that will be discussed in part two. These techniques have the very real potential of transforming your meditation experience. So listen up in this episode and get ready to radically re-understand this thing we call the mind.

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In This Interview, Culadasa and I Discuss...

  • His book, The Mind Illuminated
  • How the mind and the brain works
  • The basic distinction between attention and awareness
  • How when we give labels to something we can know and understand it better
  • The moments of consciousness model
  • Non-perceiving moments of consciousness
  • The dullness of meditation
  • Sleepiness in meditation
  • The goal of vipassana is to increase the total power of our cognitive abilities
  • The mind system model (how the mind works)
  • The conscious and unconscious mind
  • Sensory sub-mind (taking in info through senses)
  • Discriminating sub-mind (cognitive thinking/feeling)
  • These sub-minds are competing for attention
  • The conscious mind is a place that the sub-minds project into
  • The power of setting intentions on the sub-minds
  • The role of the narrating sub-mind
  • We are a collection of the processes of the sub-minds
  • Making intellectual sense of the experience of not-self


See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You sit down there to meditate and it becomes really clear that there are different parts to your mind that have different ideas about what you should be doing while you're sitting there and some of them don't even think you should be sitting there.

0:15.0

Welcome to the One You Feed.

0:25.0

Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.

0:35.0

And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

0:44.0

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

0:50.0

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

0:58.0

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

1:05.0

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chulidasa, a meditation master with over four decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhist traditions.

1:29.0

He taught psychology and neuroscience at the universities of Calgary and British Columbia.

1:34.0

Chulidasa lives in Arizona's wilderness and leads the Dharma treasure Buddhist Sangha.

1:39.0

On this episode, Eric and Chulidasa talk about many things, including the book The Mind Illuminated.

1:45.0

Hi, Chulidasa. Welcome to the show.

1:48.0

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

1:50.0

I am so excited to have you on as I told you before. Your book The Mind Illuminated is one of the best books on meditation and how the mind works that I have ever read.

2:01.0

I've told so many people about it. And so I think a bunch of listeners are waiting to hear this one.

2:06.0

So I'm really looking forward to getting into this. But before we do, let's start like we always do with the parable.

2:12.0

There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

2:18.0

One is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

2:23.0

And the other is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.

2:30.0

And looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

2:34.0

And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

2:37.0

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

...

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