Culadasa on How the Mind Works

or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chula Dasa, a meditation master with over four decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravad and Buddhist traditions. He taught psychology and neuroscience at the Universities of Calgary and British Columbia. Chiladasa lives in Arizona's wilderness and leads

the Dharma Treasure Buddhist songa. On this episode, Eric and Chuladasa talk about many things, including the book The Mind Illuminated. Hi, Chuladasa, Welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I am so excited to have you on. As as I told you before, your book, The Mind Illuminated is one of the best books on meditation and how the mind works I have ever read. I've told so many people about it, and so I think a bunch of listeners are waiting to hear this one. So

I'm really looking forward to getting into this. But before we do, let's start like we always do with the parable. 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. What is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the other is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness

and bravery and love. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. 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. Well, you know, it's very interesting, Eric I would say that that that parable is an extremely good description of what the dharma practices all about. We

have these two sides to our nature. Which parable describes, and uh, yeah, it's which one we feed. If we go around succumbing to greed and hatred and basically acting out of self centeredness and selfishness, then that grows stronger and that comes to characterize the kind of person we are, and as a matter of fact, when it spreads culture wide, we end up with the kind of world we have.

On the other hand, if we can learn to feed the other wolf, if we can practice loving kindness and understanding and compassion, we can learn to maximize the h cooperativity aspect of ourselves rather than a competitive aspect, then then that's the wolf that that wins. And quite frankly, up until now, in the history of Buddhism, it's been all about feeding the right wolf largely for your own say, although the Mahayana School has recognized that you need to

go beyond that. But we're at a place where the survival of humanity, or at the very least the survival of the incredible cultural heritage that we have developed, is at very very serious risk. And the only solution that I can see is to feed the right wolf. I agree. I'm actually one of those people that believes the world is getting better in a lot of ways, but I also think at the same time that it's getting better, our challenges are growing in magnitude. The the impact that

our screw ups can have are so much worse. The impact greed and hatred and fear can have in the world is magnified by just the nature of our our technology and our tools. I totally agree. It's a race between these two sides of our nature and uh, and which one wins on a collective basis is going to determine the future. Yeah, that's why this dharma has to

spread beyond the individuals. Ye. So I mentioned to you before, and you know, for the listeners, we're gonna do this is a two part interview, and we're gonna do it in two sections. The first section we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about your understanding of how the mind and the brain works based on different Buddhist teachings and

and your own experience in neuroscience. And then in the second part we'll talk about applying that stuff and get very specific about meditation guidance, which is really one of the strengths of the book. Um. But the other strength is this whole section about understanding how the mind works. And I wanted to make sure we got that. And it's a little bit dense at points, and I've been fretting a little bit about like, am I gonna be able to get this, you know, into a podcast and

and you know, make it digestible. So we'll see how we go, but I think it's worth trying. I thought we'd start with the basic distinction between attention and awareness, because that is fundamental to basically everything that you teach, particularly the meditation stuff, is understanding the difference between those two things and being able to recognize them. I agree

with you, it is totally fundamental. And when I realized the distinction between those two, it made all of the difference in the world, not just to my own practice, but to my ability to understand what people have been trying to say in all of these classic meditation texts over the centuries, and also helped him make sense of what was going on in the world with people the key to it. Initially, maybe this isn't the key, this

was the discovery of the keyhole. Like so many people, my initial meditation training led me to believe that what I was trying to do was to make my meditation object, the breath, the only thing that was present in my consciousness, and to eliminate everything else. And this was such a struggle and frustration, you know, dullness and drowsiness and falling asleep and all the usual kinds of things, extensive mind wandering and everything. I find myself lost in mind wondering.

And then I go back to this really narrow focused perspective. And I don't know why exactly, but one day it occurred to me to just, well, why don't you just let all that other stuff be there, and as long as I'm focused on my meditation object, let's see what happens. And everything not only became easier, but I could recognize the problems in my practice before they became problems. And then so that was the discovery of, like I said,

the keyhole. Then I found the key which was when I read the descriptions that there were two different networks by which we became conscious of things in our day to day, moment to moment knowing of the world. One was this aspect of our mind which focused on things, analyze those things, allowed us to manipulate our experience, solve problems,

do all these great things. But there was this other aspect, so other brain network that functioned in a different way, and it took in information in a much more global or holistic way and was actually providing the completely different kind of information a different perspective, and that the two were intended to work together. And so these were being described by neuro scientists as the dorsal attentional network and the ventral attentional network. They were most often being described

as two kinds of attention. But it was so obvious that these were inappropriate terms. And then, of course, and cognitive science being at van to see people using terms like focused attention and open attention or broad attention or distributed attention. And I thought about this, and I thought about the way we use language, and I said this, this is an extremely important discovery and concept. How to

talk about this in a way that is meaningful? And it occurred to me that people use the terms attention and awareness interchangeably very often. There was a lot of conflation of these two as just being two different ways of referring to the same thing, but had a little peper level. There was a distinction there that was part

of our common language, part of our common understanding. People would selectively use the word attention or paying attention in association with words like concentration and focus and things like that. But people would also often use the word awareness, not just in a broad sense to include everything, which was actually quite appropriate, but also that kind of knowing that didn't involve as highly focused, uh analytical approach to things.

And so there was all what I realized is within the language itself, there was already an intuitive understanding of these two ways of knowing, these two ways of perceiving experience, and that all it was really necessary was teased them apart so that we could use these words the kind of understanding people already had in order to be able to talk about these two ways of knowing. And it is an interesting thing about the way our minds work, that when we can give labels to something and we

can understand them and we can use them better. So it's a very interesting thing. I think it goes back to some biblical references that to give a name to something is to know it and are to understand it. And if you think about it, you know, I could say, um, of course, you know a dog can pay attention to things, but if you take a worm, it's kind of hard to imagine an earthworm paying attention to something. But you'd

certainly say an earthworm was aware. And uh, where I lived and surrounded by wildlife, and I watched the deer, and I see that dearer dwell in a state of awareness, and attention is something that they invoke periodically. So as a result of all of us that this particularly distinction, both the on a neurological neuro physiological basis and the

experiential basis just became really clear. And at that point I could look at what had previously been confusing discussions by modern meditation teachers trying to describe what mindfulness was by the writers of traditional texts, going going back to early commentaries and on the Buddhist teaching, and this particular key unlocked the meaning of what they had had since intuitively, and we're trying to put into words, but without the

specific language to distinguish between these two different things. And so in your specific definition, and that's one of the things I love about the book is you define things very very clearly, so that we all know what we're talking about. And attention in your definition is the process of giving attention to one thing to sort of analyze it and you know, learn more about it and and just be focused on whereas awareness is the broader sense

of what's happening around us. You know. So I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm my attention is on you and your conversation and your face here. My awareness knows though that, you know, there's a room behind me, and there's light coming in, and that somebody knocked on the door, you know, next door. You know, my awareness is sort of is picking all that up. But it's my attention

that is what I focused. And one of the things I thought was so interesting about this approach, and we'll cover it more as we get into meditation in the next section. But this leads us into the idea of moments of consciousness. I don't know if you called it the moments of consciousness model, but but that is a you know, there's a whole chapter on that idea. Do you think you could walk us through you know what you mean by moments of conscious and what that model is. Yes,

to begin with the origins of this, we're very early meditators. Now, this is something that many meditators will experience at some point that they will begin to perceive their experience in the form of the rapid arising and passing away of moments of consciousness. And interestingly enough, this seems to happen

at several different frequencies that seem to be fairly characteristic. Well, this had been noticed by early meditators who constructed the part of the polycanon that's called the Abidama, and they used it as a basis for taking all of the various things that the Buddha had taught about consciousness and putting it into a framework that there were individual that that consciousness consisted of individual moments of consciousness that arose

and passed away, and each moment of consciousness had specific characteristic to it. Of course, it had the object of consciousness, which is the one that we most easily become aware of. But these these wonderful meditators who created the Abidama recognized and enumerated a very very long list of characteristics which could be present or absence in each moment of consciousness, and which basically determined the qualities of that moment of consciousness.

I can say this is something that many meditators experience, this arising and passing away of experience in these discreete moments. Uh, and this is something that had been anal lies in great detail. One of the interesting things about this from the point of view of neurophysiology is what is going on in the brain. Are all of these different complex waves of electrochemical activity that are going through the brain. I think most people have enough knowledge of brain function

to realize that they're all these neurons. They're connected to each other at junctions called signapses, and an electrical current runs along the fiber that's part of one neuron, and at the end it releases a chemical neurotransmitter that stimulates the next neuron and a chain and initiates a wave of electric change that passes to the end of that neuron and to the next. Well, it actually turns out that individual neurons can have anywhere from dozens to literally

thousand of these connections to other neurons. And when you do a classic electro and cephalogram, you know, e e g. Put the electrodes on the scale, what you're really doing is you're tapping into the electrical part of those electrochemical waves passing through the brain. So this is this is

a form that information is taking in the brain. And if you have information in the form of a wave, what you have to do to extract the information is you have to take a chunk of that wave and you have to break it down and then you can extract its information content. This this gets down to you know, basic physics and mathematics and something that people have been doing for going on a hundred and fifty two hundred years, learning to analyze the information content of waves. And we

do this. I mean, the information that's being passed between you and I, in all of its different forms, is really in a form of a wave, and it becomes digitized. But what do we mean by digitization. We mean you take chunks of that wave and you extract the information content. Do you see how that the understanding of that physical process of how you extract information from uh from waves translates into the subjective experience of information impulses or chunks

or moments of consciousness. Yeah, so this all comes comes together to offer a model, and it's a model that has a lot of utility. And now every model is just an approximation. Some models are closer representation of what they attempt to model than others. But the whole purpose of a model is to help us to understand something.

So what I've done is I've taken this moments of consciousness model that historically goes back to shortly after the time of the Buddha, that is common to my own meditation experience and that of many others, and that has its counterpart in understanding how the brain works to extract information.

And I've applied it to the experience of every meditator, because every meditator who sits down to meditate, to learn to meditate, there's two things that they experience, and there are a variety of different kinds of information, and we can distinguish some of those as the information that we are interested in. If you're meditating, it's your meditation object. If your student focusing on your homework, it's it's it's your homework. And then there's all that other information that

keeps appearing in the mind that is not related to that. Right, So we have the phenomenon of distractions that can lead to forgetting what your primary focus is. And the other thing we have is dulness. And both of these things are actually inherent in the Abidama description of uh moments of consciousness. I just developed them for the purpose of helping the meditator have a model that's relatively easy to understand that they can apply to what it is they're

trying to do in their practice. Well, I'm trying to increase the number of moments of consciousness that are on my meditation object in order to stabilize my attention. I'm trying to increase the proportion of moments of consciousness that take the form of awareness in order to develop this other aspect of how how I know so that I can use it in my meditation. And where are these

additional moments of consciousness coming from? Well, there's a whole supply of non perceiving potential moments of consciousness, and of course this can explain dullness, and this can explain that really high level of consciousness, that powerful conscious perception that we all experience under certain circumstances. So there's a continuous stream of moments of consciousness. Ordinarily many of them are non perceiving, and those that contain information content can take

a variety of forms. So now we have a model by which we can talk about how we go from a mind that's full of distractions that can lead us to forget what we're doing and end up in the chain of mind wandering. How it is that we can descend from the level of consciousness that we first sat down with into a state of sleepiness or even actual sleep, And likewise, how we can sit down to meditate and

ascend to a very high level of conscious clarity. And so, in essence, what you're saying is that what appears to us to be a continuous stream of consciousness are really individual moments of consciousness, kind of the way if you think about a movie, right, it's a bunch of still frames that you just process really fast, and that those come from in a variety of sources. Start from our senses. So there's the five senses, So those are a certain

moment of consciousness. And then the other one is that And I've heard this from Buddhism before about the idea of the mind or the thinking itself being a sort of a sixth sense that you watch. And then the piece that you put in that I thought was so interesting I'd never really thought about or understood or read is the idea of binding moments of consciousness. How these individual moments are happening in there, these these things that

are are coming up. And then there's another type of consciousness that is the piece that makes it look seamless. That's right, that's a piece that helps make it look seeing less. Yes, yes, And your point is in meditation, if people get to a deep enough level, they begin to see the frames in a sense, to use the movie analogy, Yes, they begin to be able to see the frames. And the other thing is that they developed the ability to see frames of different levels of complexity.

Your mind is taking in information uh in a very basic fundamental form, and then combining it so that by the time it comes to consciousness, it's been highly processed,

highly conceptualized. So the other thing you can do is you can train your mind to be able to actually see how the process takes place of building up a meaningful perception from many disc eat bits of information that are arriving through different senses and coming from stored information from past experience, and so on and so forth, even

combining emotion with intellectual information. The pictures in the book are really great for this because they sort of show moment by moment consciousness and it really lays out what meditation can be like, where you know, it's bird bird meditation,

object meditation, object headache, bird bird meditation. But the idea of the non perceiving moments of consciousness was a real eye opener for me, because what you're basically saying is that there are moments where we're not really perceiving anything. It's the dullness. It's you know, you're not asleep, but

your brain is not doing anything. And when I heard that, it a helped me understand why I got so sleepy when I meditated and some of the challenges, but it also just made me realize, moment to moment, day to day, that that is there at at a level that I had not seen or understood, and it was a really helpful way for me to think about it and you talk in the book a couple of points about the goal of concentration and you know, mindfulness or of aposta

together is to increase the total power of our cognitive abilities or of our of our consciousness, right. And so one of the ways that that happens is we fill in more of those non perceiving moments. And you made the example of the really heightened states of consciousness where, for example, of somebody's in great danger, they say that everything slowed down, and they saw every little thing, and they were aware of every moment everything that happened. And

and that's what this is. In that moment, you have essentially no non perceiving moments of consciousness or or very few, that's right. And another example of that, of course, is the zone that athletes, you know, professional athletes that the top people talk about, you know, uh entering into the zone. The same thing happens with them, yep, sort allows them to perform at the level that they do. So the next level of detail that you go to, and these

are kind of different chapters. The next one is sort of we've gone from the moments of consciousness model to more of the mind system model and how the mind works and this ends in a really fascinating place. So that's why we're going to take the time to go through it, because I think where it ends is a real eye opener um. I'm going to lay out the basic pieces of it, allow you to then add a little commentary, and then we'll kind of move through it.

But basically, we all know we've got a conscious and an unconscious mind, right, So there's there's that piece, and then you break up the unconscious mind into a couple of major parts. One is the sensor mind, the other is the discriminating mind. The sensory mind is as you would say, it's the it's the part of our mind that perceives what's coming in through our senses, and it actually does a variety of things to the raw signal.

And I don't think we've got enough time to go into all that, but it's basically going through and processing what comes in through our senses. And then there's the discriminating submind, which is the one that's doing the more cognitive thinking, feeling type of analysis. Am I on target so far? Right? One? And then ultimately, what what you get to, and this is the part that gets so fascinating is that we've got all these sub minds that are all doing these different things. And again, this is

a model. This isn't like you've got, you know, a hundred little teeny minds in your brain. Right. It's the model of how the processing works. But the fascinating part to me is where you describe how these subminds are in essence, competing for conscious attention. And the one that is deemed most relevant is what actually pops up into consciousness.

And this is fascinating because if you've meditated, which a lot you know, I'm sure a lot a lot of people on the show are one of the real initial things that we get from meditation if we follow it the right way, is that I'm not controlling these thoughts. There is no conscious me. Whatever I think of is the conscious me is not deciding to think about this or to think about that. All of a sudden, I'm thinking about this, and then next thing I know, I'm

thinking about that. And and so your model of these various subminds projecting these things into consciousness is really fascinating. Yes, it is, and it helps so much to understand what's going on. 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 here. Right. That's a extends the every dimension of our lives, and we can say reflections of it and so much of our our behavior. What we absolutely love is when we are able to enter into that wonderful state of clarity where we no longer have these different parts of our mind competing with

each other. And whether it takes the form of just being totally present standing on the beach watching a sunset and just the fullness, the wonderfulness of the of the experience, or if we're engaged in a specific task and we enter into that flow state where we're just everything is going perfectly and there's not these other parts of our mind interrupting the process, making us lose that flow and have to recapture it and so forth. What this leads to is the idea that the conscious mind is not

the course of its content. It's actually a space or a place that the various unconscious sub minds project into. And you go one step beyond that, and this is an area that I'd love to talk a little bit more, because you say that the conscious mind isn't really doing anything. It's not like it's projecting it into consciousness, and then there is one particular mind that is there that says, Okay,

this is what I'm going to do with that. You're saying that these things all project into consciousness, the most important ones, and they're vying for that, and that they almost use an analogy of a boardroom, right, and and the consciousness being sort of the boardroom or the power point presentation that people are looking at in the boardroom, and the various people in there that are going to vote.

Are these subminds. There isn't one master. And that's a fascinating idea because we're so used to thinking of I do X, I do Y, and so that statement that the conscious mind doesn't do anything is really a challenging one. And what I wanted to ask you was if it's the various subminds that are doing this process. You talk a lot about intention, you know how setting intentions is the way that we sort of train our sub minds, and we're gonna talk about that more in the meditation section.

But if setting intention is the way that you train the subminds. What is setting the intention? Who? Where? What? Where? Where is that something is making a priority judgment that I want to intend to do X. Yes. Well, here, if we go back to the moments of consciousness model, every moment of consciousness has an intention. Every one of these subminds which is producing, uh, some aspect of our

experience that it wants to project into consciousness, has an intention. Now, when we tell the story of what happens over a given period of time, what we're really doing is describing what has happened as a result of the interaction of these different subminds, each with its own intention and UH.

When we when we have that feeling, that clear feeling of well, I intend to do such and such or past tense, I intended to do such and such, what we're really doing is saying enough of these subminds came into agreement and shared an intention. It was the one that was ultimately expressed as a part of our conscious experience. So this is what your intention is or my intention when I have the subjective experience of forming an intention

to do such and such. It began with different subminds with different intentions and What became my intention was when enough of those shared the same in interest him that it determined what took place, and the others kind of got pushed to the background. This at first glance sounds crazy or it's revolutionary to think that they're that the conscious mind isn't the decider. Right. We talked about executive function.

That's the great human endowment, right, is that we've got this prefrontal cortex that can make good decisions and recognizing that that's more of a committee than it is a person. But the truth is this, everything you're saying, a besides being backed up by a bunch of meditators for thousands of years, aligns completely with what a lot of the newer neuroscience is saying. Also, you know, we are a

collection of mind processes. So I think that's a really amazing idea, and I think what that leads to then is we all would say, but wait a minute, there's a very clear me here that's doing this stuff. Right, there's a that's me. And what you're saying, and you're not alone in saying this, is that there's a narrating mind. We've talked about these other sub minds, ones that process

the sound that's coming in ones that are discriminating. Again, we can't go into everything that's in your in the model, but one of the sub minds is a narrating mind, and that narrating mind is the one that ties all this stuff together and makes it seem as if there is one thing that is making these decisions. Yes, that's right. In order to make sense of our experience as it unfolds over time, we need to link all these individual experiences UH together in a meaningful way. We need to

create the story of who we are UH. And we do that at many different levels over the period of a few minutes while we're performing a particular task. UH. There are a lot of different things that arise in consciousness during that and then needs to be put together into a continuous story so that quote, we know what we are doing and we can stay on track and

complete the task. But there's also the all of the different you know, the all of the different experiences that I've had in the in the course of a day or a week or a month. In order two give those meaning and power and utility in the future, they need to be linked together to create to create a meaningful story of me. And as a matter of fact, this is what your whole life is. Uh, And it's the narrating mind that does that. It kind of does that on a continuous basis, creating the story of you,

you know, step by step as it occurs. What happens though, depending on how deep we want to go into this um, but at at the level that everybody can can relate to, how do you take a sequence of events and make make sense of it? Every story, to make any sense at all, needs to have a narrative center of gravity the links everything together. And that's what the sense of I name mine does. That's that's the purpose it serves. And then the rest of it consists of taking those

experiences and collecting them into a variety of objects. You take my teacup for example, I look at one side of it, it's got another side that I can't see, and I have no direct experience. So what needs to happen is that, Uh, all kinds of information has to be gathered together about these things that we're experiencing. We experienced them in different ways moment to moment, so that what the narrating mind does is object so we have

the experience. Now I the narrative center of gravity and this number of objects or people or whatever it is, each of which has its own discrete identity that I'm interacting with, and now it can create the story of that interaction. And I was going to say, what is so amazing about this, although disorienting, right, it is a disorienting concept, is that you know what we've talked on the show multiple times, we've had guests on We've we've covered the Buddhist idea of not self or we aren't

the self we think we are. And this is the clearest description of that that I've ever found, because that self that seems so real is the narrating mind. And the idea that there's not a self again doesn't mean that there's nothing here, right, It's this idea that there

isn't this one overriding governing thing that is me. I am a collection of all of these different processes, and and that's what I find to be the The end result of understanding that mind system model is it gives me a way to think about and discuss the the not self. And that's not all there is to it.

I know there are deeper levels of insight that come but it's a place to start to because I think the experience of of not self is a completely different thing, right, and you can't have it, so you have it, But understanding what people mean when they say that to some extent is so helpful. And that's what I love about this model, that that is one of its greatest virtues is it makes intellectual sense of something that otherwise is a very rarefied experience that that up to this point

in time, not too many people have had. I do want to point out something, though, and that is that the narrating mind, in doing, in performing its function, is what generates the the the eye, and the world of objects that we perceive. And it does that out of necessity. But it's a relatively simple functional component of our minds. It's just assembling information and it's the eye other construct

that allows it to do this. Really, where the the notion of self comes um is the rest of the discriminating mind here's this story and takes it as an accurate description of reality. So the funny thing is now all these different subminds, none of which is the self, but in different combinations at different times, constitute what gets labeled the self have come to believe that there is

a self. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, that's that's fascinating. Yeah, and that's what what changes with the realization of not self or no self is that all of those different parts of the discriminating mind that are the origins of the totality of your perception and behavior as you navigate through the world, they're all operating on this assumption that there is a self and there's a world consisting of separate,

discrete objects. And then they further take the narrative and add to it this third component that well, when I'm happy or when I suffer, it's because of the interaction between the self and this other. And so there's this fiction that we lived in and the notion of self. I mean, you can't have a self without another right, and so there's a boundary says that here's where self ends and here's where other begins. That boundary becomes the war zone, and this is where all of our suffering arises.

So here you have a mind mechanism that's serving extremely valuable important the narrator, the narrating mind that is allowing us to function and navigate through the world and the rest of the mind, each individual part of it developing an assumption that that view of the world it's being described is an accurate view of the world, and then

out of that arises all of our problems. It's fascinating. Well, I think this is a great place to wrap up part one of the podcast, so listeners, you'll have to wait till next week, but uh chu, lad Us and I will keep talking here in a moment. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.