Draft:John Yates (Culadasa)

John Yates is a former professor of neuroscience, a teacher of Buddhist meditation under the name Upasaka Culadasa, and a proprietor with his wife of a well-known bed and breakfast, Cochise Stronghold. Richard Boyle has enumerated him among four people with a relevant scientific background helpful to him who have experienced awakening.

Academic career

John Yates received a PhD from the University of Manitoba and went on to do post-doctoral work at the University of Calgary. He stopped his post-doctoral work, claiming ethical concerns to do with animal experimentation, and went on to teach neuroscience and physiology at the University of British Columbia.

A physician's guide to therapeutic massage

John Yates authored A physician's guide to therapeutic massage (2004), a work that provides both a practice-oriented guide to the benefits of massage covering effleurage, petrissage, stroking, frictions, vibrations, tapotment, rocking and shaking, and a survey of the evidence for its efficacy. Sedergreen (2000) says of the field that "Objective evidence in the form of controlled studies on the effects and outcomes of massage therapy is virtually non-existent... The very nature of the treatment precludes the possibility of any form of blinded study", appealing to the survey of Yates in reaching this conclusion but going on to cite Yates: "any attempt to separate muscle relaxation from the psychological effects of massage…is probably meaningless…" and "pleasant sensations elicited by massage together with the psychological response to being touched in a caring way must be expected to directly impact on the emotional status of the patient." Despite his negative assessment of high quality evidence for the efficacy of massage as a therapy, the book can be regarded as upbeat about its value as a therapy.

Meditation teacher

Culadasa is a popular teacher of meditation, who left academia to pursue a fulltime career as a meditation teacher, and became a founder of the Dharma Treasure Buddhist Sangha in Tucson, Arizona, and author of the book The Mind Illuminated (2015) which attempts to inform traditional Buddhist meditation practices with modern neuroscientific concepts.

Lineage

Culadasa was taught Mahasi Sayadaw's style of Vipassana by Kema Ananda and Samatha Vipassana by Jotidhamma Bhikkhu. Kema Ananda (formerly Eric James Bell) was taught by Namgyal Rinpoche.

The Mind Illuminated

Perhaps Culadasa's highest accomplishment as a teacher of meditation is authoring, with two of his students, a 504-page book (Culadasa et al. 2015a) that aims to provide a complete guide to meditation from the most elementary basics to achievement of samatha, which he defines as tranquility arising from complete unification of mind. The book organises the practice into ten stages, related to but in several respects distinct from a classic nine level account of progress in meditation. A distinctive feature of the work is his appeal to a distinction coming from neuroscience between attention and peripheral awareness, which has some connection to dual process theory, which informs every stage of the programme of practice he outlines. Building on this, he defines mindfulness to be "the optimal interaction between attention and peripheral awareness", where he distinguishes attention and peripheral awareness as two distinct modes in which one may be conscious of things.

Another theme in his work is is view that the mind is a unique phenomenon for study, since we can study it as an object in psychology, but meditation offers a clear and detailed method for understanding the mind from the inside, as it were.

Finally, the most substantial contribution of the work from a theoretical view is his recasting of three classical Buddhist accounts of the mind into accessible, modern and psychologically informed terms. These models are the moments of consciousness model, the mind systems model, and the submind-interaction theory.

In her review of the book, Claire Thompson writes "The book both helps us master deep states of insight and also allows us to improve our lives, as we live and act from a greater understanding of ourselves and the way our minds work." On his extensive review on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander finds the claim, even from the viewpoint of a skeptical outsider who has only dabbled with meditation, that Culadasa's distinction between attention and awareness appears to be both very relevant for meditation practice and not made well by anyone else; he pays particular attention to the three models of mind and is struck by the parallel between Culadasa's explanation of consciousness from the classical subminds account the global workspace theory of Bernard Baars.

Additionally, the book has seen a generally positive reception among influential teachers of meditation, such as Shinzen Young, Daniel Ingram and Sharon Salzberg, and an enthusiastic reception among many participants on online meditation fora.

Discussions with Daniel Ingram

While the teachings of the work have generally been accepted as sound, there has been controversy on particular points. VICE reported on the possibility of what is known as a Dark Night experience, and cited the case of an pseudonymous David, who had suffered such an experience: he had read Culadasa's work, then Ingram's, then began a serious meditation practice, and that led to first becoming withdrawn followed by a permeating existential dread.

Their respective viewpoints appeared to differ widely on this: Ingram maintains such experiences are common and devotes considerable energy to helping serious practitioners, who he claims may never really recover from them, while Culadasa maintains that they are rare if a wise approach to practice is followed, and even when they do occur, cultivation of samatha can quieten them so they do not reoccur. But Ingram has later asserted "Here again, we are on very similar pages, in fact to such a degree that I am surprised that there is any real underlying controversy, and wondering if this debate is much more subtle but seeming by the power of language to be more like a dramatic conflict. We might disagree on who “someone so predisposed” is, but regarding the effect, we seem aligned in my reading of what he is saying." In the discussion, Ingram frequently referenced the neuroscientific work on meditation safety of Willoughby Britton..

Bibliography

• J. Yates (2004). A physician's guide to therapeutic massage (3 ed.). Toronto: Curties-Overzet. ISBN 978-0968525647.
• Culadasa with Matthew Immergut and Jeremy Graves (2015a). The Mind Illuminated. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House. ISBN 978-1781808207.
• Culadasa and Matthew Immergut (2015b). Attention, awareness and how to meditate successfully. Elephant Journal.

References

Category:living people