Tonight's going to be about the relationship between the part of the mind called the, we might

refer to as the interpreter and another part which is the emotional part and how they can sometimes get into conflict with each other.

The role of the emotional brain

is much, much more important than we normally suspect.

Because the left hemisphere creates this interpreter,

this inner narration of our life, and we rely on it to make sense of our experience.

We have the story that we're telling about our day, about our life's journey and about the way people treat us, stories going on.

Without them, the flood of experience, all of the events of our lives, all of the sensations, the sheer volume of

events would not make sense if we didn't have this inner story that sort of selects what we believe is important and

cobbles it all together into a narrative.

This is who I am.

This is what I want to do. This is where I'm going.

This inner chatter wants us to believe that it's creating all of our actions. It's behind, it's making the decisions, it's what's motivating everything.

But as the Buddha proposed in his chain of causation, actually thought arises very, very late after most of our actions and impulses have already been activated or triggered by unconscious processes.

The Buddha noted that well before we have any thought, we already have physical arousal and emotional cravings that occur beforehand and that

thought is an add-on.

Gazaniga says about thought as the interpreter,

it works on the fly furiously reconstructing what we've done, creating reasons why we've acted,

and inserting motives and intentions based on its limited flawed information.

In other words, we're very often acting on impulses. So we want to believe

that our thoughts are controlling, but actually our thoughts are simply most of the time, unless we really, really,

intervene and pause, stop the flow of reactive impulses.

...