All right, so kind of the theme I was talking about earlier was that thought doesn't play the central role in our life. the way it appears.

I like to describe it in terms of the way it appears.

I like to describe it in terms of the pre- Galileo perspective, which was essentially the idea that everything in the universe revolved around the earth.

And when Copernicus and Galileo essentially decentralized the order of the universe,

it was very frightening for people.

The idea that everything doesn't revolve around us that in fact the Earth is just

another planet in a universe of planets that we're not at the epicenter of all experience at first was

greeted with a great degree of resistance to say the least and a great degree of anger the idea that human beings were not essentially put in the absolute center of the universe

and that everything revolves around us, even though, of course, it seems that way. If we didn't investigate experience very closely, it would certainly look to us as if the sun is revolving around us and that all the stars and that we're absolutely in the center.

It takes actually some close investigation to find out in fact that we're not at the center of the

universe and so the Buddha was pretty much the first major thinker that essentially

decentralized the mind and proposed that the conscious thinking mind is not in fact the

epicenter of our actions, the things we do, but actually it's something that comes up very, very late and has a very different

role than it appears, much like the Earth appears to be in the center of everything.

Consciousness or conscious thought feels as if it's organizing our actions.

It feels and it seems as if I think something and then I do it.

It seems as if that the thing that's giving my life a common thread and me a common consistent identity is my thinking.

The words, the inner chatter, the self-narration that goes on in my mind.

The Buddha actually came around in 2,500 years ago, and one of his core teachings was that, in fact,

well before thought arrives in the equation, there are what he called feelings and emotional states that arise and create impulses that

essentially determine much of our actions. He had words for them like Anoussaias and Vaguna and stuff like that. I'm not going to go into the

poly term. But in his chain of causation thought arrived very very late as a kind of a more than anything else an explanatory quality than actually something that always was choosing guiding our actions in

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