topic is

is essentially letting go of control little in life

and learning how to

put aside the issues, challenges, dramas that are unresolvable that we cannot fix. In early Buddhism the word Cheetana meant willpower or

control or volition, the things that, the mind's capability to plan, solve, figure out, and

then take action.

And of course, willpower in conjunction with the rational, abstract, logical faculties gives us human beings profound tools.

What we can do, courtesy of the circuits of the left hemisphere is we can with the left

lateral prefrontal we can and also broken Wernicke's regions we can represent the world as

represent the world as words and symbols and using that and the medial prefrontal we can work through logical ideas of how to

set goals, how to change certain situations in our life.

We can solve problems.

And we can use our narrative capabilities to keep track of how we're moving

towards our goals. So we might have a goal to go back to school, to leave a job, to move into a different area of the world to achieve something in the arts and we can of course visualize or create a

representation of that goal we can hold it in mind, and then we can, to a certain

degree in abstract thought, we can represent the different steps we'd have to take to move from where we are to that envisioned destination.

It's a faculty that is deeply celebrated in our culture.

We have movies, novels, unending narratives

about people who face seemingly insurmountable challenges and through cunning and through determination and most of all through inventiveness somehow managed to overcome the hindrances

and challenges of life.

Part of the quality of the left hemisphere

is that its fuel, its gasoline as it were, is dopamine,

...