When you hear the word d, it refers to the teachings of the Buddha.

If it's got a lowercase day, D in Buddhism it refers to all of the phenomena

we're surrounded by in life before our minds get a hold of it and begin

to embellish, amplify, filter, cut-up change, highlight, in essence, play around with perceptions in a way to say to awareness and attention, hey, this stuff that's going on right

now is pretty important.

I should pay attention.

Or this stuff is not very important I shouldn't pay attention.

You see the mind is not particularly wired to represent the world as it is.

All brains are set up to

help a species survive, period, end of sentence.

All species in every way imaginable, distort reality, filter reality.

Just to give two obvious examples which won't really play in tonight, but you may or may not be aware that there is really no such thing as color or sound in the world.

Color is what's created by your eyes when light bounces off a surface and then hits the rods and combs in your iris,

but most species don't see colors and species that do see colors see entirely

different colors than we do. There's no right or color is something that brains add to the world.

Likewise, when a tree falls in the forest

that a Buddhist gem, it doesn't actually create a sound. What does it do? It creates vibrations. Those

vibrations reach your ears and your ears transform it or transcribe it into a sound. That's what music is, just vibrations, moving air.

Pretty dry stuff, right? So I'll move on from this to where it's really important, which

are putting aside the tricky issue of

qualia and just getting to the gist of this talk. We have all these sensations coming in and then the mind is first trying to make sense of them through the occipital, the temporal loves, the parietal loves, which are essentially going through the information

and adding, creating the virtual reality that we each live in.

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