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Tonight teaching about one of the more mysterious ideas of the Buddha that's clearly very important in the darma,

yet it was ill-defined in the suitas, the teachings.

What we do know is that during Nama Rupa, which is in the Buddhist

teachings, one of the earliest stages of human development, roughly equivalent to the attachment stage in contemporary psychology, which is just events shortly after birth that occur in interactions between the child and a caregiver,

there are core attributes of personality that are instilled and that shape not only the basic

tendencies proclivities of our personality but also help shape the very way we perceive the world.

And in this phase of development, the Buddha said that one of the qualities or mental attributes that are ingrained

is what he called sonna, and sona roughly translates to the perceptions we have of the world and there's it's

very clear from the Buddhist teachings that these perceptions are largely the in not a what you would say accurate representation by any means that we don't

see the world we see our perceptions of the world and our perceptions are

shaped by our family systems, the early

caregiving experiences, cultural biases, and that it significantly distorts everything we experience.

And one of the Suitas known as the distortions of the mind,

the Buddha when he's defining perceptions. of the

distortions of the mind, the Buddha when he's defining perceptions, he says the mind distorts the worlds

with a wide variety of misperceptions.

...