The epicenter of the Buddha psychology is not the eightfold path or the four noble truths which you probably at some point or another heard of,

the absolute foundation of the Buddha's insights and the human mind and what causes suffering

was called the Paticha Samupata, you don't have to

translate it literally would be, paticha means dependent and

Samupata means the arising of experience.

So it literally means that mental experiences arise in a certain sequence.

Mental events happen in a very strict causal sequence. That's essentially what it purports. And for the purposes of tonight, I'm going to draw attention to one of the most surprising suppositions or foundations of this this inside which is that

thoughts emotions and behavior are all preceded by our gut feelings.

And what that means is that our gut feelings are far more influential over how we act than how we think or any

external circumstances.

We are beings that are driven by our feelings.

We act in accordance with how we feel, not how we think.

Now this is a very, very important observation and the implications are

wide ranging. I'm going to talk first a little bit about just introducing you to this observation and what the Buddha claims and

then we're going to unpack it a little bit in terms of what it means in terms of our own lives and how it could help us reduce stress, needless

stress in our lives and also open up our lives to embrace risks and challenges that we avoid out of fear.

So the Buddha's claim is first

that certain experiences, settings, people, places, things, certain experiences

activate very strong feelings. In the early language, these feelings had a wonderful word they were called

Vaidana and Vaidana literally means non-verbal essentially states of comfort and discomfort or no change or no feeling whatsoever.

So there's only three kinds of feelings in the Buddha's theory.

There's feelings of comfort, discomfort,

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