Hi, friends. Thanks for joining. This is Josh. And welcome. Just got back from teaching retreat upstate. A lot of fun at Omega Institute. It is kind of crazy

the teaching a retreat and then coming back

and then immediately giving a talk

after immediately also going through a day of counseling.

But we'll see how it goes. So just a couple of messages.

Kathy's doing her gathering at Garrison. That's June 26 to 28th. And finally, if you would like to reach me for any questions about the work I do, the

counseling and all that, that's DPX, NYC at Gmail.

And everything I do, I do without charging anyone. It's all provided based on donations.

So if you do get anything from the talks, the Benmo is Dharma Punts with an XNYC and the PayPal and everything is on the website,

DharmaPunks with an XNYC.com.

Tonight, I'm going to talk about play and spiritual practice, imagination and spiritual practice, and why it's so vital

and how we can go about incorporating it into our spiritual life. So just to review very briefly

things that we've talked about frequently of late, our brains are not passive receivers of the sights and sounds of the world.

Rather than waiting for images and sounds from the world to arrive, our brains essentially create a simulation in advance,

a kind of a best guess about what's out there based on what we've experienced in the past.

Rather than we don't rebuild reality from scratch every time we walk into a new room or find

ourselves in a new situation, that would exhaust all of our brain's resources almost immediately.

We would rarely, if ever, be awake because constructing reality from scratch

is an extremely energetically expensive. And so it makes sense that the brain saves so much metabolic resources and also makes it

easier for us to move through the world by creating in advance the things we see here feel,

sense, and then simply using little snippets of the world outside to correct

these models. So the brain basically decides, I've been in this situation before, I know basically

...