Welcome. I hope you're doing well. If you like the work that I do, if the class is of any value,

and you feel like supporting it, the Venmo is Dharma Punks with an XNYC and the PayPal and Patreon are on the website,

DharmaPunks with an X-NYC.com.

And yeah, I don't take any sponsoring or anything like that.

I'm just supported entirely by, in the Buddhist tradition, by the people who join the gatherings

and hopefully get something from the talks and counseling that I do.

So that's about it.

Tonight, we're going to be talking about how the past influences our present responses

to especially uncertain situations.

And we'll talk about the ways to shift the ramifications of our past

as it affects the present.

We like to think of memory as a recording of past events that we're consciously aware of.

So we think of a memory as something that we voluntarily recall about a past experience and that when we're done remembering it,

most of the time we can put it away. Sometimes traumatic memories are intrusive, of course,

or unpleasant memories where we feel we've done something embarrassing or we feel emotionally wounded might intrusively interrupt us in the day.

But this idea is that memories are conscious events that we're aware of.

But memory in our daily life is primarily used unconsciously as a way to prepare us in every situation as life unfolds. When we walk into, for example,

our local supermarket, and our brain doesn't wait for raw sensory light data to hit our retinal nerve and then to, you know, the cones in the retinal nerve,

and then be transformed into digital action potential, which crosses the optical nerve to the thalamus, which then goes to

the occipital region for object and situation recognition. Now, what our brains do is it loads memories, essentially, of our past visits to the

supermarket. What we experience, what we see on shelves, lighting, how our body moves, is a model

based on previous store visits.

...