So it won't come as a surprise for you to learn that for much of human history people

assumed that the sun revolved around the earth.

It's called geocentrism.

The idea that the earth is in the center

of all the universe, that everything revolves around us and that the stars and that the stars and the sun are in essence tributaries or caught in our vital orbit. And this view was very important to many spiritual doctrines.

Interestingly enough, what we are often not taught

is that pantheists like Aristarchists, 18 hundred years before the Prussian Nikolai Copernicus

stated that the appearance

that everything revolves around the earth was in fact quite incorrect.

And he was the first to propose what is known as the heliocentric view that the Earth is not the center of all things,

that it in fact orbits around the sun

and that the sun was one of many stars.

So why am I telling you this?

Well, all of us, like children who view the the Sun and believe it's something orbiting the Earth. It's a natural appearance. It's what seems to be. We all tend to locate

at the center of our experience our thinking mind. We tend to believe that our thoughts are what not only is

where the self is who we are, but that our thought is actually what is creating our actions.

It's very tempting to believe that before I do something, the

before I do something the instigation is oh maybe I should go and get something to eat and

that before that thought there wasn't any inclination

that the first thing that arose was that idea.

It's so tempting to believe that our thought is what is behind our actions and that our thought lies at the epicenter of our experience.

So the Buddha was a lonely figure in many ways, but none so more than he was the first major

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