So the second principle as we move on from the breath and body is as you might have guessed from the meditation's feelings, what the Buddha called Vegana and feelings are very very very important to the Buddha in one suit called the mula suit, the Buddha said that everything in life, all experience takes its shape, its basic emotional or its resonance, everything that we relate to takes its basic form in our feelings,

our gut feelings. In probably the singularly most important teaching of the Buddha known as the Patieta

Sanupada, which is the chain of suffering in life.

The Buddha said that before we have thoughts or emotions, we have gut feelings, which are just

basic body states that tell us whether we're comfortable and happy

with what's going on in any given moment or whether we are uncomfortable and want what we're experiencing to stop.

And then the third possibility is I don't care.

And when we're in the I don't care mode, where we don't really care about what's going on in the I don't care mode where we don't really care about what's going on in the world around us or what we're experiencing.

We generally then get lost in thought.

When we're in neutral feelings, we generally tend to say well nothing much importance going on

so I'm just going to drift away and think about myself and what other people think about me and all that fun stuff.

So, Vaydena or gut feelings,

I'm not gonna talk tonight about too many clinical studies.

If you're interested in the absolutely foundational

the important role that your gut feelings

are intuition plays and the decisions you make in life.

There's so many books I would recommend because I am after all a complete geek.

When I formed this group with Noah back in 2002 I wanted it almost to be called

Darma Geeks because that's what I am in addition to being a Darma pun, but darma punts won out.

So, but there are wonderful books.

One that's really fun to read is by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink,

which talks about the role that fast neural circuits known as intuition, play, and the decisions and choices we make.

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