Hi, thank you so much for joining. I'm Josh. I hope your early January has been going well.

And if you're around in the first Sunday of February,

I hope you'll consider joining us at our half day gathering.

It's always nice to connect in person, building community and connections.

We'll have a link on Darmopunks, NYC, and also at Santa Yoga, where the Sunday gatherings take place.

And if you'd like to support my work,

everything I do is a Buddhist pastor entirely

by donation only, there's no charge for access to my talks and the

canceling and everything is done by donation so the PayPal is on the

darmapunks website the Venmo is darmapunks with an

ex-nyc and the Patreon you can find by just going to Patreon and Darma Punks NYC.

So thanks for your consideration on helping me continue

on this journey of being a Buddhist pastor in the time of hyper capitalism. So tonight, putting all that aside,

we're going to be talking about the inside experience, the aha moment, where our understanding of the world is transformed.

We'll also be talking about how we get a sense of what reality is and what shakes up that sense of reality.

And I'm going to be basing this talk on the work of a bunch of different cognitive neuroscientists.

People, people like Donald Hoffman, Ruben Laconin, Helene Slagder, Lawrence Barcelot, Lars Muekley.

There's a whole bunch of young exciting neuroscientists that are paving the way for a better understanding how the brain creates our sense of reality and

we're going to see that Buddhist insights have some wonderful overlapping insights that correspond.

Best question to ask at the start of this talk

is how do our brains do their job of helping us adapt to our environment and that's a pretty profound question

because what most of us don't realize is that our brains are essentially encased in an entirely dark box which we call a

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