Hi, thanks for joining. Welcome. And if you'd like to support your friendly local

Buddhist pastor, the Venmo's Darmapunks, NYC, the other ways are on the website as well, and everything I do is supported by your

donation. I don't charge for anything, so it's listener,

practitioner supported.

So tonight, tonight we're going to be talking

about acceptance versus delusion or fantasy in relationships.

I hope that this will be of some interest.

So without further ado,

I'd like to start out in what might seem like a take a strange angle.

For much of human history, we assume that thought was

what directed behavior. As the card said I think therefore I am there was there's this

idea that thought is the director of the mind of the behavior that it's kind of the center of the mental universe

and all of this began to crumble roughly the first I would argue big chink in the wall was in the

90s by the American psychologist William James

who noted that emotional reactions and behaviors aren't guided by thoughts at all, but are the results of fast, unconscious

responses to stimuli that we're very often are initiated before there's any thought at all. In other words,

he noted that behavioral actions quite often precede thought.

A few years later, Freud noted that unconscious drives

such as aggression and drives for pleasure, frequently overwhelmed conscious ego control, and we act out neurotically.

So once again, this is about 120 years ago,

this preliminary recognition that thought is not in many ways the director of behavior.

But as time passed, psychology and neuroscience began to further chip away at the idea that thought plays a

...