Hi there. Thanks for inviting me onto your computer for the next hour in change.

I'm Josh. Darmapunx NYC doing it in person the first Tuesday of February, Tuesday at 7 PM.

If you find these gatherings worthwhile and would like to support my work, which everything is done entirely by donation.

Benmo is Darma Punk's with an ex-NYC.

The rest of the links for PayPal and for Patreon

can be found on our website, which is NarmaPunks NYC.com.

So thanks for helping me survive as a Buddhist teacher who does everything entirely by

donation. Tonight I have a kind of info packed a talk that will require all of our brain cells to be firing all at once because there's a lot of information in it.

I'm going to jump right in and the talk is basically going to be

about how we go about perceiving the world around us, other people and ourselves.

We're also going to be talking a little bit about how we change those perceptions of our lives.

Our brains... of our brains

brains perceive the world via two distinct kind of processes and while they influence each other and they must work together,

they're very different in the way they go about constructing our sense of

subjective reality that we live in.

So one kind of process starts with a bunch of predictions or what we could call

guesses about what's happening around us in us with other people, just guesses, predictions.

And then it actually narrows down

to integrate actual info coming through our senses

from the outside world. This is what's called top-down processing. The brain

already has a sense or a belief about what's going on in the world and just

looks for some smatterings of or filters out most of the data

...