(Excuse me.) So the Buddha teaches that one can purify one's actions through repeated reflection. And one reason for this, of course, is that when you think about it, and think about if it's harming yourself or others, it might bring closer to conscious awareness, you know, that maybe what you're doing isn't a good thing to be doing, and it will change your motivation. But there's another thing here that is particularly interesting from the point of view of neuroscience that he talks about after an action has been carried out after you've done something, remembering it and reflecting on it can actually change the memory trace for that action, intention, and can change its influence on future experience and future actions and intentions. And I want to talk about how this is sort of fundamental to the way people think about memory now, particularly in the context of psychotherapy, and helping people overcome the effects of past experiences. But before I expand on that, I want to bring in a related Buddhist idea, which is that of the Alaya, and now this is not from the earliest Indian Buddhist tradition, it's an Indian Buddhist tradition from but it's from about 700 years later, after the time of the Buddha, from a school of Buddhism called Yoga Chara. And they introduced this somewhat more explicit way of thinking about karma, based on the idea of the Alaya consciousness. The word Alaya means store or storehouse. And it's a word that we're familiar with in the West because of the mountain range the Himalayas, that's part of the word that names that mountain range: "him" means snow, and the Himalayas are "where the snow is stored." But in the, in the yogacharya tradition, it's where the traces of past experience are stored in the mind. They call it the Alaya consciousness. To the best of my understanding, because they called everything consciousness. So, just like they call vision "eye consciousness." They call this memory storehouse the "alaya consciousness." So in its simplest forms, it's a place in the mind where traces of our past experiences are stored in a dormant or latent state. and they can reappear in present moment experience when conditions trigger them as to arise. And in the latent state the Yoga Charas call it the seeds, the karmic seeds in the Alaya. And when it showed up in the present, because it was triggered by something that was the ripening of the fruit of karma. Now, I gather that in later Mahayana traditions, the Alaya consciousness has other types of meanings and I'm honestly not very familiar with them. And I gather it's sometimes used to explain the mechanics of multiple lives. But I'm not talking about anything that goes that far, just the basic concept of a storehouse for the traces of our past experiences. The other thing that's a little different about the Yoga Chara view of the Alaya is that it doesn't focus exclusively or primarily on intentions, it focuses on all aspects of experience, which is much like the way neuroscientists would think about memory. And really, biologists in general are very happy with the concept of a storage system for latent information that can come back when needed, because this is basically what DNA is. It's our evolutionary karma. And we're all stuck, we all inherit a raft of it. And it's very active while we're growing as embryo and fetus. And many of our genes become latent, as when we're fully grown and developed, but they don't go away and they can be reactivated. And this happens all the time. You know, if the weather gets really cold, certain genes wake up, and they do things to help you generate warmth. If you make a transition from a sedentary lifestyle, to a lifestyle with a lot of exercise, certain genes turn on and there's they they deal with that, they cope with that extra demand. And I'm sure you know this, but that's good for you. This happens even with meditation practice, certain things get turned on when when one adopts a new regular practice, certain potentials that were latent, become activated. So this is a very agreeable concept to biologists. But for neuroscientists and psychiatrists and psychologists, the thing about memory and for our experiences of our life, especially our early life, and feelings, and beliefs, and things that happened to us, not just from our own intention, although that's very important, but sometimes things happen to us that have nothing to do with what we intended, and they affect us. And, and basically, neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity, of which memory is the sort of common sense expression of it. And I want to talk about how that's embodied. And I'm going to share my screen again.