Emotions

I've managed to make sort shift of all the "light" books I'd brought along on holiday, partially due to my broken hand which limits the physicality of this holiday so far. So I'm left with the "hard" books which take considerable effort in reading. But on the other hand they do reveal gems. One such a book which I've been meaning to tackle for a while is "Destructive emotions" a dialogue with the Dalai Lama narrated by Daniel Goleman. A fascinating insight from yesterday was "The first task Matthieu set himself was to address the gap between the Buddhist and English terms for emotions. ...The English word 'emotion' comes from the Latin root emovere - something that sets the mind in motion, whether toward harmful, neutral, or positive action.

In Buddhist terms, on the other hand, one would call emotion something that conditions the mind and makes it adopt a certain perspective or vision of things. ... he described a standard very different from that used in the west for marking an emotion as destructive: not just whether it results in obvious harm, but whether it causes a more subtle harm - distorting our perception of reality.

The only other antidote to this rather heavy going is "the easy way to learn Chinese Characters" - since its been a while since my last Chinese class I'm trying to get back into it again before my study begins in September.

Finally this afternoon we're in a town in a bar with wifi. So I've uploaded my one finger typing efforts for now and a few pictures and that will be that until civilization....

keep the comments flowing in the mean time.

And a question... how do I get around the video zoning thing on a mac? I order DVD's from all over and usually play them on my multi-system player at home. But i can only change the zone on the Mac 4x ....