Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Fruits of meditation

Finally watched Pixar's "Inside Out," and loved it, as I knew I would. The Pixar folks are just really smart about every detail... but there's something interesting going on in this depiction of a new popular psychology. The five basic emotion model of the psychologist in question, Paul Ekman, has been in the news again recently, this time in reports that his "Atlas of Emotions" (whose characters and even colors you'll recognize from "Inside Out") was sponsored, and funded, by the Dalai Lama! We read that Dr. Ekman emphasized that the Atlas was not a scientific work intended for peer review while The Dalai Lama wants to keep religion out of it. But future historians may well point to this fivesome as a turning point of the buddhicization of American culture.