There are ways in which certain emotions get unnecessarily amplified. Prejudice, anger, jealousy and fear, to name a few. The more you dwell on associating these with specific people/events/situations, the more they seem to gain an upper hand; and only through a sudden wakeup call, such as an incident or a counter-experience are we jolted into awareness and realize how conceited or mistaken we might have been. A re-patterning of the mind, every once a while is absolutely necessary. Talking of patterns and networks of patterns in the mind and concentration, which, I was reading in Edward de Bono's book 'I Am Right, You Are Wrong' - one topic struck me; in one chapter he talks of attuning the mind to the current task, which tends to make completing or wading through it much more effective. For example, he says when you give the mind the signal 'look for people wearing red caps only, in the stadium' - the action of finding such specimens becomes much more easy, almost ...