The inspiration for this book began in the late seventies when Francisco Varela was teaching at the summer Science Program of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa Institute tried to create an intellectual space for a dialogue between the cognitive sciences and the Buddhist traditions of meditative psychology and philosophy by offering a variety of courses and by gathering teachers and students for discussion in an infonnal atmosphere. In this enterprise and in the ideas that grew from it, the contributions of Newcomb Greenleaf, Robin Kornman, Jeremy Hayward, Michael Moennan, Joseph Goguen, and Charlotte Linde were invaluable. In 1979, the Alfred P. Sioan Foundation funded what was probably the very first conference on Contrasting Perspectives on Cognition: Buddhism and the Cognitive Sciences. This conference, which gathered scholars from various universities in North America and Buddhist scholars from many schools and traditions, was so unsuccessful in establishing a genuine dialogue that we learned a great deal about how not to go about the exploration.
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