the early part of the 20th century.)On my return to the United States I began to write about this systemin my first book, The Meditative Mind, in a textbook on theories of personality, and in some obscure journalsand to do research on meditation as an antidote to stress reactivity (for my dissertation). At the time, as I recall, there was little interest among my professional colleagues. However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years. I experimented with many different varieties of meditation (that was the main topic of my book) and over the years settled into a Buddhist method called mindfulness, and most recently I have been working with Tibetan teachers. Given the recent findings (summarized in Destructive Emotions) that seem to indicate a positive neuroplasticityfor example, shifts to a more positive daily mood rangeI've tried to make more time for it.It seems that one of the biggest gaps that must be crossed between the Eastern and Western approaches to the mind is that the scientific method requires an objective third-person approach, whereas Buddhist practice is clearly a subjective first-person phenomenon. How can these differences be resolved? Do you think that the answer lies in the creation of a new approach, a scientific revolution?When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiencesthe first personwith what the measurements showthe third person. The late Francisco Varela, with colleagues like Evan Thompson at York University, proposed an integration, called "neurophenomenology," which elegantly ties together first-person experience, a second person trained as an interlocutor, and the standard third person, such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). Varela has a brief presentation of this method in my book Destructive Emotions. He points out the need for highly trained observers of the mind and proposes that seasoned meditation practitioners can play this role.What do you think is behind the recent popularity of Buddhist meditation techniques in psychotherapy? I'm guessing you think that this is more than just a passing fad.There has been on-again-off-again interest in the therapeutic uses of meditation for the last three decadessince a small circle of psychotherapists first became aware of (and themselves tried) meditation practice. But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapistsfar greater interest than ever before. For example, my wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman, has written a book on how to integrate mindfulness with cognitive therapy , which became a New York Times best-seller; she regularly gets invitations to teach the integration of these methods to therapists. Much of this has been driven by recent findings on the successful application of mindfulness meditation in conjunction with cognitive therapynotably, the research of Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA, who had success with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and of John Teasdale at Cambridge University, who reports a drop of 50 percent in the relapse rate among severely, chronically depressed patients.Buddhism has the notion of "mental afflictions," which are states of mind that,