Focuses on direct，lived experience，which the author claims gives the mind a certain depth unplumbed by current cognitive science. Using language analogous to the Madhyamaka Buddhist injunction to avoid the extremes of nihilism and reification，the author encourages us to avoid the 2 extremes of "neuro-reductionism" and "ineffability" by cultivating an explicit，"mutual determination" between scientific analysis and experience. The author observes that human experience commonly is examined in spiritual traditions, but that cognitive science has tended to interest itself in the cognitive faculties associated with ordinary，unexamined life. The author has developed a research program dubbed "neurophenomenology," an experiential neuroscience informed by a methodology that avoids reducing experience to neural accounts. This program considers the relationship between external，scientific accounts of experience deriving from cognitive science and first-person，i.e.，phenomenological，accounts deriving from lived experience. Varela specifically asks us to consider how these 2 domains of observation and description mutually constrain，or co-determine，one another.
