Matthieu and Wolf: This book is coming to an end. It marks eight years of conversations that we are delighted to share with our readers. Motivated by curiosity and mutual friendship, we explored some essential questions concerning the nature of the human mind. It was our intention to combine our respective expertise and exploit two complementary sources of knowledge: the first-person perspective provided by introspection and contemplative practice, and the third-person perspective taken by the neurosciences. Of course, we were aware from the beginning that we would fall short of reaching any final answers to the profound questions that humanity has been discussing for thousands of years. However, we hope that we have at least arrived at a clearer identification of some commonalities, as well as some persisting gaps of knowledge. We wish to thank our readers for having been with us to this point.
We also wish to thank all those who accompanied us on this journey. Our publishers first: Ulla Unseld Berkewicz, Nicole Lattès, and Guillaume Allary, who gave us the freedom to carry on our conversation at our own pace, meeting off and on and maturing our ideas over eight years. This is rather unusual in a publishing world, where often the idea of a book that did not exist the day before suddenly becomes something that must be completed by an imminent deadline. We are immensely grateful to our publishers for their patience and support.
Our thanks go to all those who gave us hospitality during our various encounters—the Suhrkamp house in Frankfurt, where our formal discussions started; the mountain hermitages of Shechen Pema Ösel Ling, facing the majestic Himalayan ranges in Nepal, where we sojourned twice; and the beautiful jungle resort of Thanyamundra at Koh Sok in Thailand, where we enjoyed the hospitality of Klaus Hebben.
We thank Suhrkamp Verlag for transcribing our conversations that were held in English, which is not our mother tongue.
We are especially grateful to Janna White, who carefully and wisely edited the English manuscript and brought it to its final form. We are also grateful to the MIT Press team for carefully checking this volume and bringing it to publication in a beautiful way.
Many other friends and relatives accompanied us over the years. We thank them all from the heart.