Francisco Varela was a scientist and philosopher whose work connected cognition, bodily activity and lived experience. He was also a co-founder of the Mind & Life Institute.
His work is relevant to a question that appears throughout I AWAKE: what changes when understanding includes your participation, rather than treating you as a detached mind observing from outside?
The explanation isn’t the whole experience of doing it.
You can describe balance. Standing on one foot teaches something the description doesn’t supply on its own. Speaking a difficult sentence also includes posture, breath, timing and the person listening.
That doesn’t mean thinking is unimportant. It means the activity contributes something.
Varela belongs in this glossary as part of the background to enactive cognition and embodied cognition. His work isn’t evidence that every body-based practice has the same effects, nor a claim that he developed I AWAKE.
The connection is an interest in mind as involved in living, sensing and acting, not confined to an account we can give afterwards.
Mind & Life’s account of its founding conversations places Varela within the institute’s history and its conversations between contemplative traditions and science.
For the wider philosophical discussion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s Embodied Cognition introduces different approaches to cognition and embodiment rather than presenting them as one settled theory.