Processes of avoiding the world within in order to try to regulate your behavior, or becoming entangled in your thoughts interfering with your ability to take advantage of what's around you, or losing contact with your values for fear that you'll know more about the places where you hurt - those kinds of processes are just normal psychological processes. And if you take the mode of mind that works great in 95 percent of your life and apply it within, it then implodes. It starts creating barriers, and that's true at work, it's true in our culture, true in our politics.

There is a middle path between indulgence and suppression, but the culture has overwhelmed that in the cacophony that has been created in the modern world and the commercial encouragement of avoidance and indulgence on the one hand, or suppression and "just do it," treating yourself as an object on the other. We've got to find a way that's more compassionate, softer, that allows us to move forward towards the kind of lives that we really want to live.

Let's take something like antidepressant medications. There's decent science saying it has an effect, but it's shockingly small after you control for penetration of the blind, people knowing that they're getting the active pills versus sugar pills, if you use an active control. It's probably only a few points. But it's a multi, multibillion-dollar industry. And by the way, has huge side effects. 40 percent of the people taking them have significant sexual side effects. And that's just one. A single antidepressant medication can be worth a billion dollars to a company.

If you aren't willing to have it, you will.

Our children are exposed to 10, 20, 30 times the number of words that our great-grandfathers were exposed to. We're exposed in a single day or two to more horror on our Internet Web pages than our great-grandfathers were exposed to in decades of living. We have not created modern minds for that modern world. Science and technology has just dumped it on us. And I think people yearn for it. I think you see it in what's popular. Why are people wanting to learn about meditation and talking about a purpose-driven life? It's because they know more is needed in the modern world.

I think we're coming into a time where it has to do with how you stand in relationship to your own world within and in relationship to those around you in the world without. And I believe these are the things that we need to put into our schools, education, into our psychotherapy and into our culture more, finding a way to not be so harsh and judgmental, so objectifying and dehumanizing, constantly focused within and trying to get these difficult thoughts and feelings to go away.

In Scandinavia probably the most worker-supportive part of the planet, they have the highest rate of chronic pain and worker-related disability. So any kind of pain and difficulty is so much unwelcome that if you say that you're in pain, we're going to even pay you full salary to quit work because you're burned out, inside that what you're going to create is gigantic amounts of chronic pain syndrome. Scandinavians spend 15 percent of their gross national product on disability. 50 percent of the public health nurses are on disability. And that's where we're headed in the U.S. too.