We humans are smart. We have been asking good questions about human nature, about the experience of life, about consciousness, for many thousands of years. In all that time we've discovered a lot.

• Ancient practices of meditation offer refined methods for quieting the mind and fostering an experience of pure being.

• Cognitive science has revealed patterns of belief and thought involved in some forms of suffering.

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy applies specific techniques engaging thought, belief, and behavior with some success in relieving certain kinds of inner challenges.

• Neuroscience has broken many barriers to our understanding of the brain and its activity as it parallels conscious experience.

• Psychopharmacology has pursued hundreds of chemical interventions in the attempt to relieve suffering and promote well-being.

• Sociology has uncovered ways in which the collective influences the individual, and also forces joining individuals to create emergent societal patterns.

• Psychotherapy has refined the supportive relationship with an emphasis on understanding and healing, while life coaching has done similarly with a focus on action and accountability.

• Specific teachings such as The Work of Byron Katie, focusing, NLP, and others have brought various insights and approaches to the task of living more fully.

But we're not smart enough. Yet. Despite all our efforts, however, we are still at a loss as to how to relieve human suffering, whether for an individual or the planet as a whole.

• More people than ever are suffering from depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

• Our best efforts for individuals often amount to using drugs of questionable efficacy which shut down the brain's capacity for feeling and trigger unhealthy side effects.

• The level of inequality, polarization and conflict seems to be escalating in our communities and internationally.

• Our best response to those whose pain is great enough to motivate harm to others is to shut them away, and our prisons are bursting with millions.

In short, we still can't get along, and we are still supremely inept at relieving suffering.

So what's the missing piece?

You can neatly group the fields of study and application listed above into four categories: thought, behavior, relationship, and physiology. But a fifth category remains largely unexamined. The one element of conscious life we have never adequately investigated is feeling.

It's no wonder. How do you measure the actual experience of love? How do you examine the inner experience of curiosity? How do analyze the tangible experience of loneliness?

Of course we can measure heart rate, galvanic skin response and other physiological indicators of emotional arousal. And we can study patterns of expression and behavior. But these don't tell us much about the actual, inner experience of feeling. So far, noone has brought rigorous, scientific observation into this inner world. The problem has been so intractable that most researchers simply lump together physiological emotion and consciousness of feeling, making no distinction between the two.

Now it is time to close the gap. I've done enough to get the ball rolling, developing a clear model of the feeling mind and how to work with it. Now it's up to all of us to apply these new discoveries to making our world a better place.