The surging interest in meditation extended beyond the popular culture into classrooms and laboratories. As researchers published papers about meditation, universities offered courses about it and students signed up for them. By 1984 this virtuous cycle was sufficiently mature to lure Aldine, a publisher of textbooks, into releasing a fat anthology of the best papers published on the subject so far.

The editors were Deane H. Shapiro, Jr., a clinical psychologist, and Roger N. Walsh, a psychiatrist. Both were (and are) faculty members at the University of California.

The book contains sixty papers, most of them reprinted but some published there for the first time, plus an epilogue by the editors and a bibliography with over a thousand citations.

The papers represent a very broad range of methodologies. Some of them are pure hard science; others are discussions of ancient texts. Some are theoretical; others empirical. Some invent new conceptual frameworks; others elucidate ancient ones.

Approximately two-thirds of the papers fall into the categories of psychology or physiology. Some representative titles:

The rest of the volume covers a variety of topics whose diversity defies summarization. I'll mention a couple of papers that were particularly interesting to me.

One of the papers contains the clearest description and analysis I have ever seen of Mahamudra, an important form of Tibetan yoga. The paper, "Tibetan Yoga: A Model for the Levels of Concentrative Meditation," by Daniel P. Brown, attempts to construct a "cartography" or map for the stages through which a student moves.

An equally ambitious attempt to construct a cartography of meditative states is contained in "The Buddha on Meditation and State of Consciousness" by Daniel J. Goleman. (This paper was later incorporated in Goleman's well-known book The Varieties of Meditative Experience, also published as The Meditative Mind.) Goleman bases his map coordinates on a careful reading of the Vissudhimagga, a classical Theravada text.

Some of the book's most interesting papers are contained in a section on electroencephalography (EEG), the measurement of electrical signals from the head. Several classic papers on the alpha-blocking question are included, which present evidence that yogic (concentrative) meditation has different effects than Zen (insight) meditation.

I recommend this volume very highly for readers with an academic or intellectual interest in meditation. In fact, for such readers, I think the book is indispensable. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but you can probably find a copy on the Advanced Book Exchange. I bought a pristine copy there for $50.