Many claim that meditation is effective in the treatment of many ailments associated with stress and high blood pressure, and in the management of pain. While there are many popular books on meditation, few embrace the science as well as the art of meditation. In this volume, Shapiro and Walsh fill this need by assembling a complete collection of scholarly articles--Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives.

From an academic rather than a popular vantage, the volume takes the claims and counterclaims about meditation to a deeper analytical level by including studies from clinical psychology and psychiatry, neuroscience, psychophysiology, and biochemistry. Each selection is a contribution to the field, either as a classic of research, or by being methodologically elegant, heuristically interesting, or creative. Original articles cover such topics as the effects of meditation in the treatment of stress, hypertension, and addictions; the comparison of meditation with other self-regulation strategies; the adverse effects of meditation; and meditation-induced altered states of consciousness.

Concluding with a major bibliography of related works, Meditation offers the reader a valuable overview of the state and possible future directions of meditation research. Today, in the popular media and elsewhere, debate continues: Is meditation an effective technique for spiritual and physical healing, or is it quackery? Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives weighs in on this debate by presenting what continues to be the most complete collection of scholarly articles ever amassed on the subject of meditation.

Deane H. Shapiro, Jr. is professor emeritus of psychiatry and human behavior, School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. He is internationally recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on the clinical, therapeutic and medical health care applications of meditation and his research and writing on meditation and self-control have been requested by universities and medical schools throughout the world.

Roger N. Walsh is a psychiatrist on the Faculty of the School of Medicine at the University of California at Irvine. He is the author of Toward an Ecology of Brain and Beyond Ego: Readings in Transpersonal Psychology. His research interests include Asian philosophies and religions, ecology, meditation, and transpersonal psychology.