How To Meditate: A Guide to Self Discovery (SPECIAL NEW HARDCOVER EDITION) — By Lawrence LeShan, Foreward by Rick Hanson

"This answer to the question “Why meditate?” runs all through the literature written by those who practice this discipline. We meditate to find, to recover, to come back to something of ourselves we once dimly and unknowingly had and have lost without knowing what it was or where or when we lost it. We may call it access to more of our human potential or being closer to ourselves and to reality, or to more of our capacity for love and zest and enthusiasm, or our knowledge that we are a part of the universe and can never be alienated or separated from it, or our ability to see and function in reality more effectively. As we work at meditation, we find that each of these statements of the goal has the same meaning. It is this loss, whose recovery we search for, that led the psychologist Max Wertheimer to define an adult as “a deteriorated child.... It is our fullest “humanhood,” the fullest use of what it means to be human, that is the goal of meditation..." — Excerpt from How to Media