THE BUDDHA ON MEDITATION AND
HIGHER STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
DANIEL GOLEMAN
Harvard University
BUDDHIST REPUBLICATION SOCIETY
Kandy 1973 Sri Lanka (Ceylon)
INTRODUCTION
The predicament of Westerners setting out to explore those states of consciousness discontinous with the normal is like that of the early sixteenth century European cartographers who pieced together maps from explores’ report of the New World they had not themselves seen. Just as Pizarro’s report of the New World would have emphasized Peru and South America and underplayed North America, while Hudson’s would be biased toward Canada and North America to the detriment of South America, so with explores in psychic space: each report of states of consciousness is a unique configuration specfic to the experiences of the voyager who set it down. That the reports overlap and agree makes us more sure that the terrain within has its own topography, independent of and reflected in the mapping of it. The differences in maps show us that there are many routes to these states, and that they can be reached in distinct ways and told of within desparate systems of language, metaphor, and symbol.