INTO THE MYSTIC : An Explorer's Guide to the Perils of Meditation— and the Promise of Enlightenment.

A brilliant new science narrative - a travelogue of the mind.

“The great thing about reality is you get to test it out for yourself,” Daniel Ingram

This trip documents the exotic geography of deep meditation. The narrative frame is a personal account of one month (July, 2012) spent meditating 18-hours a day under the guidance of a controversial teacher in rural Alabama named Daniel Ingram. INTO THE MYSTIC is both a playful first-person narrative about the adventure of serious mindfulness meditation, and a rigorous secular-friendly inquiry into the nature of spiritual transformation. Science is only just beginning to take these experiences seriously; Warren argues that as these insights are understood and consolidated, they will initiate a new age of human exploration into the mind. This is the story of a contemporary spiritual quest that is also a report from the multi-disciplinary frontiers of mind science and a road map for how readers might discover these mental states and shifts on their own. It will challenge, provoke, transform and entertain, with real implications for science and society. JEFF WARREN is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and meditation teacher. His primary subject is the mind—the cutting-edge of psychology, neuroscience and contemplative thinking—made fun and accessible. After working as a journalist at the CBC radio's flagship current affairs radio show, The Current, he left to write a travel guide to sleeping, dreaming and waking consciousness called The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Random House, 2007). In 2010 he was awarded the Webster McConnell Canadian Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto's Massey College. He continues to write for a variety of journals, including a regular column Psychology Tomorrow. In March 2012 Jeff was part of a research study on meditation and the brain at Harvard Medical School, both as a participating subject and as the only observing journalist. All this has given Jeff unique access; he knows personally many of the world's leading researchers and thinkers and teachers, and brainstorms with them about ideas and findings long before they reach publication.