Stephan:   Over 1,000 papers on meditation have entered the peer reviewed literature in the past 15 years. If it were in my power I would like to see every person in the country offered training in a psycho-physical self-regulation meditation technique. It would change the entire orientation of the country, putting it on a more life-affirming path. Even the most utterly secular disciplines, such as this one, teach one to open to nonlocal consciousness. No one comes back unchanged. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a daily meditator for 40 years. It has changed the nature of my beingness for the better, and I suspect most meditators would say the same.