While modern culture has been extraordinarily powerful in inventiveness at the material level - smartphones, laser surgery, satellites - it creates in most of us who inhabit this realm a blind spot: we are oblivious to the power of an inner journey. We see meditation as a way to stay calm despite life's stresses, or as a way to improve concentration and performance, but we are unaware that it can be a path to another kind of success.

Daniel Goleman has for many years I've been exploring, beyond the public gaze, Asian meditative paths, which hold as their true goal awakening: an experience of our world devoid of concepts or attachment to them, of suspended reality. In Awaken, he recounts the personal experiences that have kept him fascinated by the inner journey to awakening and its implications for our understanding of what may be humanly possible.