God Is My Adventure - A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters, and Teachers

Originally published in 1935. GOD IS MY ADVENTURE- a book on modern mystics masters and teachers By ROM LANDAU. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION: There is something sacrilegious in your intention of writing such a book,' said a friend and yet I went on with it. Since I was a boy I have always been attracted by those regions of truth that the official religions and sciences are shy of exploring. The men who claim to have penetrated them have always had for me the same fascination that famous artists, explorers or states men have for others and such men are the subject of this book. Some of them come from the East, some from Europe and America; some give us a glimpse of truth by the mere flicker of an eyelid, while others speak of heaven and hell with the precision of mathe maticians. I have met them all, and some I have watched in their daily lives. For years now I have sought their company, questioned them and watched them closely at work. I have tried to dissociate the per sonality from the teaching and then to reconcile the two. I have included some of those whom now I cannot view without mistrust. Since thousands of other people believe in them, they are at any rate most interesting figures in contemporary spiritual life, however little of ultimate value their teaching may possess. There are people who know the heroes of this book more inti mately than I, but my aim has never been to identify myself with any one teacher. On the contrary, I have always been anxious to discover for myself through what powers they have influenced so many people. This attitude will warn the reader not to expect an impersonal survey of contemporary spiritual doctrines. I have limited myself to writing of those men with whom I have been in personal contact. I approach them not as the scholar but as the ordinary man who tries to find God in daily life. This book is the confession of an adventure and the story of my friendships with those men whom a future generation may possibly call the true prophets of our time. The core of the adventure is a search for God. I leave it to the reader to decide whether such a search can be sacrilegious. R. L. MOCKBRIDGE HOUSE HENFIELD, SUSSEX Summer, 1935. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION ( Ninth Impression): It is an agreeable duty for an a* uthor to express his pleasure when one of his books has enjoyed public favour sufficiently to call for yet another edition seven years after its first publication. In the present case, to the author's pleasure must be added his gratitude to his readers. For I have greatly profited from the thousands of letters received from people previously unknown to me, and even more so from the many valuable personal contacts which have often resulted from such correspondence. I should be false to my real feelings if I refrained from giving utterance to my gratitude for the enlightenment which I have thus derived. When the manuscript of God Is My Adventure was first submitted to its original publishers, four of the five readers to whom the book was sent for a professional opinion, turned it down. The fifth pointed out that, whatever merits the book might possibly possess, it hardly justified publication since not more than a handful of people were ever likely to be interested in it. The five readers were unanimous in thinking that for a ' philosophical' book God Is My Adventure was not sufficiently orthodox, and for one purporting to explore the by-ways of modem esotericism, not pronounced enough in its allegiance to any individual one of the teachers and systems which it described.