Listen, Humanity
Meher Baba
Hardback, $25; Paperback, $15
For
the western mind, India has long been a symbol of the
incomprehensibility of the East. Listen, Humanity takes the
reader into the very heart of the life of India and, through the
sympathetic interpretation of a Western businessman’s mind,
describes a series of meetings between Avatar Meher Baba and His
followers. Part I recreates the lines and atmosphere of these
meetings, immersing the reader in the delicate balance of humor
and pathos, activity and quiet that was achieved. From it one
emerges with the sense that the heartbeat of the devout Orient is
powered by the same mainspring that drives the creative mechanism
of the West.
Part II of this volume sets
forth the enduring philosophy of life and death, sleep and
waking, war and peace, slavery and freedom that Meher Baba
clarifies in simple terms for all of us today. In it, life is
described as the continuing reality, and death as the interlude.
Living takes on a healthy color by being suffused with meaning
and progressive development, and the ultimate goal is described
in words that provide assured direction to the often wandering
course of humanity’s aspirations.
The final part of Listen,
Humanity is devoted to the challenges involved in the deep
relationship between master and devotee. How does the pupil
determine for himself that this is the path that he must tread,
and this is the man in whose hands he should put the guide-reins
of his life? These are not judgments that come easily. They are
the intensified counterpart of what we must assess when we choose
our profession, our life-mate, or the enterprise in which we hope
to pass our life.
Nowadays the great messiahs
and saints of the past seem hazy at best. Often it is suspected
that they may even have been the product of imagination and
exaggeration. Is it possible to produce in this advanced age of
rational enlightenment, figures who have authentically the
characteristics attributed to the teachers of almost forgotten
centuries?
The final pages of Listen,
Humanity are an absorbing discussion of this subject, filtered
through the appraising mind of an American businessman, reared in
the tenets of science and shaped in the exacting demand of
competitive enterprise. Listen, Humanity offers the Western world
a unique insight into the most intimate phases of the creative
religious life of the Easterner. To the Oriental, the present
volume offers a concise presentation on the philosophy of perhaps
its greatest living clarifier of our function in God’s
pattern. To all, it presents the absorbing story of humankind at
close grips with the mightiest challenge of all—the Self.
Also available in French: Ecouté O Humanité, Paperback, $14