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Book Editions

God Speaks has had three editions. The first edition, published by Dodd, Mead and Company, received four printings, 1955, 1967, 1968, and 1970, and was 255 pages. As early as 1956 Meher Baba began work on a second edition, which was printed posthumously in 1973 and 1975. It was 334 pages. In 1990 the original publisher, Dodd, Mead, went out of business and the plates for the second edition were not preserved. For this reason, the book was retypeset in 1997 and is 313 pages in its current form. Labeled within as the "second edition third printing" the 1997 printing is technically a third edition since it is retypeset, although no major editorial changes were made to the text. The third edition received a second printing in 2010.

Book Reviews

No other Teacher in our own time or in any known past time has so minutely analyzed consciousness as Meher Baba has in God Speaks. Occidental psychology, especially under the illustrious leadership of Dr. [Carl] Jung, has made great advances in the study of the unconscious and of the dream-state, but because of its necessary adherence to conservative methods of scientific research it has not been able, as yet, to fathom the Deep of the Seer. So, for the science circumscribed psychologist, God Speaks should prove to be of paramount importance in inspiring further progress on the psychological pathway. Correlatively, noteworthy in particular is Part VIII, on the Evolution of Consciousness, and Part IX, on the Ten States of God, to which is attached a diagram linking together "the most generally accepted Sufi, Vedantic and Christian mystical equivalents." As a whole, the book marks clear the at-one-ment of the essentials of the various historic religions in the light of the gnosis of the Sufis. Meher Baba's enlightening treatise adds much to the sum total of learning and contributes incalculably to the enrichment of mankind for, as the sages of Asia teach, the most intrinsically valuable of all riches, and greater than all mundane wealth, is Right Knowledge. Nowhere is Meher Baba's wisdom more succinctly set forth than in his Conclusion, on page 176: "To understand the infinite, eternal Reality is NOT the Goal of individualized beings in the Illusion of Creation, because the Reality can never be understood; it is to be realized by conscious experience."

In her 1955 review of God Speaks in The Awakener, Filis Frederick wrote:

This is primarily a book for the mind, in the sense that it requires deep thought and study, and does not appeal so directly to our emotional or devotional side as do Baba's short messages and exhortations to His followers. It is, in essence, a divine cosmology, a Map of the Evolving Universe, in which we all play a part, to help us find the quickest and shortest route home—to our Beloved God, Who Is found, on Realization, to be our very own Self