THE ALTITUDE OF PRAYER

Joel Goldsmith, author of some thirty volumes in the area of spirituality and (apparently) founder of an international spiritual movement called The Infinite Way, propounds a sort of gnostic Christianity that affirms man's spiritual unity with the Infinite, while denying the ultimate reality of the material world. Christ functions as a cipher of everyman, and mystical prayer is the route to discovering our common identity with God. The spiritual viewpoint here seems a Western variant on Vedanta Hinduism. The book, which originally appeared as letters to students of The Infinite Way throughout the world, expresses many genuine insights into prayer and religious experience which familiarity with Eastern and Western mystical literature may verify. Still it seems more a treatise for the initiate than instructional uplift for the general reader.