As Landau was leaving, Baba stopped him and dictated on the board, "I am going to help you in the future."
A few days later, Baba had one of the mandali write to Landau, as he dictated this message:
The spiritual revival that you ask about is not very far off and I am going to bring it about in the near future, utilizing the tremendous amount of misapplied energy possessed by America for this purpose. Such a spiritual outburst as I visualize usually takes place every seven or eight hundred years, at the end or beginning of a cycle, and it is only the Perfect One, who has reached the Christ state of consciousness, that can appeal and work so very universally. My work will embrace everything. It will affect and control every phase of life ... In the general spiritual push that I shall impart to the world, problems such as politics, economics and sex will all be solved automatically and adjusted.
All collective movements and religions hinge around one personality who supplies the motive force, and without this centrifugal force, all movements are bound to fail. Perfect Masters impart spirituality by personal contact and influence, and the benefit that will accrue to different nations, when I bring about the spiritual upheaval, will largely depend upon the amount of energy each one possesses.
I now take orders from no one; it is all my supreme will. Everything is because I will it to be. Nothing is beyond my knowledge; I am in everything. There is no time and space for me; it is I who give them their relative existence. I see the past and the future as clearly and vividly as you see the material things about you.
Landau published an account of this meeting three years later in his book God is My Adventure and called it: "Portrait of a Perfect Master: Shri Meher Baba." The book became an immediate bestseller.1 Landau included an account of a later visit in New York with Norina, to whom he had been introduced by Quentin. According to Norina, Landau seemed an intelligent fellow, and she presumed him to be a genuine seeker and was candid with him due to his personal friendship with Quentin, narrating some of the experiences of her life before and after meeting the Master. She later regretted doing so, as Landau proved to be skeptical of Meher Baba.
Footnotes
- 1.Rom Landau's book, God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers, has gone into more than a dozen printings since its first publication. Romauld (Rom) Landau (1899–1974) later became a professor of Islamic Studies in California.