YUGA describes five falls—the Fall into Time, the Reign of Quantity, the Mutation into Machinery, the End of Nature, and the Prison of Unreality. Taken together, these comprise the fate of historical humanity and are, the author is convinced, one-way trips. And the urban-industrial-vehicular-commercial-technological-pharmaceutical-electronic-information-spectator secular society they have produced has ripped the human world to shreds. . . . The book is hard-hitting, but readers who find it disturbing overlook the invincible beatitude that undergirds its every line. When we awaken from our modern nightmare—as sooner or later we all shall—this book will help us remember what that nightmare was. In YUGA the perennial wisdom has found a new and clarion voice.

Glass’s poetic and novelistic vocabulary, combined with exhaustive and blithely eclectic research, the mind-boggling diversity of his sources and references, even the peculiar Table of Contents, is a radical departure. Equally at home with the Diamond Sutra and the Grundrisse of Karl Marx, while being a careful student of magazine displays at the checkout counters of supermarkets, the author cheerfully presents his book as a provocation rather than as argument.

But the master achievement of YUGA, which lies neither in its ‘argument’ nor its style, is its voice. That voice speaks so palpably from the author’s heart that we find it resonating in our hearts as well. The final pages of YUGA are celebrations of joy and love, and the discerning reader will detect those qualities lurking between the lines of the book’s every page. For remember, Marty Glass is a spokesman for the truth that underlies all the world’s wisdom traditions. Behind the world of appearances—samsara, maya, and the shadows on Plato’s cave—stands the uncreated Light, Reality, which is eternal Bliss. This reality speaks to individuals in t