Author: Jan Olof Bengtsson

This is another lastingly important vartma-pradarshaka guru (person who shows the path) from the late 1970s. He wrote well; his books from the 1930s and 40s have a pleasantly traditional, sometimes almost idealistic Victorian style, a not quite contemporary style, even as he discussed, for instance, new and distinctively twentieth-century developments. This style was eminently suited to his substantial purpose of introducing Eastern spirituality and metaphysics. (It must be added, however, that something of this style almost of necessity has to be preserved in all truly spiritual writing, and that it indeed is to some extent preserved also in later Western spiritual writers, even though it is in them strongly attenuated. It is striking that this interesting subject of the literary style of such writers, introducing Eastern spiritual doctrines, seems not yet to have been explored at all. The change in style from nineteenth-century more or less idealistic comparativists and newly Eastern-oriented esotericists to the traditionalist school and the New Agers should be an interesting and revealing field of study.) Only in his most philosophical books does he, at times, become somewhat too repetitive. René Guénon wrote relatively favourable reviews of two of his early books.

http://www.paulbrunton.org/