Discourses has a long and intricate textual history that will be of special interest to those who want to inquire into the ways of Meher Baba's authorship. A detailed review of this history can be found in the fourth volume of the revised sixth edition (Sheriar Foundation, 2007); especially relevant is "A History of the Discourses," pp. 3-80. But in brief, these essays of Baba's have appeared in five major collections.

1. Meher Baba Journal. A monthly magazine initiated by Meher Baba and published in India under His supervision between November 1938 and October 1942, each issue of the Journal premiered an original discourse. Fifty-one discourses appeared over this four-year period.

2. Five-volume set. The full complement of sixty-nine discourses was published in five volumes between 1939 and 1943. Various of these volumes were republished in subsequent editions, the last of these released in 1955.

3. God to Man and Man to God. With Meher Baba's permission, Charles Purdom, a Western disciple, reedited sixty of the original discourses, simplifying them stylistically. First published in London by Victor Gollancz in 1955, God to Man and Man to God was republished, with slight editorial revisions and one essay removed, by Sheriar Press in 1975.

4. Sixth edition. Under Meher Baba's direction Don Stevens and Ivy Duce reedited the original sixty-nine essays of the five-volume set. Sufism Reoriented published the result of this effort in three volumes in 1967. A revised sixth edition, that incorporated and additional fourth volume with supplementary materials, was released in 2007.

5. Seventh edition. Under the supervision of the Avatar Meher Baba Trust and Meher Baba's mandali, Eruch Jessawala, Bal Natu, and Flagg Kris edited the Discourses one last time, using the sixth edition as their base text. The seventh edition was published by Sheriar Press in 1987.

While the last two of these editions - the sixth and seventh - are currently in print, the earlier editions are generally unavailable except to persons with access to extensive library collections. For the benefit of students of the Discourses, therefore, and particularly those with interests in the evolution of its text, the Avatar Meher Baba Trust plans to make the principal collections available online in this web site. At present the five-volume set, the 1955 edition of God to Man and Man to God, and the seventh edition are published here in pdf format. Work on the other editions is still in progress.

Users of these pdf's should know that they are not facsimile reproductions of the originals. Rather, they are scans that have been processed through OCR (optical character recognition) and reflowed on a page-by-page basis. The font and lineation that you will find I these pdf versions often differs form those of the original books. On the other hand, the content and pagination is the same. You can rely on the page numbers.