Modern man has found that material achievements are failing him, but in his escape from despair, he has become an easy prey for the deceptive cult of ""Zen-Existentialism."" There has emerged a mode of radical ""New Humanism"" with its emphasis on ""human autonomy."" In place of the God-man appears the ""man-god."" There is a search for the ""world within,"" the ""limitless inner space,"" the ""expansion of consciousness"", and the transcendental experience of ""Satori.""
First published in 1969, this book prophetically anticipated the growth of New Age developments in the decades to follow. Lit-sen Chang directly spoke to the Hippie movement of his day, which was then seeking various means of transcendence through drugs and eastern mysticism.
This book also reflects fifty years of bitter experiences of the author's spiritual pilgrimage and shows how he was miraculously delivered by the grace and power of God from his ""cul-de-sac."" Chang writes of the utter futility of the fantasy of the East, analyzes the root causes of the crises in the West, and points out the doom of auto-soterism after his careful diagnosis of the human problem in cultural, philosophical, religious, and theological terms.

Lit-sen Chang (1904-1996) was an ardent Chinese Buddhist on his way to India to promote a renaissance of Asian religions when he met Christ. He had been a talented legislator, and a brilliant young author on law and land policy. He now committed himself to serve Christ, and graduated summa cum laude at Gordon Divinity School in 1959, and then served as special lecturer on missions and world religions. He wrote twenty volumes on the field of Christian apologetics against Chinese culture and the contemporary West. Wheaton College honored him with the Doctor of Letters in 1984.