Writings: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo, yoga, the Mother, philosophy and religion

SRI AUROBINDO'S WRITINGS
| His writings | How to read Sri Aurobindo |

Sri Aurobindo's earliest writings were poems that he penned as a student in England. This literary interest continued during his thirteen-year stay at Baroda, where he wrote a number of poems and plays, and afterwards in Calcutta and Pondicherry. His dramas and short stories are presently published in two volumes entitled Collected Plays and his poetic works in the volume Collected Poems; there is, in addition, Sri Aurobindo's major poetic work, Savitri, an epic in blank-verse of about 24,000 lines.

Sri Aurobindo, 1918-1920, Pondy Sri Aurobindo first rose to national prominence as a writer for his editorials and articles in Bande Mataram, a Calcutta daily he edited between 1906 and 1908. A large number of other political and cultural pieces appeared in two Calcutta week-lies in 1909 and 1910, the year in which Sri Aurobindo retired from active politics in order to devote himself exclusively to the practice of Yoga.

In 1914, after four years of concentrated yoga at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo launched a 64-page monthly philosophical review, Arya, in which most of his important works were serialised during the next six and a half years:

The Life Divine
The Synthesis of Yoga
Essays on the Gita
The Secret of the Veda
The Foundations of Indian Culture
The Future Poetry
The Human Cycle
The Ideal of Human Unity

Though he retired from public life in 1926, Sri Aurobindo maintained a large correspondence with his disciples, especially in the 1930s. Several thousands letters on his teaching, his system of spiritual self-discipline and other subjects have been published in three volume entitled Letters on Yoga. The Mother contains his shorter work of that name and his letters on the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Notes and letters on his own life appear in Sri Aurobindo On Himself. Other important works are:

Hymns to the Mystic Fire (translations of Vedic hymns to Agni)
The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings
Essays Divine and Human (both the volumes contain short prose works on philosophy, psychology and yoga).

While studying Sri Aurobindo's works one important fact should be remembered by the reader. Sri Aurobindo's consciousness was in a constant state of development and there was a radical change in his views particularly after 1910. The careful student of Sri Aurobindo always takes this development into consideration when studying his writings of different periods.

The Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo was published as the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) in the year 1972, the Birth Centenary year of Sri Aurobindo. This set of thirty volumes is no more available. However, all the subsequent editions of Sri Aurobindo's major works correspond to the Centenary edition, this facilities uniform referencing for the study of this work.

Currently The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo in thirty five volumes is under publication.

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". . . the best thing would be to obtain perfect silence -and achieve a state of immobility of the brain, I might say, so that the attention becomes as still and immobile as a mirror, like the surface of absolutely still water. Then what one has read passes through the surface and penetrates deep into the being where it is received with a minimum of distortion. Afterwards -sometimes long afterwards -it wells up again from the depths and manifests in the brain with its full power of comprehension, not as knowledge acquired from outside, but as a light one carried within."

The Mother

Read more.. in Sadhana : Guidance in the light of Sri Aurobindo & the Mother

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