Tag Archive for: Integral Yoga

Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo (Recorded By A. B. Purani)

Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo

Recorded By A. B. Purani

Evening Talks is A.B. Purani’s record of informal conversations between Sri Aurobindo and his disciples during two periods: 1923–1926, when the talks were held on the verandahs of the houses in which Sri Aurobindo stayed, and 1938–1943, when they took place in Sri Aurobindo’s room. The talks cover a wide range of topics—yoga, philosophy, art, poetry, psychology, science, and contemporary history, notably India’s struggle for independence and the Second World War. They reveal something of the versatile nature of Sri Aurobindo’s personality and his wide-ranging, profound knowledge of life as well as a glimpse of the heights of spiritual consciousness he embodied and through which he acted on both world events and on the natures of those drawn to his yoga.

Book Details

Author: Sri Aurobindo

Print Length: 836 pages

Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more

Sunil – The Mother’s Musician by Clifford Gibson

Sunil – The Mother’s Musician

This portrait of Sunil Bhattacharya as a composer, teacher, sadhak, and friend consists of his correspondence with the Mother on his music, and his exchange of letters, dating from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, with the many friends all over the world who admired his music. Interspersed throughout the story told in these letters are reminiscences by residents of the Ashram that serve to highlight Sunil’s character and talents. In the first few pages of the book, Sunil describes his early childhood in Krishnagar, West Bengal, and his life in Calcutta, where he learned to play the sitar.

Book Details

Author: Clifford Gibson
Print Length: 356 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Author (Clifford Gibson)
Book format: PDF
Language: English Read more

Letters on Yoga (CWSA Edition)

Letters on Yoga (Volume 1-4)

Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo Volumes 28-31

Sri Aurobindo’s Letters on Yoga (CWSA Edition) Four volumes of letters on the integral yoga, other spiritual paths, the problems of spiritual life, and related subjects. In these letters, Sri Aurobindo explains the foundations of his integral yoga, its fundamentals, its characteristic experiences and realisations, and its method of practice. He also discusses other spiritual paths and the difficulties of spiritual life. Related subjects include the place of human relationships in yoga; sadhana through meditation, work and devotion; reason, science, religion, morality, idealism and yoga; spiritual and occult knowledge; occult forces, beings and powers; destiny, karma, rebirth and survival. Sri Aurobindo wrote most of these letters in the 1930s to disciples living in his ashram.

Letters of Sri Aurobindo was first compiled and published in four series from 1947 to 1951. The First, Second and Fourth Series contained letters on yoga, the Third letters on poetry and literature. Prior to that, small collections of letters were published in The Riddle of This World (1933), Lights on Yoga (1935), Bases of Yoga (1936) and More Lights on Yoga (1948). Some letters were also published periodically in various Ashram journals: Sri Aurobindo Circle, Sri Aurobindo Mandir, The Advent and Mother India.

The First and Second Series of Letters of Sri Aurobindo were reissued in 1950 and 1954 respectively.

In 1958 all the above letters, excepting those on poetry and literature in the Third Series, were published again, along with additional material as Volumes VI and VII of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education Series in two volumes. Volume One was reissued in 1969 with further additions.

In 1970 Letters on Yoga was published as volumes 22, 23 and 24 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. This edition contained a large number of letters not included in the two volumes of the Centre of Education edition. It was reprinted several times.

In 1997, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram began to publish the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo in a uniform library edition of 37 volumes. A considerable number of new letters has are being published for the first time in the new CWSA edition.

Book Details

Author: Sri Aurobindo

Print Length: 2420 pages

Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more

Sweet Mother by Mona Sarkar

Sweet Mother

Luminous Notes

This book includes the Conversations with the Mother recollected by Mona Sarkar published earlier in Sweet Mother — Harmonies of Light and Sweet Mother — Harmonies of Light — Part 2, as well as some new material. The text has been revised in places. These conversations were held in French. They were noted down from memory, except for a few talks which were recorded on tape. Occasionally, the Mother spoke in English.

Book Details

Author: Mona Sarkar
Print Length: 126
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Contributor: Website Visitor
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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Songs from the Soul by Anilbaran Roy

Songs from the Soul

A collection of meditations and mystic poems by Anilbaran Roy. Anilbaran Roy was a professor of philosophy for seven years in Bengal. Subsequently he felt a call for national work and actively participated in the Non-cooperation Movement. He became profoundly impressed by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and in June 1926 he joined the Ashram. Anilbaran was a prolific writer and has written books in three languages, English, Bengali and Hindi.

Sri Aurobindo translated his poem and wrote in November 1935 of his translation (which he has apparently just completed): “Anilbaran’s song is best rendered by an Elizabethan simplicity and intensity with as little artifice of metre and diction as possible. I have tried to do it in that way.”

The Mother made selection from Anilbaran’s prayers offered to her. She termed the collection a “Spiritual Dictionary”. They were published as part of this book “Songs from the Soul”

The following quotation from “The Mother” by Sri Aurobindo was chosen by Anilbaran to open the book:

“Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at appearances; trust the Divine Power and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of Divine Nature.”

Book Details

Author: Anilbaran Roy
Print Length: 116
Publisher: Sandhanam Printing Works
Contributor: Website Visitor
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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The Mind of the Cells or Willed Mutation of Our Species

The Mind of the Cells
or Willed Mutation of Our Species

Le Mental des Cellules (The Mind of the Cells), a synopsis and introduction of the whole Agenda, with many fascinating and important excerpts, and written with great passion by Satprem. He also refers to personal experiences, including the 1976 attempt upon his life, which he only survived by going into a state of complete non-resistance.

“The Mind of the Cells”: Six and a half billion Homo sapiens are now learning the futility of their ways of existence, just as one day some fish learned the futility of their gills on dry land. If those fish had sought to improve their aquatic science, invent new fins and new philosophies, they would have been mistaken. The question is whether we will find the WAY, not to improve human suffocation, but to be and live in another way on earth. Is there in this human body a spring, a lever which will enable us to change our terrestrial conditions, just as three million years ago a first mental vibration prepared Einstein and the Boeing 747? What vibration? Where, in the body? Could it be that life’s raw material, the cell, conceals a power of consciousness or a “vibratory mode” which would make obsolete all our cerebral means and our dead-end devices? A Mind of the Cells which will open up to us new sources of energy, new means of communication, a new power to handle Matter. A new biology and a new consciousness which will enable us to meet the challenge of a species on its way to self-destruction. Such is Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s incredible discovery in the cells of the body, at a time when the earth is asphyxiating. For “salvation is physical” said she, who at the age of eighty, dared to knock at the body’s last door, and who made the most tremendous discovery since Darwin.

Book Details

Author: Satprem
Print Length: 234
Publisher: Institut de Recherches Évolutives
Contributor: Website Visitor
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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Captive of Her Love by Janina Stroka

Longings for the Mother

This book is a collection of letters, poems and paintings by Janina Stroka, a Polish disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, from 1957 until her passing in 1964. It is a truly fascinating book that should interest readers of many backgrounds and persuasions. Employing a primarily epistolary mode, through the use of letters, it combines several interesting categories as well: spiritual travelogue, quest narrative, period history and East-West encounter. Above all, it bridges the gap between the falsity of public image vis a vis the reality of our private self.

Janina’s account of her life in Pondicherry in this book is divided into three parts. The main part of the text consists of extracts from letters written to a Dutch friend with whom Janina lived first in Palestine and later in Germany, from December 1957 to June 1958. The letters in the next section were written between 1960 and 1963 to a young Bengali, a writer and social worker. Next, the book contains selected poems and paintings by Janina and concludes with a comment by the Mother on Janina’s passing.

All of these provide an invaluable glimpse into Janina’s inner life in the Ashram, no less than her observation of the details of the seemingly trivial but no less significant aspects of the day to day life in the Ashram and Pondicherry during the late fifties and early sixties. We find, for instance, a perceptive description of meal-time atmosphere in the Dining Room. Those who habitually crib against the Dining Room food would do well to see Janina’s sense of reverence towards this food (“We always get two bananas and a wonderful yoghurt, just a dream!”). She talks memorably of a number of events and impressions of the supramental force spread over Pondicherry, vis a vis the ubiquitous presence of the town’s dirt, filth and squalour; about “bad people in the Ashram”; regarding the problem with maid-servants, their perpetual intrigues and the need to constantly humour them in order to extract work out of their reluctant selves and so on. She also records her encounters with Pavitrada, Nolinida and Medhananda and the quota of luscious mangoes from Bombay that she receives from X, a friend: “What a pity that I do not have a husband” she observes with self-deprecating humour.

Janina reveals in her engrossing accounts that despite their rootedness in reason, science and rationality, (or perhaps because of it!) a dedicated westerner, drawn powerfully to spirituality, is likely to blossom more fully vis a vis his/her eastern counterparts. Her life — full of ordeals, hardships and agony — is testimony to the indomitable human spirit forever in search of the deepest meaning of life. Her narrative offers us a lesson in humility.

(from book review by Dr Sachidananda Mohanty)

Book Details

Author: Janina Stroka
Print Length: 106
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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Longings for the Mother by Indra Sen

Longings for the Mother

I learned of the Mother’s passing on the morning of the 18th November, 1973 at Sri Aurobindo Yoga Mandir, Jwalapur (Hardwar), where my normal work lies as given by the Mother in 1958. The impulse that arose within me was to go deep within and be with the Mother to the best of my capacity. I reduced my external preoccupations to the minimum and began to live in that manner and it was profoundly satisfying. In this experience, there were occasional moments of shock and grief too but, on the whole, there was a feeling of inner assurance and a sense of contact and conversation with the Mother. On the morning of the 27th November, as I sat in this contemplation, a move arose to concretise the inner thought and feeling and I wrote out “Our Mother, who is no more, who is ever more.” Soon all the ten topics ending with “Mother, we read again Your ‘Notes on the Way’” came along. And I read these again and again and enjoyed doing so. I began to do this day after day. I felt that this tended to deepen my inner contact. The next three pieces were written on the following three days, a piece per day. Then I had to go on a short journey and, for about a fortnight, there was no writing. About the middle of December, the writing was resumed and the remaining six pieces were written out. The entire writing was done, on the whole, with ease and simplicity.

To me, all this served to clarify and strengthen an inner contact with the Mother. Many friends, who have read these pieces in typescript, have felt deeply moved and found in varying degrees a greater inner contact.

Book Details

Author: Indra Sen
Print Length: 43
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo by A. S. Dalal

Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo

A. S. Dalal, a philosopher, psychotherapist, long-time devotee of Sri Aurobindo and inmate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, provides here an in depth investigation and discussion of the similarities and differences between the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo. Although nearly one-hundred years separate these two great spiritual teachers, who come out of disparate disciplines (Buddhist and Hindu), the author discovers an underling essence and truth which deepens and strengthens his own spiritual convictions and understandings. Through out his long life, the author has been exposed to multiple disciplines and the process of exploring Eckhart has brought him new insights and a greater integration that comes only when one expands beyond the narrow confines of the mind which can and too often do grow around any single discipline. This book provides a great opportunity for any seeker to push the limits of his own understanding and to reinvigorate his own quest.

Book Details

Author: A. S. Dalal
Print Length: 172
Publisher: Stone Hill Foundation
Contributors: Blindshiva
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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To Thee Our Infinite Gratitude (Writings on the Passing of Sri Aurobindo)

To Thee Our Infinite Gratitude

Writings on the Passing of Sri Aurobindo

A series of essays written in commemoration of Sri Aurobindo’s passing. The words of Amal Kiran, Udar and K.R.S.Iyengar give us a vast spiritual, psychological and factual perspective of the event, greatly helping us to understand several aspects of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the young American scholar Rhoda P. Le Cocq’s account of the last Darshan of the Master and the Mother unveils that aspect of the power of Grace which so smoothly and silently demolishes the wall of scepticism one had maintained around oneself for long. The compilation brings us a serene calm and an intense feeling of gratitude, and reminds us that:

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride
The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,
A grey defeat pregnant with victory,
A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

Savitri

Book Details

Author: Nirodbaran, Dr. Prabhat Sanyal, Amal Kiran, Udar Pinto, Pavitra, K.R.S. Iyengar, Rhoda P. Le Cocq
Print Length: 100
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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