Blue 2005

Sri Aurobindo’s Writings
Sri Aurobindo’s earliest writings were poems that he penned as a student in
England. This literary interest continued during his thirteen-year stay in 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 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 weeklies 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 Renaissance in India, A Defence of Indian Culture (these two are now
included in The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture,
formerly The Foundations of Indian Culture), The Future Poetry, The Human Cycle
and 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 thousand
letters on his teaching, his system of spiritual self-discipline and other subjects
have been published in three volumes 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: The Upanishads–I: Isha Upanishad and
The Upanishads–II: Kena and Other Upanishads (parts of both appeared in
the Arya), Hymns to the Mystic Fire (translations of Vedic hymns to Agni),
The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, Essays Divine and Human
(these two volumes contain short prose works on philosophy, psychology and
yoga). Record of Yoga contains the diary of Sri Aurobindo’s yogic experiences.
The collected works of Sri Aurobindo were published as the Sri Aurobindo
Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) in 1972, the birth centenary year of Sri Aurobindo.
This set of thirty volumes is no more available.
Currently a new set, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, in thirty-seven
volumes, is under publication (see page 25 for details).
HOW TO READ SRI AUROBINDO
“. . . 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
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