The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Note on the Text
THE SYNTHESIS OF YOGA first appeared in seventy-seven monthly
instalments in the philosophical review Arya, beginning with its first issue,
August 1914, and continuing until its last, January 1921. The Arya
text of the Synthesis consisted of five introductory chapters numbered
I – V and seventy-two other chapters numbered I – II and IV – LXXIII
(the number III was inadvertently omitted). Each of the instalments
was written immediately before its publication.
In the Arya the division of the main series of chapters into four
parts, corresponding to the yogas of Works, Knowledge, Devotion and
Self-Perfection, was not marked explicitly until the fifth year, when the
heading “The Yoga of Self-Perfection” began to be added above the
chapter numbers.
The Synthesis of Yoga was left incomplete when the Arya
ceased publication in January 1921. Before abandoning the work,
Sri Aurobindo wrote part of a chapter entitled “The Supramental
Time Consciousness”, which was meant to follow the last published
chapter of “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”. He never completed this
chapter and never published the portion that he had written.
A letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1936 gives some idea of his
purpose in writing The Synthesis of Yoga and his overall plan for the
work:
The Synthesis of Yoga was not meant to give a method for all
to follow. Each side of the Yoga was dealt with separately with
all its possibilities, and an indication [was given] as to how
they meet so that one starting from knowledge could realise
Karma and Bhakti also and so with each path. It was intended
when the Self-Perfection was finished, to suggest a way in
which all could be combined, but this was never written.
One can gauge how much of The Synthesis of Yoga remained to be
written by comparing the actually completed chapters of “The Yoga