In these reminiscences, Nolini Kanta Gupta recounts the highlights of his eventful life — his transition from student to revolutionary to a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The memoirs first appeared in English translation in 1969 under the title Reminiscences.
Author: Nolini Kanta Gupta
Print Length: 198 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more
This is the first English translation of Aurobindo Prasanga (literally, “About Aurobindo”), a memoir by Dinendra Kumar Roy (1869-1943). A Bengali writer who was fairly well known during the first half of the last century, Dinendra Kumar lived with Sri Aurobindo in Baroda from 1898 to 1900 or 1901. The chapters making up this work first appeared in the journal Sahitya in Bengali year 1318 (1911-1912). More than a decade later, in 1923, they were brought out as a book. Some of Dinendra Kumar’s references to historical and literary figures are explained in editorial notes at the end of the translation.
Author: Dinendra Kumar Roy
Print Length: 45 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more
你说黎明之城是一个梦想。是的，它是“神”的一个“梦想”。通常这些“梦想”都会成真，比人类所谓的现实更加真实得多！
本书内容选自室利·阿罗频多和母亲的作品。您可以在参观“走进黎明之城图文展”时对应展板底部标注的序号阅读这些文字。展览所在地：黎明之城访客中心咨询处旁。
如果您想要更全面深入地认识黎明之城，阅读室利·阿罗频多和母亲的简介与作品，请看本书最后一页的参考资料。
英文内容和图片、小标题、排版：Olivier Barot
中文翻译：清宁 校对：倪慧
You say that Auroville is a dream. Yes, it is a “dream” of the Lord and generally, these “dreams” turn out to be true, much more true than the human so-called realities!
Texts in this book are selected from the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. You can read the book while visiting the exhibition “The Spirit of Auroville” by following the serial numbers marked at the bottom of the exhibition panels. Exhibition Venue: Auroville Visitor’s Centre, next to the Information office.
Author: the Mother
English text and picture selection: Olivier Barot
Chinese translation: Anandi Zhang
Proofreading: Ni Hui
Print Length: 64 pages
Book format: PDF
Language: English & Chinese
This book deals with the healing by different Alternative medicine therapies along with presenting a few case studies and combines the author’s experiences with Sri Aurobindo’s yoga of transformation ( both the physical body and the earth ). It narrates about the three stages of the matter in three separate sections through Psychicisation, Spiritualisation and Supramentalisation. Especially the joining of the spiritualism with science is a very rare factor for the younger enthusiastic mass. The synthesis of the old traditional yoga and the modern integral yoga opens a new angle for the spiritual seekers. And the inquisitive research persons can also find out a way to know about cell transmutation from Quantum Physics and Medical Science, which reveals the secrets of physical transformation as well as the immortal cells. The most uncommon thing is the ‘psychic discovery within the physical body’, which tells about the soul’s presence within the body described as ‘chaitya purusha’ in Veda and interpreted as psychic being by Sri Aurobindo. How in Pondicherry ashram The Mother and Sri Aurobindo were united to do this work and left their bodies there too is an additional attraction. This book is really a masterpiece.
This compilation is inspired by and offered to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother who guide us by their Presence and example. It serves as a reference material for people who find it useful to learn and apply the wisdom in life. This is an age where each individual has a unique role to play, and each culture has an opportunity to radiate its full potential, beauty and fragrance in the world garden. May each one blossom like a flower, each in its own time, own way. May humanity aspire for and realise Unity in Diversity by unending education, constant progress and a youth that never ages.
Author: Sri Aurobindo, the Mother
Compiler: Anandi Zhang
Print Length: 48 pages
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more
This book is a translation of a memoir written in Tamil by K. Amrita, an early disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Amrita recounts the story of his childhood and student life, but always his central concern is his relationship with Sri Aurobindo and his efforts to come closer to him. Amrita’s tale told with honesty and ardor, has all the poignancy of a sensitive young Tamil Brahmin discovering a new way of life.
The Tamil text of the memoir was translated into English soon after it was written, and this translation (titled Old Long Since) was published in 1969 and 1995 as part of larger works. It is now being published for the first time (2015) as an independent book and has been given a new title, A Pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo. Further details are given in the Note on the Text at the end of the book.
Author: Amrita
Print Length: 63 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more
This book provides a concise and detailed summary of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and yoga while focusing on one of its main themes: the spiritual evolution of the soul. It covers essential ideas in the philosophy such as the nature of the Divine and its relation to the universe, the processes of involution and evolution, the relation of the soul and nature, the processes of karma and rebirth, the evolution of societies, the main principles and practices of the Integral Yoga, the psychic, spiritual, and supramental transformations of consciousness, and the concept and realization of the superman, the intermediary between the human and the supramental being. It concludes with a consideration of the validity and relevance of the philosophy and yoga for contemporary life.
Larry Seidlitz, Ph.D. is a practitioner and scholar of the Integral Yoga. This is his third book on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and yoga, and he has also written essays on the topic for various journals. He was editor of the USA-based journal on the Integral Yoga Collaboration for 16 years, edits books and papers for other scholars on the Yoga, and conducts online courses on the Yoga for the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research. Formerly a research psychologist in the USA, he now resides near Auroville and is associated with both the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville.
In this series of selected letters we have Sri Aurobindo’s guidance to a boy in his late teens. The letters, no less illuminating for all their simplicity, cover a fairly large number of subjects. As their recipient grew up more and more, the subjects naturally increased in significance. The correspondence with Sri Aurobindo ran up to 1937.
A brief personal background to the correspondence:
“I came to Pondicherry in 1931 when I was about fourteen years old. In those days the Mother did not admit youngsters into the Ashram. It was only out of her kindness that she made an exception in the case of four children: Bala, Romen, Shanti and myself. We did not have a school here at that time, nor were there regular study classes. Before coming, my mind was occupied with only two things — study and cricket: they were my life and my world. I had almost decided to go to Europe and become a big doctor. I first visited the Ashram during my school vacation just for the sake of making a nice long journey, certainly not for taking up Yoga. I stayed for a month and returned in time for the reopening of my school. During that stay, what the Mother did within my being I could hardly fathom. But the result was that I returned home to stay for only two days, I hurried back here with the full realisation that I could not possibly live, either happily or unhappily, without the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Till 1933 I did not know what this strange thing called Yoga was. Hence the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were to me just like my own human mother and father. When the correspondence with Sri Aurobindo started, he had to teach me everything, not only what was meant by Yoga but also what culture, religion, philosophy and morality were. He used to correct my English, too, for quite a long time. Whatever I have gained in any way is a growth from the seeds he and the Mother sowed in me during those boyhood days.” – Nagin Doshi
Author: Sri Aurobindo; Nagin Doshi
Print Length: 689 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Society
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more
In these essays, Bergson writes, concerning the idea of parallelism between mind and body:
“Consciousness tells no more than what is going on in the brain, it only tells it in a different language.” There can be no doubt that the origin of this thesis is entirely metaphysical. It comes to us in a direct line from the Cartesian philosophy of the seventeenth century. …I believe that the facts, examined without prejudice and without the bias towards a mathematical mechanism, suggest a more subtle hypothesis concerning the correspondence between the psychic (ie., mental) and the cerebral state. The latter only express the action which is prefigured in the former. …for to the same cerebral state there may equally well correspond many different psychic facts” (p. 144).
In his characteristically clear and precise manner Bergson pursues in these essays the elusive problem of the mind-body relationship which is once again at the forefront of both the science and the philosophy of consciousness today. The solution that he suggests is that these are two different approaches to the understanding of reality, each describing an aspect of that reality – one material and the other spiritual. Science tries to grasp the reality by means of physical observation and measurement; the philosophical approach tries to grasp reality by means of intuition and ideation. To fail to make the distinction necessarily leads to contradiction and error.
Bergson published these essays in 1919, more than 20 years after Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907), at a time when his reputation as the leading philosopher of the day had spread throughout both the physical and the spiritual world. He was president of the Academie des science (France) and the Society for Psychical Research (UK), representing the two approaches to knowledge. And he had lectured at Oxford (UK) and Columbia (USA) universities. He was fluent in English and had decided as a young university student to become a citizen of France rather than of England.
The fact that Bergson’s work is currently enjoying a revival in both science and philosophy, due to the widespread interest in the study of “consciousness”, along with the concurrence and convergence of his philosophy with that of Sri Aurobindo, suggests that these essays may be important to the understanding of both of these philosophers of Intuition and Consciousness, as well as to better understanding the relevance of their thought in the world today.
Sri Aurobindo once wrote that he wanted his short poems published in two separate books, one of sonnets and one of “(mainly) lyrical poems”.
This book contains all of Sri Aurobindo’s short poems, other than sonnets, composed between 1930 and 1950, with the exception of poems written solely as metrical experiments, nonsense poems written as parodies of surrealist verse, and incomplete or fragmentary poems. Most of the poems included are “lyrical” in the technical sense: they are short and express the writer’s personal thoughts and feelings. Unlike most other examples of the genre, however, their lyricism is spiritual and psychic. Along with the later sonnets and the epic Savitri, they represent Sri Aurobindo’s highest achievement in spiritual or yogic poetry.
Twenty-eight of the forty-two poems in this book were published by Sri Aurobindo during his lifetime in the following volumes: Six Poems (1934), Poems (1941), On Quantitative Metre (1942), and Poems Past and Present (1946). The other fourteen poems are taken from his manuscripts from the same period. Most of them were revised more than once, but some exist only in a single handwritten draft.
Author: Sri Aurobindo
Print Length: 83 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more