The Teaching Of Sri Aurobindo

Sri M.P. Pandit has provided us a brief overview and introduction to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo. The ideal of a perfected human being, living in a perfected society, has been one of the aspirations of mankind since time immemorial. Sri Pandit was secretary to the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and a prolific writer and lecturer on Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. This book introduces Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, yoga and social & political thought, along with an overview of his analysis and understanding of the classical texts of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

Between 1927 and 1950, Sri Aurobindo--one of the foremost Indian philosophersof the 20th century--perfected a new kind of spiritual practice he called the"Integral Yoga." This volume brings together a comprehensive selection of SriAurobindo's letters pertaining to the practice of this discipline.

A compilation of letters written by Sri Aurobindo to disciples during the 1930s, this book presents the major aspects of his spiritual teaching. The first parts deal with the psychological and philosophical foundations of his teaching and relate them to other systems of yoga and philosophy. The next sections deal with the method of practice, starting with the bases of yoga and continuing with the different types of sadhana, descriptions of experiences and realisations, the triple transformation that defines the essence of the yoga, and the difficulties in transforming the nature. A glossary of the terminology used by Sri Aurobindo completes the volume.

Sri Aurobindo calls us to what he terms an “adventure of consciousness”. Integral yoga was not intended to set forth a specific and rigid set of practices for everyone to follow; rather, it was developed to understand the specific needs of each individual at each stage of development and to employ those methods and practices that would best aid in the further progress for the individual seeker. It also was not targeted at abandoning life. The integral yoga first focuses on achieving the necessary liberation from the fixed habits of body, life and mind that create a framework around each person's life, and then, on bringing down into the being a higher status of consciousness and aiding its transformation of the being in all its aspects. The eventual objective of the integral yoga was to provide conscious support to the natural process of evolution of consciousness, and thereby speed up its advent. The book Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice was compiled and organised from among the thousands of letters on yoga that Sri Aurobindo wrote to disciples and others over a number of years. It outlines his philosophical outlook, the background and basis of the integral yoga, and delves into a vast array of details which aid the sincere seeker in understanding the inner workings of consciousness, and helps the seeker to work through the difficulties, obstacles and resistances of nature to truly bring about a transformation of consciousness in all parts of his being.