Chapter 71Note on the Texts

LETTERS ON HIMSELF AND THE ASHRAM consists of letters written by Sri Aurobindo between 1926 and 1950 in which he referred to his life and works, his sadhana or practice of yoga, and the sadhana of members of his ashram. The letters have been selected and arranged by the editors in four parts dealing with four broad subject areas: (1) Sri Aurobindo’s outer life, his writings, his contemporaries, and contemporary events; (2) his inner life before and after his arrival in Pondicherry; (3) his role as a spiritual leader and guide; and (4) his ashram and the sadhana practised there. A fifth part contains mantras and messages that Sri Aurobindo wrote for the benefit of his disciples. The title chosen for this volume might seem to suggest that Sri Aurobindo deliberately set out to write a large number of letters about his life. In fact, he rarely wrote about himself on his own initiative. He wrote many of the letters in the present volume in answer to questions about himself. He also occasionally referred to himself in passing to illustrate a point under discussion. He explained such references in a letter of 30 October 1935: “I can’t write such things by themselves as an autobiographical essay — it is only if they turn up in the course of something that I can do so” (page 232). The letters included in this volume have been selected from the large body of letters that Sri Aurobindo wrote to his disciples and others between November 1926, when his ashram was founded, and November 1950, shortly before his passing. Letters from this corpus appear in seven volumes of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO: Letters on Poetry and Art (Volume 27), Letters on Yoga (Volumes 28– 31), The Mother with Letters on the Mother (Volume 32), and the present volume. The titles of these four works specify the nature of the letters included in each, but there is some overlap. For example, Part Four of the present volume contains many letters on yoga. These differ from those published in Letters on Yoga in that the ones published here are framed historically by events and conditions in the Sri Aurobindo