Chapter 7Note on the Texts

LETTERS ON YOGA — I, the first of four volumes, contains letters in which Sri Aurobindo speaks about the foundations of his spiritual teaching and method of Yogic practice. The letters have been arranged in five parts dealing with five broad subject areas: 1. The Divine, the Cosmos and the Individual 2. The Parts of the Being and the Planes of Consciousness 3. The Evolutionary Process and the Supermind 4. Problems of Philosophy, Science, Religion and Society 5. Questions of Spiritual and Occult Knowledge The letters in this volume have been selected from the extensive cor- respondence Sri Aurobindo carried on with his disciples and others between 1927 and 1950. Letters from this corpus appear in seven vol- umes 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 Letters on Himself and the Ashram (Volume 35). The titles of these works specify the nature of the letters included in the volumes, but there is some overlap. For example, a number of letters in the present volume are also published in Letters on Himself and the Ashram. The Writing of the Letters Between 1927 and 1950, Sri Aurobindo replied to hundreds of corre- spondents in tens of thousands of letters, some of them many pages in length, others only a few words long. Most of his replies, however, were sent to just a few dozen disciples, almost all of them resident members of his Ashram; of these disciples, about a dozen received more than half the replies. Sri Aurobindo wrote most of these letters between 1931 and 1937, the prime period of his correspondence. Letters before and after this period were written on a more restricted scale and confined

I 28-31