Sri Aurobindo wrote these eight essays, his last prose writings, in 1949 and 1950 for publication in the quarterly Bulletin of Physical Education (at present called the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education). They reveal a vision which includes the perfection of the body as an instrument of the action of the spirit, the nature and structure of a divine body and the conditions and operations of its life on earth, the manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness as the basis for a divine life upon earth, and the creation of a new humanity possessed of a mind of light.

Sri Aurobindo represents a synthesis of the teachings of both the West and the East. Not content simply with dissolution into a transcendental, other-worldly God-consciousness, nor with concentration on the outer life and its powers to the exclusion of anything other or higher, Sri Aurobindo has created the teachings of a Divine Life on Earth. This volume comprises all of Sri Aurobindo's shorter prose writings on Yoga and philosophy written after 1910 and published during his lifetime. The present edition differs from the first (Centenary) edition in several respects. The contents have been ordered to follow strictly the arrangement of the material as it was issued by Sri Aurobindo in his lifetime.

This is a new release of the original 1953 edition.

This book aims primarily to help the reader become aware of the influence and action of the soul in life and then to describe and clarify the various states of consciousness that pertain to the experiences of the soul. The selections were chosen to provide the reader with a mental understanding and clarity that can help identify the movements and influences of the psychic being and grow more conscious of which factors are helpful and which harmful in fostering the awareness of one's soul . Finally, it aims to light the way beyond the initial discovery of the psychic being to an aspiration for the complete transformation of the external being, leading to a life governed only by the soul. This book, an expansion on the editor's previous compilation The Psychic Being, deals more extensively with the practical aspects of the subject.

Aryadeva's Catuhsataka, along with the work of Nagarjuna, provided the philosophical basis for much of subsequent Mahayana Buddhism. Like Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarikas, it too was commented upon by Vijnanavada, or Idealist, thinkers as well as by those of the Madhyamaka, or Middle Way school. Thus the Catuhsataka was interpreted in very different, and yet philoslophically rich, fashioned by its sixth century commentators, Dharmapala and Candrakirti: the former saw it as only refuting ascriptions of imagined natures (parikalpitasvabhava) to phenomena while leaving real natures untouched; the latter interpreted Aryadeva's work as a thorough going rejection of all real intrinsic natures (svabhava) whatsoever. Tom Tillemans, in this reprint of his 1990 doctoral thesis, takes up the key themes in Dharmapala's and Candrakirti's philosophies and translates two chapters from their respective works on Catuhsataka. Both commentaries had a strong influence on subsequent Buddhism: Candrakirti's was important for Tibetan developments; Dharmapala's played a formative role in the increasingly marked differentiation between Vijnanavada and Madhyamaka philosophies.