Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

Introduction

The "personal letters" which started appearing sixteen years ago in Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, published from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, have proved to be a popular feature. A large number of readers from all over the country and even some from abroad have expressed their gratitude for helpful treatment of a lot of problems which aspirants to the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother meet on their way. Repeated suggestions have also come to collect the series of "Life-Poetry-Yoga" in book-form so that it may be easily available for consultation.

These suggestions have now been taken up and the project is to divide the letters into a row of volumes of convenient length brought out from time to time at convenient prices. The initiative for the project is due to a group of well-wishers from the U.S.A. belonging to an organisation which they title "The Integra] Life Foundation." I am deeply indebted to these splendid friends.

The dates of the letters do not follow any fixed order. They jump back and forth through months and years. They were collected according to the occasions on which their copies were found in old or recent files. This vagary does not matter because the questions dealt with have no special chronological relevance. The dates could have been omitted, but certain allusions in the letters called, now and then, for accurate time-pointers to give them definite significance.

The letters which appear in the present volume ran.from 1945 to 1995. Some changes have been introduced to clarify certain points. A few omissions have been made to avoid repetitions which did not matter much when they appeared at long intervals and not in serial reading such as a book provides. Some omissions are due to the fact that the writing has found its slot in another book of correspondence, the exchanges that took place between Miss Kathleen Raine and me over nearly three years and has now been published under the caption, Indian Poets and English Poetry in succession

to the earlier exchanges which have come out as The English Language and the Indian Spirit.

It is hoped that the third volume of Life-Poetry-Yoga will prove welcome not only to old readers but also to new ones into whose hands it may chance to fall - fellow-souls who are on a path of the inner life in the midst of worldly concerns and literary interests.

1996

Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)