Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo

Publisher's Note

We are greatly privileged to publish this book, which blends scholarship with true humility that is characteristic of a genuinely spiritual person, under the Editions India imprint of Stone Hill Foundation Publishing. Since we started working with the author, Dr. A. S. Dalal, on the manuscript of this book five years ago (then in a different form and with a different focus), we have been very impressed by his sincerity, scholarship, and equanimity. The first draft of this book had to be reframed after nearly three years of work partly as the author sought input on it from Eckhart, and mainly because of the need for minimizing verbatim quotes from his published works and recorded talks. A lesser person would have found this daunting, but Dr. Dalal accepted the task in a true spirit of surrender and wrote a new book in another year's time. Added to this has been delay from our side in publishing the book. During the whole process of transcribing the audiotapes of the interview with Eckhart and the preparation of the manuscript for publication, we have seen nothing but patience, kindness, and unfailing courtesy and appreciation from Dr. Dalal. This has been a very positive experience for us in working with an author. We have learned much from the experience, and for this we are graceful co Dr. Dalal.

We also acknowledge and appreciate the key role played by Lynn Crawford who, since the time the manuscript was first submitted co us, has very ably facilitated correspondence between us. and Dr.

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Dalai, and helped us in getting our queries answered and tying up loose ends throughout the publishing process.

Readers will find three levels of conventions in the treatment of Sanskrit terms in this book. A large volume of quoted text from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother warranted that we follow in the text the same print style adopted by them in their original works. These consist of the Sanskrit terms transliterated into roman script starting with a capital letter (though the normal treatment of these would be lower-case italics), those starting with a lower-case letter, and, occasionally, lower-case letters with diacritical marks. The only departure from this convention has been a slightly different spelling adopted in the main text of the book for the transliteration of certain words such as Advaita (instead of "Adwaita" in the quoted text).

This book is being published simultaneously under two imprints of Stone Hill Foundation Publishing—Editions India for Asia and Arunachala Press for the rest of the world. It is also available in hardbound and paperbound editions.

Mohan Nair

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