Synthesis of Yoga
The Synthesis of Yoga is Aurobindo's principle work on Yoga, comparing the methods of the various schools of traditional yoga, and providing the comprehensive way for following the true path to Divine consciousness. It is the primary work on Integral Yoga, the system of yoga that Sri Aurobindo developed.
The book originally appeared in serial form in Arya, published between 1914 and 1921.
Synthesis of Yoga is divided into four parts: the Yoga of Divine Works, of Integral Knowledge, of Divine Love, and of Self Perfection. The first three correspond to the threefold yoga of the Bhagavad Gita (i.e. karma-, jnana-, and bhakti-yoga), while the last (incomplete) section gives Sri Aurobindo's own development and synthesis of these three paths.
Sri Aurobindo revised the text of the book during three distinct periods. These are: In the 1920s, mostly minor corrections to certain chapters; a full-scale revision during or around 1932, with a view to publishing The Synthesis as a book; and during the early 1940s, further work on the later chapters of Part I, as well as beginning two new chapters, which he apparently intended to add to this part, but which he abandoned before completion. During the later part of the 1940s, Sri Aurobindo lightly revised the entire first part of the Synthesis while preparing it for publication.
In all, some chapters were extensively revised, others had only minor revision, and some have not been revised at all.
In 1972 The Synthesis of Yoga was published as Volumes 20 and 21 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL); a popular edition that was reprinted many times.
The fifth, 1999 edition, includes some material and revisions not previously published.
Read more about this topic: Collected Works Of Sri Aurobindo
Famous quotes containing the words synthesis of, synthesis and/or yoga:
“It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: “What is he thinking?” and he knows nothing.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)