Sri Aurobindo’s works
I have been fascinated with some of the important works of Sri Aurobindo and have been studying them deeply. Having realised some of the hurdles in reading his works, mainly the style of writing, I have prepared my own ‘notes’ on them, using the free download versions of the PDFs.
In the original texts, some sentences run to several lines or a long paragraph, some paragraphs run up to two pages or more, and each chapter runs into many pages—25 to 30—without any further topic-titles. This makes navigating his works difficult for a generation—including my age group—who are used to ‘Powerpoint culture’. Whereas, I have realised that many times each paragraph and each chapter is a garland of gems, with each gem being exquisite.
Hence I attempted certain structural value-adds to provide the benefits I have stated in my Prefaces. The value-add by way of my notes consists of such things as extracting/condensing, consolidating topic wise, adding extensively topic titles upto paragraph level where appropriate, selecting & grouping of important terms with their explanations, providing in-line meaning of archaic/difficult words & phrases, highlighting important sentences, explicitly listing key points within a paragraph, detailed multi-level ‘contents’ pages etc. I have done this primarily to help myself in re-reading, understanding, remembering & referencing his works which provide great insights into our scriptures.
Following are some of the important works of Sri Aurobindo for which I have added such ‘notes’: ‘Essays on the Gita’, ‘Isha Upanishad’, ‘Record of Yoga’, ‘Kena Upanishad’, ‘Philosophy of Upanishads’, ‘Problem of Rebirth’. The ‘About’ of each (given below) provides more details of these versions. If you find it interesting/useful to you in your studies, please send me a request email to receive a free copy of the full version.
Suggested order of reading/studying these is: (i) Isha (ii) Kena (iii) Philosophy of Upanishads. These three will help form a solid foundation for the understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of Upanishads. This forms the essential basis for many of his other works. Subsequent to these, others can be taken up in any order.