In this issue we introduce two books that, although very different in time frame, subject matter, and tone, share a common perspective in that both are based on accounts of personal journeys on the path of the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

At the Feet of the Master: Reminiscences is the story of T. Kodandarama Rao’s stay in Pondicherry from 1921 to 1924. He wrote the book in 1969, more than forty years after he left Pondicherry, and it remains one of the few extant records of life during the early 1920s at what later became the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. It is a very personal story that describes how as a young man the author could not decide between the paths of political action in the independence movement or a dedicated life of spiritual practice. It was an issue of the Arya, which he had found on a library table in his student hostel in Madras that initially drew his interest, and eventually he felt the call to go to Pondicherry and meet Sri Aurobindo in 1920. What follows is an intimate account of the community life centred around Sri Aurobindo at that time, including vivid portraits of some of his fellow sadhaks, as well as descriptions of some of his inner experiences:

A kind of electric drilling was taking place in the head and there was felt the breaking of cells and loosening of knots in the whole being. Channels for the flow of Light and Force were being hewed out and what seemed to be metaphysical phrases when the Master wrote about the pouring of light and force, were becoming concrete experiences.

The other book, more of a philosophical treatment of the psychology of yoga, is A. S. Dalal’s Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo: Two Perspectives on Enlightenment, a comparison of aspects of Tolle’s teaching and Sri Aurobindo’s integral Yoga. The author relates the roots of his own spiritual seeking, which began when he was just a boy of fifteen, and confides that since 1951 when he became “an avowed practitioner of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga”, he felt no strong inclination to study any other spiritual teachings until he came into contact with Eckhart Tolle, whose experiential, psychological insights have been helpful in his practice of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. The longest section of the book compares the teachings of Tolle and Sri Aurobindo on such topics as ego, self, and being; evolution of consciousness; mind and the witness consciousness; mind, thought, and stillness; and the process of inner change. In the final chapter he writes of some insights that have surfaced as the result of his comparative study:

A revelational insight gained from Eckhart is about the role of the mind in concealing and distorting the reality of what we perceive.... What appears to the mind as inanimate is described by Eckhart as vibrant with incredible aliveness. Flowers and trees are described by him as expressions of incredible beauty, stillness, and sacredness. He sees animals living primarily in the joy of being rather than involved merely in a perpetual struggle for existence as they appear through the mental screen. A human being is perceived by him as a beautiful though unconscious form of the One Being in temporary disguise that is thick or thin, depending on the transparency of the human form.

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