Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother.

AUROBINDO, Sri .

Item Number: 127545

Pondicherry, India : Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953.

First edition of this work on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by Mirra Alfassa on the front free endpaper, “To Sisir Kumar with blessings Mirra.” Mirsa Alfassa known to her followers as The Mother, was a French spiritual guru and a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him and called her by the name “The Mother”. She founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and established Auroville as a universal town; she was an influence and inspiration to many writers and spiritual personalities on the subject of Integral Yoga. Mirra Alfassa (Mother) was born in Paris in 1878 to a Sephardic Jewish bourgeois family. In her youth, she traveled to Algeria to practice occultism along with Max Théon. After returning, while living in Paris, she guided a group of spiritual seekers. In 1914, she traveled to Pondicherry, India and met Sri Aurobindo and found in him “the dark Asiatic figure” of whom she had had visions and called him Krishna. During this first visit, she helped publish a French version of a periodical Arya, which serialized most of Sri Aurobindo’s post-political prose writings. During the First World war she was obliged to leave Pondicherry. Thereafter, a 4-year stay in Japan, in 1920, she returned to Pondicherry for good. Gradually, as more and more people joined her and Sri Aurobindo, she organized and developed Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In 1943, she started a school in the ashram and in 1968 established Auroville, an experimental township dedicated to human unity and evolution. She died on 17 November 1973 in Pondicherry. Very good in a very good dust jacket. We have never seen another signed example.