Dear Readers,

In this issue we present three articles focusing on three different aspects of Sri Aurobindo's vision and work: education, Integral Yoga, and poetry. In the first article, Beloo Mehra examines and compares Sri Aurobindo's and Gandhi's aims of education. The aims of an educational approach reflect its fundamental assumptions about the nature of humankind, the direction in which it is developing, as well as its whole pedagogy. This article focuses on the basic assumptions and aims of the two approaches, the ways in which they coincide, and the ways in which they differ.

In the second article, Larry Seidlitz examines how Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga might be utilised as a spiritual basis for the growing movement in the West of spiritual activism. After briefly reviewing the nature of this movement, the article distinguishes between four basic approaches towards spirituality based on Sri Aurobindo's teachings—false spiritual passivity, true spiritual passivity, false spiritual activism, and true spiritual activism. It argues that true spiritual activism must have as its basis true spiritual passivity, and considers spiritual acitivism in the light of Sri Aurobindo.

In the third article, Goutam Ghosal considers Sri Aurobindo's theory of poetry, both as written in The Future Poetry, and in his later correspondence with K.D. Sethna. The article discusses the main features of his theory, and suggests that the theory was not fully worked out in The Future Poetry. The correspondence with K.D. Sethna dating after 1926 focused on overhead poetry, that is, on sources of poetic inspiration from planes of consciousness above the human intelligence. The article argues that Sri Aurobindo's theory pertains to a poetry of the future, and not to past forms of spiritual poetry.

Larry