PREFACE
Yoga is generally associated with certain set practices such as postures, breathing exercises, meditation and the like. In addition, yoga is understood as consisting in certain rules and norms pertaining to aspects of one's outer life, such as diet, habits and acts of conduct. However, as taught by Sri Aurobindo, yoga consists essentially in inner psychological work aimed at the change and transformation of conscious-ness. As he states: "Yoga is nothing but practical psychology""; "...the whole method of Yoga is psychological; it might almost be termed the consummate practice of a perfect psychological knowledge."2
This book, meant primarily for the general spiritual seeker rather than for the practitioner of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, deals only with the initial and preliminary steps to-wards the radical change of consciousness aimed at by the Integral Yoga. These initial tasks of psychospiritual growth consist in: emerging progressively from the unconscious state which one is more or less a fused part of the collective mass rather than an independent individual who is "a truly mental man who thinks for himself, is free from all outer influences, who has an individuality, who exists, has his reality" (p. 104); developing an increasingly greater understand-ing of oneself by becoming more and more conscious of one's being in all its complexity in order to discern the springs of
1. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Birth Cente-mary Library, Vol. 20, p. 39.
2. Ibid., p. 496.
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