|
Notes on the Texts
Record of the Yoga/1913/February. This heading was written by Sri Aurobindo inside the front cover of the exercise book used to keep the Record of 1-14 February 1913. Record entries occupy only the first seventeen pages of the notebook. No record was kept for the last part of February and the whole of March 1913.
Record of Yoga — April. This heading was written by Sri Aurobindo inside the front cover of the exercise book used to keep the Record for much of 1913. During this year entries were kept in a rather irregular fashion. The exercise book contains entries for the following dates: 1 and 12 April, 19 and 21 May 1-11 July 5-21 September 11 November to 2 December 12-21 December
No entries were written or survive from the months of August or October. During all of June and parts of September, November and December entries were made on loose sheets or in other notebooks. The Record of November and December will be published in the next issue.
Record [June 1913]. During this month the Record was kept in three separate forms which in some places overlap so that there are two entries for the same date. 1) Between 4 June (date written below the first entry) and 28 June, under the heading "Record", Sri Aurobindo made regular diary entries similar to those that make up the rest of the Record of Yoga, although more tabular and abbreviated. These entries were written on three sheets of blank writing paper, each folded to form four narrow pages. 2) Between 16 and 24 June, on two other sheets of the same sort of paper similarly folded, he wrote under the heading "Script" not only the sort of communications to which he ordinarily gave that name,1 but also general comments. 3) From 25 June to the end of the month he wrote entries similar to the script notations on a separate sheet of paper (of the same kind as the others and similarly folded) under the title "Record of Details & Guidance". Besides all the above there exists a financial account for the fortnight 1-15 June (not included here) in a notebook entitled "Record of Yogic details". It should be remembered that to Sri Aurobindo "All life is Yoga".
[Record of Yoga. 1-11 July 1913.] This is the regular Record of Yoga, continued in the notebook that was begun on 1 April. The entry of July 1st starts on the page that has the end of the entry of 21 May.
1 For a discussion of script in the Record, see Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1986), pp. 106-109. [Record of Yoga. 5-30 September 1913.] No Record was kept or survives for August 1913. The first sentence of the first entry of 5 September suggests that a now-lost Record was being kept during the first days of September and perhaps also for part or all of August, perhaps on loose sheets, like the Record of June. The first entry dated September 5 is written in pencil in the notebook begun on 1 April. It occupies the top of a page coming four pages after the one used for the entry of 11 July. The bottom of this page and the whole of the next one were left blank. Then comes the second entry of September 5, which is written in ink, and deals at more length with what was spoken of in the first entry. The first entry maybe thought of as a draft of the second. The notebook begun on 1 April 1913 was set aside after the entry of 21 September, not to be taken up again until 24 November. The entries for 22-30 September, which are more in the nature of Script than of simple Record, occupy four pages of the notebook used previously for the "Record of Yogic details" of 1-15 June and the "Record of Yoga/Theosophic" of 13 and 15 September. Between those entries of mid-September and these of the last week intervene twenty-three pages of Vedic translations and notes and six blank pages. The "Eclogue in hexameter" referred to by Sri Aurobindo in the entry of September 20th-21st is almost certainly "Tiresias" (Collected Poems (1972), p.608).
Record of Yoga. Theosophic. The two entries under this heading were written in the notebook used subsequently for the Record of 22-30 September. Note that a regular Record entry was written on 13 September, the date of the first "Theosophic" entry. |