Publisher's Note

This volume contains the talks Mother gave to the students, teachers and sadhaks of the Ashram in her "Wednesday classes" of 1956. This year Mother usually began by reading from her French translations of two of Sri Aurobindo's works. For most of the year the book was The Synthesis of Yoga (Part One, "The Yoga of Divine Works"). On November 21 she took up Thoughts and Glimpses. After the reading Mother answered questions on the text or on other subjects. These questions were either asked on the spot or submitted to her beforehand in writing.

The talks, conducted in French, were tape-recorded at the time. They were first published in an incomplete form in the quarterly Bulletin of Physical Education (later Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education) in various issues from 1956 to 1963.. The first complete edition of the French text, Entretiens 1956, was published in 1968.BetweenMarch 1970and August 1974a new English translation, complete and in chronological order, appeared in the monthly journal Mother India. This complete translation was brought out in book-form in 1973 as Questions and Answers .1956. The present volume, number eight of the Collected Works of the Mother (Centenary Edition) is a revision of the 1973 edition.

For quoted passages from Sri Aurobindo's works, references are to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library edition..