Jamalpur, Bihar, is the eastern Indian town where the socio-spiritual organization Ánanda Márga Pracáraka Saḿgha was founded in 1955. Jamalpur had previously been known for its large railway workshop, at one time the largest in Asia, established during the British period. Here, in the summer of 1959, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the founder-president of Ananda Marga, gave a remarkable series of lectures to a small group of his followers. The lectures were given in a mixture of English and Hindi.

At the conclusion of the seminar, the notes of the participants were assembled and edited into an English manuscript. The manuscript was then sent to the author for any necessary additions and alterations; thereafter it was published in book form.

Like no other book, but rather like spiritual practice itself, Idea and Ideology methodically, in a careful sequence, expands the reader’s horizons and mind. It concludes by using the spiritual vantage that has been gained, to focus on the social problems of the earth. (The concise socio-economic precepts known as the Five Fundamental Principles of Prout made their first appearance, at least in published form, in this book.)

The author classified Idea and Ideology, together with Ánanda Sútram, as the darshana shástra, or philosophical treatise, of Ananda Marga. Ánanda Sútram, dictated by the author two years after the Idea and Ideology seminar, is a collection of Sanskrit aphorisms with terse explanations. Though its style of presentation is quite different from that of Idea and Ideology, its subject matter and order of topics closely resemble the Idea and Ideology pattern.

The second, third and fourth editions of Idea and Ideology involved only minor grammatical alterations of the first edition. At the time of the drafting of the fifth edition in 1978, certain grammatical changes were made with the express approval of the author. These changes related to passages where initially the meaning was not completely clear, and where therefore to edit the grammar might affect the meaning.

The sixth edition involved no change from the fifth edition. The present, seventh, edition is the first annotated edition.

Readers comparing this edition to other recent editions will find on page 5 of this edition a sequence of nine words, and on page 81 another sequence of nine words, that did not appear in the fourth, fifth and sixth editions. These sequences of words appeared in the first three editions, but were inadvertently omitted thereafter.

Square brackets [    ] in the text are used to indicate translations by the editors or other editorial insertions. Round brackets (    ) indicate a word or words originally given by the author.

[There was a paragraph here that does not apply in this electronic edition.]