The Inner Mounting Flame

Engineered by Don Puluse and produced by McLaughlin, who wrote every track, it was the band's first album and its first of entirely original material. It was credited to the Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin, and the original LP came with a purple insert printing Sri Chinmoy's poem Aspiration. Phil Freeman wrote that the band recorded all eight tracks on 14 August 1971.

Christgau gave it an A, writing that McLaughlin understood far better than Williams how to make a rock band work. AllMusic's Richard S. Ginell gave it five stars and said it defined jazz-rock fusion a year after Bitches Brew, and Bill Milkowski noted in JazzTimes that the group had dared to call itself an orchestra. Kolosky called it the first album to capture the full power of hard rock alongside jazz improvisation, and Freeman called it a barnburner.

Columbia/Legacy reissued it in 1998 with new notes by Bob Belden. The 2011 remaster in The Complete Columbia Albums Collection added a live Noonward Race from the Mar y Sol Pop Festival in Puerto Rico on 3 April 1972. Sean Ono Lennon has written about it as the record that changed his life.