Acknowledgements

The list of people to whom we owe an immense gratitude begins early. In fact, it begins with the ancient ṛṣis who composed the beautiful verses of the Ṛg Veda, and it continues right into our present times through a long, uninterrupted lineage of yogis, poets, sages, philosophers and common men and women, who together developed the theory and practice on which Indian psychology is based.

Amongst our contemporaries, there are again too many great individuals to name all, but we would like to mention at least a few. The first who come to mind are no doubt the authors of the chapters in this book. They have not only borne with us during the long period of gestation Foundations and Applications of Indian Psychology took to come out, but they have also contributed in many other ways to the development of Indian psychology as a science. Then there are the many others have not contributed directly to the text, but who have worked for Indian psychology in other ways, whether by writing, research or the organization of seminars, workshops and conferences. We would like to mention, for example, George Mathews, Janak Pandey, S. Narayanan, Usha Ram, Indrani Sanyal, P. Krishna Rao, Krishna Mohan, Sonali Bhatt Marwaha, Ramana Kumar Kanuri, H. R. Nagendra and his colleagues at SVYASA, and in Pondicherry A. S. Dalal, Panch Ramalingam, Soumitra Basu, Larry Seidlitz and Ananda Reddy, but there are so many others.

Special mention need be made of Kireet Joshi, who in the early years of this century gave his unstinting moral and financial support to the development of Indian psychology as the then Chairman of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. Similarly, we are grateful to K. Ramakrishna Rao, who personally and in his many official capacities has made a unique contribution to the development of Indian psychology. During the last ten years, the ICPR and ICSSR have enabled almost every seminar related to Indian psychology in India. In this connection we also want to express our gratitude to Rajiv Malhotra and the Infinity Foundation.

Finally there are those at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Indian Psychology Institute who have helped with the production of this book: Neeltje Huppes, without whose continuous support the book might not have come out at all, Vladimir Iatsenko who provided us with the Glossary, and Lynn Crawford, Divya Parasher and Jyoti Dalal who proofread and typeset the texts. We owe a similar gratitude to the staff of Pearson Education and to the many others who by their interest, silent support or hard work have helped with the development of Indian psychology and the production of Foundations and Applications of Indian Psychology.

We are grateful to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust for giving us permission to use quotations from Sri Aurobindo’s writings.