This book is an outcome of my bicultural experience as a student and
teacher of psychology in India and North America. As a student in India,
the psychology I learned in the classroom was totally Western in its
perspective. A book on Indian economics, called Bharatfya Arthasastra,
written by the late Pal)Q. it Dindayal Upadhyaya, inspired me to look
into the sources of the Indian intellectual tradition for an indigenous
per- spective within the discipline of my training and research. The
late Balsastri Hardas suggested K. K. Kolhatkar's Bharatfya
Manasasastra, a book that translates and comments on Patanjali's Yoga
sutras in Marathi, as a sourcebook of psychological concepts of Indian
origin. My response to this initial exposure to Yoga as a system of
psychology was one of bewilderment. Having been trained in psychology
with Woodworth and Schlosberg's Experimental Psychology as the textbook
of psychology, I could not comprehend how ideas so diverse as those of
Patanjali and Woodworth and Schlosberg could be designated by a common
label- psychology! Obviously, it was necessary to sort out psychology's
meaning in different sociocultural contexts, beginning with the most
fundamental notions on which psychological concepts are based. This book
represents an attempt to understand psychological concepts, especially
those re- lating to consciousness and the self, as they developed in the
different intellectual traditions and cultural contexts of India and the
West.
