Jaya, Radhe!

Esteemed Beverley Zabrieskii et al,

Here it is 2.54 AM in the small town of Thoubal in the remote Indian State of Manipur in the foothills of the Himalaya. It is cold. We are accommodated in a little cottage built for us, and are in the middle of this India tour.

It has been moving so fast that we only now got a chance to read the full newsletter you sent to us. We will contact the Jungian Group in Bombay and try to visit them while we are there.

The newsletter has given us such incredible resources for our work: Bridges between Jung and the traditional wealth of Indian psychology that we have discovered.

We have not heard from Prof. Shamdasani in response to our previous letter and certainly to not want to distract him from his premier work in publication.

BUT, we are sending a copy of this letter to him with a small note that on the 7th-9th of February we will be back in Kolkata and stationed with our very esteemed friend and colleague Professor Dr. Samaresh Bandyopadhyay, former professor and head of the Department of Ancient India History and Culture at the University of Calcutta.

He mentioned that if he had a little more information he might be able to research Jung's visit to and activities at the University of Calcutta.

If this is of any use to the Philemon Foundation then please do not hesitate to text or call us: +91 96 43 43 1330, or email us.

Already we have met with Dr. Kalyana Kumar, Director of the Indian fine arts academy, the Director of the Indian Council on Philosophical Research, presented at a symposium on the Bhagavata Purana sponsored by Madras University and Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, lectured to 120-students and five professors at Asutosh College in Kolkata adn almost died of a heart attack etc. etc.
We see many avenues of approach open for our efforts.
Thank you so much.

At your service.
Hanumatpresaka Swami
(Prof. H. H. Robinson)

 

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From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] 
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2016 11:19 PM
Subject: Nios and Jung in India
Greetings for the new year.
Forgive my delay in response. Christmas is a time for family chaos and energy.
I am glad to know you are returning to Peru. The Lima event was superb - I hope you are proud of what you produced.
I myself am going to lecture in Buenos Aires in mid July so it would not be possible for me to attend the 2017 Lima event.
I recently received a Jungian organization's - IAAP- newsletter about new Jung ams in India and have pasted it below in case it is of interest to you.
I send this quickly - but will write more soon.
Yours
Beverley

-------------------------------- 

from Ashok Bedi, CSJA
IAAP Liaison Person for India

 

In 2003, my colleague and mentor, Murray Stein, approached me at the
C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago to undertake the initiatives for developing
the IAAP groups in India. It was a daunting task to establish some ground
in a vast old culture of India with over 1.1 billion citizens and no Jungian
presence. Synchronistically, I was invited to lead the Annual Study
Groups to India under the auspices of the New York Foundation – “In the
Footsteps of Carl Jung in India” and “A Jungian Encounter with the Soul
of India” series to replicate fractals of Jung’s memorable trip to India in
1937-38, which is well recorded by Jung in his various publications. These
study groups as well as my efforts to establish Jungian presence in India is
in its 12th year. While these Annual India Study Groups are not a part of
the IAAP Developing Groups initiative, they have done much to introduce
the Global Jungian audience to the intricacies of the Indian Cultural
Psyche and its contributions to the Collective (www.pathtothesoul.com).
Taj Mahal
(Photo: N. Kiehl)
15
After exploring possibilities in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and
Ahmedabad, I found some interest at my Alma Mater – the B.J. Medical
College at the Department of Psychiatry in Ahmedabad with the help of
my colleagues, Dr. Bipul Sinha and Dr. Ganpat Vankar, at the Department
of Psychiatry, with enthusiastic response from the Psychiatric Community.
It began as the India Jung Center at Ahmedabad, the place of Mahatma
Gandhi’s Magnum Opus in his unique struggle to confront the British
Colonial oppression using the timeless principles of Ahimsa (nonviolence)
and peaceful civil disobedience. Over the next several years, I was able to
secure the support from other colleagues and it blossomed into the
establishment of the Jung Center Bangalore under the leadership of
Kusum Dhar Prabhu, the Jung Center Ahmedabad presently under the
leadership of Dr. Minakshi Parikh (Chairperson – Dept. of Psychiatry at
the B.J. Medical College) and the Jung Center Mumbai under the
leadership of Rev. Fr. Joseph Pereira (Managing Director of the largest
NGO in India – Kripa Foundation, inspired by and in collaboration of
Mother Teresa).
The efforts at these three centers were supported by the generous
donations of Jungian Books by my colleagues at the C.G. Jung Institute of
Chicago. Dr. June Singer donated her large collection of personal Jungian
Library and we have the June Singer Library of Jungian Literature at the
Jung Center Ahmedabad. Many other peers at the Chicago Institute have
donated books including Dr. Robert Moore, Dr. Margaret Shanahon, Marti
Atkinson, Mary Dougherty to name a few. With these and other
donations, we now have a collection of Collected Works and other Jungian
literature at all three centers. These efforts were supplemented by visiting
volunteer Jungian Faculty from the global Jungian, Psychiatric and Mental
Health Community including Dr. Boris Matthews, Dr. Dinshah Gagrat,
and Dr. B.J. Jakala, Luke Waldo (Family Support Programs Manager at the
Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee) and Christian Gillard.
I have continued to visit India annually to teach and coordinate the
initiatives at these centers and have been supported generously by these
faculty members in their presentations in India. Other visiting analysts
and faculty members have supported the efforts in Bangalore. A few years
ago, the Bangalore group decided to become an independent group under
the leadership of Kusum Dhar Prabhu. They continue to do excellent work
16
to train independent routers, public programs and continuing professional
activities at the Bangalore Center.
Since we only have one Jungian analyst in India at Bangalore, the
India initiative is supported by myself, the visiting faculty and the Dan
Lindley and Lucia Woods Lindley Distance Learning Center at the C.G.
Jung Institute of Chicago, made possible by a generous donation by Dan
Lindley and Lucia Woods Lindley. My gratitude to them for supporting
our efforts in India. We have offered numerous Webinars for the Mumbai
group and are planning a Basic Jung Series for the Jung Center
Ahmedabad. These are supported by my Jungian and Psychiatric peers in
the USA including Dr. Dinshah Gagrat- Chief of Adult Psychiatry and
Eating Disorders Programs at the Aurora Psychiatric Hospital & Dr. Lance
Longo, M.D. – Chief of Addiction Medicine at the Dewey Center in
Milwaukee. The DVDs of these offerings are available in the archives of
these centers for continuing education purposes.
The activities at the Jung Center Ahmedabad recently got a boost
from a synchronistic series of events. Dr. Minakshi Parikh is the new
chairperson of Psychiatry at the B.J. Medical College and her husband, Dr.
Nimesh Parikh, is the chairperson of the competing V.S. Medical College.
Both prestigious Medical Colleges are now collaborating in the Jungian
Studies. The bedroom and the boardroom are now in sync! Additionally,
during my last visit to India, my colleague, Dr. B.J. Jakala from Los Angles
and I did several presentations at the Mumbai and Ahmedabad Centers
including at the GIPS (Gujarat Institute of Psychiatry – the largest private
Psychiatric group in India) under the leadership of their Medical Director
Dr. Himanshu Desai. GIPS mental health professionals seemed keen to
engage the Jungian paradigm in their psychotherapy efforts.
The activities at the Jung Center Mumbai under the leadership of
Rev. Fr. Joe Pereira serves over 70 Kripa centers throughout India and
abroad providing addiction and mental health services to the community
and hence our Jungian efforts there have an exponential impact of all these
centers as all the staff have access to our Webinars and to the annual
presentations in Mumbai center and its affiliates
(www.kripafoundation.org). Fr. Joe is a close friend and collaborator of
the famous Yoga Late Guruji Shree B.K.S. Iyengar and all the Kripa centers
in India and abroad creatively blend the Eastern Contemplative practices
17
with the Allopathic Medicine in their Kripa Model of treatment. Fr. Joe
and I are coauthoring a book on this paradigm: The Spiritual Paradox of
Addiction: the Faith Deficit Syndrome, which is in the prepublication stage.
For the first few years some of the efforts at the India Centers were
partly supported by the IAAP along with my personal funds. In 2007, I
was inspired and supported by my son, Siddhartha, and my wife, Usha, to
establish a Not for Profit Charitable Foundation – the USA India Jung
Foundation www.uijf.org. This Foundation has done some fundraising
and other activities to support our India efforts. Our Board Members
include Siddhartha and Usha Bedi, Dr. Dinshah Gagrat, Dr. Ajit Divgi.
Siddhartha Bedi, Usha and Ashok Bedi, Dr. Ajit Divgi, Dr. Dinshah
Gagrat, Dr. Shobha Gagrat and others have made generous donations to
the Foundation.
The India experience has been a paradoxical experience for me.
When, as Jungians, we present the tenets of Analytical Psychology to
Indians, they see it as a very dilute, westernized version of the ancient
Hindu concepts, the tales their grandmothers taught them as children. For
a long time, I struggled with how to sell snow to Alaskans! Then after
much soul searching, it clicked. While Indians have a lot of Archetypal
Gold in their cultural goldmines, they did not have the modern
methodology to mine their own treasures in a clinically usable form. The
paradigm and the clinical methodology of Analytical psychology offers
much to the Indian Psychiatric and Mental Health Community to make
their timeless wisdom available for the purposes of healing the suffering
and harvesting the fuller potential of its patients and culture. This
perspective has been the focus of our work in India.
While the Jung Centers in India have the basic Jung books, I still
need donations of additional copies of the Collected Works and Neo-
Jungian Books that are clinically relevant to amplify the collections so that
more than one student may borrow these. Kindly send your donations of
core Jungian Books only, directly to:
For the Jung Center Mumbai:
Kripa Foundation: Attention - Krishna Iyer; Ph: 022-26405411
81/A Chapel Road, Mt. Carmel Church, Behind Lilavati
hospital, Bandra (west), Mumbai – 400050, Maharashtra,
India.
18
For Donations to the Jung Center, Ahmedabad:
Dr. Minakshi Parikh
Department of psychiatry, G3 Ward,
B J Medical College and Civil Hospital,
Asarwa, Ahmedabad -380016, Gujarat, India
The India Developing Groups initiative is an Alchemical Process
with its own rhythm. While maintaining a steady momentum of our
efforts in this vast, fast growing, ancient land, I stay open to the
synchronistic happenings to give us the tail winds of the gods. My
gratitude to the Jungian community and other peers, who have generously
donated their time, resources, expertise and feelings to support this effort.
Attached are some of the images of our India activities.
Ashok Bedi, CSJA
IAAP Liaison Person for India

Father Joe Pereira, Dr. B. J. Jakala and Ashok Bedi at the Jung Center, Mumbai
The Jung Centre Ahmedabad
Kusum Dhar Prabhu
The Jung Centre Bangalore