Aakriti
20 February 2012, 01:46 PM
It is good to have found this forum.
I was raised Vedanta (Hollywood Temple) since I was very young (about three). As a child, in addition to the regular lectures and pujas in the "adult part" of the temple, I also went to the Sunday School they conducted for us kids, which was located in Swami Prabhavananda's personal living quarters. For Sunday School, the hearth of his fireplace became our altar, and I remember with great fondness the pujas we did there.
I never exactly "left" (I've always been, at my inner, most fundamental base, Hindu)...and I've always gone to the Hollywood temple for visits of one kind or another (to meditate, or to take advantge of their wonderful bookstore/gift shop), and the Hollywood temple has always been--without the slightest question or hesitation--THE most spiritual, three-dimensional "place" I know of...but through the years I've also done my share of intellectual and spiritual exploring.
And now the explorations "abroad" have been completed and I'm very happily and with enormous inner peace back where I started...right "here."
I recently began organized Sanskrit lessons (for the first time in my life). I look back to the people I've known in my life, many of them Westerners who were enormously intellectually accomplished in Vedanta, Sanskrit, and Hindu studies (the Hollywood temple attracted some of the acknowledged luminaries of the world, and these were the people I grew up knowing, at least from a child's perspective), and I realize that what I (as a child) once thought so unbelievably magical, and almost unthinkable as something that I could ever do myself, is what it is exactly "right" for me to be doing now.
I am back.
Namaste to all.
I was raised Vedanta (Hollywood Temple) since I was very young (about three). As a child, in addition to the regular lectures and pujas in the "adult part" of the temple, I also went to the Sunday School they conducted for us kids, which was located in Swami Prabhavananda's personal living quarters. For Sunday School, the hearth of his fireplace became our altar, and I remember with great fondness the pujas we did there.
I never exactly "left" (I've always been, at my inner, most fundamental base, Hindu)...and I've always gone to the Hollywood temple for visits of one kind or another (to meditate, or to take advantge of their wonderful bookstore/gift shop), and the Hollywood temple has always been--without the slightest question or hesitation--THE most spiritual, three-dimensional "place" I know of...but through the years I've also done my share of intellectual and spiritual exploring.
And now the explorations "abroad" have been completed and I'm very happily and with enormous inner peace back where I started...right "here."
I recently began organized Sanskrit lessons (for the first time in my life). I look back to the people I've known in my life, many of them Westerners who were enormously intellectually accomplished in Vedanta, Sanskrit, and Hindu studies (the Hollywood temple attracted some of the acknowledged luminaries of the world, and these were the people I grew up knowing, at least from a child's perspective), and I realize that what I (as a child) once thought so unbelievably magical, and almost unthinkable as something that I could ever do myself, is what it is exactly "right" for me to be doing now.
I am back.
Namaste to all.