| How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery of Vedic Dharma |
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| Books By David Frawley |
| EARLY YEARS | |
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Intellectual Awakening and the Counterculture About the age of sixteen I underwent a major intellectual awakening. It came as a powerful experience that radically changed my thoughts and perception. Initially it was quite disturbing and disorienting. While some sort of intellectual ferment had been developing in me for several years, this one resulted in a profound break from the authorities and ideas of my childhood and the vestiges of my American education. It initiated a series of studies that encompassed western intellectual thought and first brought me in contact with eastern spirituality. It marked an important transition in my life. At this time I began to write a philosophical type of poetry, which I kept secretly to myself. I lost interest in science and mathematics that had been my main mental pursuits. My interest in Europe became stronger but moved from its history to its thought and culture. America began to seem a rather provincial country, devoid of sophistication or culture.I looked briefly into rationalist philosophers like Kant, Hegel or Bertrand Russell but was not drawn to them. I found them too dominated by a dry reason that seemed devoid of life and creativity. My mind had a certain emotional or artistic urge and was not content with mere logic or science. The existentialists at first stimulated me with their deep questions about consciousness and perception. I began to think about consciousness and how it works. They were rather depressing as well. Emptiness, despair and suicide were ideas I could relate to as part of growing up in a world without meaning, but I was not so morbid in temperament as to be swallowed up by them. Existentialism eventually seemed to me to be a rather dry and hopeless affair.
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