| How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery of Vedic Dharma |
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| Books By David Frawley |
| EARLY YEARS | |
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| I began to see
in these eastern teachings the answers to the questions that western intellectuals had
failed to achieve. More importantly, they had methods to reach higher states of
consciousness, while the intellectual tradition of the West could only conceptualize about
it. I remember once walking down the street and realizing that the sky was Krishna. I
intuitively felt that such deities reflected cosmic realities, windows on the
universe. I realized that there was a spiritual current in Europe in spite of the
church, and that it not only used Christian symbols in a spiritual context but retained
older pagan symbols and contacts with the eastern world. The alchemical tradition was universal and extended even to China. I discovered that symbols were not only poetic images but had a psychological power, an appeal to the collective unconscious, and that they took us in the direction of the ancient Gods and Goddesses. I found the idea of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva as the three great forces of creation, preservation and destruction in the universe to be make sense. Psychology was another interesting topic that I discovered, including Freud’s ideas on sex, which helped liberate me from my Catholic background, but I felt that he had not understood the deeper levels of the mind and its creative process. Then I encountered the works of Carl Jung on psychology and alchemy, which brought on another revelation. I spent my summer after high school in 1968 not preparing for college but going through Jung’s esoteric works on Psychology and Alchemy. The images that he pointed out – the sun and the lion, the phoenix and the cauldron - were much like the poetic images that I was working with. They brought me in contact with older European mystical traditions.
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