Though I’ve gone most of my life without seriously thinking about religion, if I had to date the beginning of my spiritual search, I’d have to mention a couple of things from when I was about eight years old. discovering Hinduism Bhagavad Gita
My favourite person at this age was a stereotypical witchy aunt. My childhood love of fairies and Celtic mythology was largely her doing. This was probably the route by which I had come into an inch-deep, but nevertheless dangerous, knowledge of European paganism.
Proudly, I declared to my ultra-conservative Catholic mother my intention to become a pagan. The shrieks of anguish which followed were incomprehensible to my eight-year-old self.
It was also around this time that the vice-principal hauled me into the principal’s office at school – a Catholic school, natch – over my sacrilegious interest in witchcraft. I’d brought in a Sabrina the Teenage Witch novel to school, you see.
My principal, fortunately, was a little wiser than my mother. She let me off the hook with the distinct impression that she was more disappointed in her vice-principal for terrifying me with her grown-up authoritarianism than me for my interest in fantasy fiction.
It was the Harry Potter panic era. Go figure.
By puberty, experiences like these had conspired to drive me away from the church I had been born into, and I lapsed, as many Australians do, into a period of cynical agnosticism that lasted until I was thirty. Religion was for Boomers and sheltered American Bible Belt kids, not rational modern people with their feet firmly planted on planet Earth.
When I did start to feel an interest in religion again, I would find myself drawn to the unfamiliar and, occasionally, the forbidden. My shelves overflowed with books on the Jewish Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian mythology, the gods of Greece and Rome – and more than a few on European witchcraft lore. discovering Hinduism Bhagavad Gita
I need not have been so careful. Many Hindu ideas, like mindfulness and reincarnation, I was already familiar with from New Age YouTube, and the parts I didn’t already know were written in so accessible and relatable a form that I feel sure I could’ve understood it if I had never even heard of India.
I would later learn from interviews that Pai had been unfamiliar with the Bhagavad Gita until being assigned to write a book on it, at which point she became an instant fan. As I read her book, I quickly began to understand her enthusiasm.
More than one Messiah? Temporary Heavens and Hells? A balance of wealth and privilege over multiple lifetimes? Permission to call myself God? If only my mother and vice-principal could hear this stuff. discovering Hinduism Bhagavad Gita
This for sure wasn’t the religion I had grown up with, but I liked it. It was new. It was different. It was fun!
Most importantly of all, it was fair. The structure of the Christian universe, with its one lifetime and eternal Heaven or Hell, had never made sense to me. It seemed unjust, and I felt like Christians knew it but chose to follow a philosophically unsound religion anyway. Fire and brimstone I could stomach, but not hypocrisy.
Admittedly, there were some parts of the Gita I didn’t like. Mainly, the parts that sounded a bit too much like Christianity. ‘Submit to the will of God’? Tried it; I just got my heart broken by Catholic men. discovering Hinduism Bhagavad Gita
My search remains ongoing. I don’t see myself ever giving up my spiritual independence and formally converting to a religion. But I feel comforted knowing that not all faiths condemn the doubtful and the wandering. That it’s possible to think of God as my best friend in the car seat next to me and not as an overly starched Victorian schoolmaster rapping me on the knuckles with a ruler whenever I dare to daydream in the classroom.
I may have to answer for my indecision someday, but at least Hinduism will let me retake the spiritual exam in my next life if I get some of the answers wrong in this one. Having now introduced myself to Lord Krishna, I feel able to face the metaphorical battlefield of Kurukshetra more bravely than I did yesterday. discovering Hinduism Bhagavad Gita
