Kenneth Solomon

I was born into a secular Jewish family. My parents were both from New York. My father worked for the federal government, and they moved to Washington, D.C. in the early 1950s. I was born in 1958. I lived in a  suburb until I graduated from high school. In my first semester of college, I met some followers of the Hare Krishna movement. And in my second semester, I stopped my studies and moved to the ashram, in the temple.

I grew up in the midst of that, with an older brother and a father who were fairly politically active. When I was 10 years old, I went with them down to some of the big protests against the war in Vietnam. At an early age, I was very introspective and was thinking the world was kind of messed up. I didn’t want to be another cog in the wheel. I wanted to do something that was going to help change the situation. I could see that a lot of people weren’t so happy. So, I was kind of on a quest even from the time of my pre-teen years.

 A friend and I, and a few other friends, started out with transcendental meditation. And around that time, I became a vegetarian and started reading some Eastern philosophy—a little bit of Buddhism, a little bit of the Upanishads, the Vedas, and so on. But philosophically, it didn’t really click for me; it didn’t really make too much sense.

I was already into the Eastern philosophical area, but I was struggling with it, reading a lot of books that didn’t really make sense to me. When I met some of the followers of Srila Prabhupada, the Hare Krishna devotees, they gave me a small book, Shri ish Upanishad. And just by reading that book, by the time I got through even the introduction—which was a transcript of a lecture that Srila Praba gave titled, “What are the Vedas”—gave me a whole overview of the Veda teachings. To use a cliché, the lightbulb went off…or went on. 

So, for a few months I stayed at home and just read and chanted on my own. And then my parents saw that I was determined to do it. A few months before I turned 18, they said, “OK, if you want to go, then go ahead.” And they weren’t so happy at the time because I wasn’t going to school. I was shaving my head, taking a vow of celibacy, and these kinds of things that don't go over with the normal middle-class, secular Jewish type of thing.