WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

I got very attracted to reading through the Hardy Boys. That was my first love of reading. I was probably in the sixth grade.

Then what really introduced me to reading in the more classic sense was “Treasure Island.” I probably read “Treasure Island” five or six times. It was the book that inspired me to read more important literature.

The beauty of reading was that it allowed me to develop my imagination and to experience other cultures and other times and space. That’s why I loved “Treasure Island” so much and read Robert Louis Stevenson’s other books.

Reading led me to my faith--before I even knew I was going there. One of my favorite books by the time I was in eighth grade was a book of Chinese proverbs. I really enjoyed reading the Chinese proverbs, and in college some of my favorite readings were also some of the Eastern texts. And then I started to awaken to the whole Eastern consciousness and Eastern mentality and mind-set.

Then I read a book on yoga, probably in 1977, and followed that up with another book that even to this day I read on occasion, which is a treatise on yoga called “How to Know God.” It is a translation of the yogic sutras of Pantanjali. He was the first person to ever write a treatise on yoga, and it was written before the time of Christ. It might have been written as much as 500 years BC.

Reading is storytelling. In all religions, in all faiths and all life, wisdom and knowledge are passed on through the telling of stories, from one generation to the next, from one culture to another.

In our faith, reading is elementary. Our faith is based on a collection of writings of the Sikh gurus and holy men between the 13th century and 17th century AD. It’s a text of more than 1,400 pages in the original form, that as a tradition we read on a weekly basis, from cover to cover as a congregation, out loud as a community.