Interactive Q&A session by Poornimaji at University of Virginia

With the immense grace of Sri Swamiji, Shri Poornimaji’s satsang at Virginia started on Friday, February 3rd 2012 with an interactive session with students at University of Virginia. There were several students from different countries like India, Afghanistan and Nepal, who are studying different lines of education like medicine, engineering and commerce.
Shri Poornimaji started the interactive session with a question about Hinduism and based on the responses, started explaining how the name ‘Hindu’ came into existence explaining the origin for that name and the meaning of ‘Sanatana Dharma’.
She continued the session by asking the question ‘Is Hinduism a religion or a way of life and why’. With the responses from the students she explained the concept of ‘Vedas’ and ‘Upanishads’ and susbstantiated the reasons for VedaVyasarji to create the four sects of Vedas viz Rig, Yagur, Sama and Atharvana. She also talked about the four Yugas and expounded on the term Ithihaasam and then enumerated the differences between Ithihaasam and Puranams.
She then let the students ask her questions and replied to their questions very lucidly. Surprisingly the questions asked by the students were thoughtful, based on current day to day incidents in our life. To name a few, the students asked for guidance on how to choose the right and the means to avoid wrong doings, to elaborate on the differences between mantras and black magic things and also to comment about capitalism concepts in the temples. One of the interesting question that came up was regarding the Vedas, and the student wanted to know whether the Vedas has ever been edited or modified by recent scholars, If one is born as Hindu but never followed anything from Vedas will that person still be considered as a Hindu and the last question posed to Poornimaji was to delineate the differences between praying at temple and praying at home and is there any difference when praying at home and in temple.
Shri Poornimaji finally concluded the session with a brief lecture on the Mahamantra, its power, why this is the only mantra that can be chanted by any one, at any time, at any stage, as stated in the Kali Santarana Upanishad and distributed the Mahamantra stickers to the students who all received whole heartedly and conveyed how nice it is to have Shri Poornimaji with them and how blessed they are to have her come and conduct such a wonderful interactive session on Hinduism. With that the session came to close after two hours.