Master revealed to us that he himself had been Krishna’s closest friend and disciple, Arjuna. (“Prince of devotees,” the Bhagavad Gita calls him.) We found it easy to believe that he had been that mighty warrior, for Master’s incredible will power, his innate gift for leadership, and his enormous physical strength (when he chose to exert it), all pointed to someone with the tendencies of a mighty, conquering hero.

Divine power is rooted in love
People who knew only of Paramhansa Yogananda’s extraordinary love and compassion, his sweetness, and his childlike simplicity were sometimes taken aback when they encountered his power. Few realize that power and divine love are opposite sides of the same coin.

Indeed, divine love is no gentle sentiment, but the greatest force in the universe. Such love could not exist without power. Great saints would never use their power to suppress or coerce others, but power is, nevertheless, inextricably a part of what it means to be a saint. It took extraordinary power, for example, for Jesus Christ, alone in a crowd, to drive the money-changers from their tradition-sanctioned places in the temple.

Worldly people fear this power in the saints, and, fearing it, persecute them. They don’t realize that a saint’s power is rooted in love, or that it threatens nothing but people’s delusions and ignorance-induced suffering.

Yogananda’s power was not only a product of his divine awareness; his human personality, too, reflected past incarnations as a warrior and conquering hero. In Calcutta, in his youth, he was approached more than once by people who wanted him to lead a revolution against the British. There was something in his very bearing that bespoke the intrepid warrior.

William: noble, generous, forgiving
He told us more than once that in a former life he had been William the Conqueror. Educated as I had been during my early years in the English educational system, I had always thought of William as one of history’s great villains. On learning that that supposed “villain” was my own Guru, I made it a point, needless to say, to study several biographies of William in order to get a broader picture of what he’d really been like.

I found that William the Conqueror was indeed, in every way, a great man. Morally, in an age of widespread profligacy, he was chaste and self-controlled. Spiritually he was deeply religious, and never (so I read) missed a day of mass in his life. He was noble, generous, and forgiving.

A divine commission
He lived, however, in an age when conquest could be accomplished only by a very strong will. He told us he had been given a divine commission, which I have since come to understand was to bring England out of the Scandinavian sphere and under the influence of Roman Christianity.

During his lifetime, William promoted the recovery of old monasteries and generally gave great support to the church, endorsing also the concept of chastity for the clergy. William and Archbishop Lanfranc, together, unified the church, and reorganized it from the ground up.

Quite as important in the context of those times, they connected the church administratively and liturgically with Rome. His closest friends were spiritual men like Archbishop Lanfranc (who in this life, Yogananda stated, was Swami Sri Yukteswar) and Saint Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury.

“The will of a single man”
William’s occasionally harsh behavior was forced on him by necessity, and never sprang from personal anger (though, consistent with my observation of Master himself on occasion, William’s demeanor sometimes appeared very fierce). I asked Master once (I was thinking of his lifetime as William): “Sir, is an avatar [a divine incarnation] always aware of his oneness with God’s omnipresence?” “He never loses his consciousness of inner freedom,” Master replied.

William’s life, when studied in this light, gains new luster and meaning. The British historian, E.A. Freeman, wrote in his biography, William the Conqueror: “[What we English are today] has largely come of the fact that there was a moment our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that was William [the Conqueror].”

Earlier, Freeman stated: “The Norman conquest has no exact parallel in history largely owing to the character and position of the man who wrought it. The history of England for the last eight hundred years has largely come of the personal character of [that] single man.”

William’s legacy: a united kingdom
England itself was by no means so Anglo-Saxon as relatively recent writers, including Sir Walter Scott, imagined. The north, according to recent DNA testing of old bones, was heavily Scandinavian, and the east came under what was called Danelaw, and must have been more Danish than Anglo-Saxon.

It was William who united the constantly warring earldoms into one kingdom. His legacy, moreover, which bound every native to primary loyalty to his king, saved England the fate of medieval Europe, which saw constant baronial conflicts.

England’s government dates back to the conquest by William, who brought England to a level of security, stability, and legal organization that made it possible for it to survive the death of medieval society and continue on into the modern age. England is the oldest continuous government in the world, the second being the United States.

Swami Kriyananda: William’s youngest son
Some months after Master’s passing, an inspiration came to me: I suddenly realized that I had been his youngest son, Henry, who later was crowned as Henry I. I had always known with an inner certainty that I had been a king in the past—not that it mattered to me in the present. Leadership had always come to me naturally, however, and in no way caused me to feel important because of it.

I now went to the Los Angeles public library and read up on facts about Henry that were too detailed to appear in a book intended for the general public. It surprised me to see how many parallels there were, even in little matters, between Henry’s life and my own.

Henry had been born late enough in William’s life to be in a position, after a relatively brief hiatus, to carry on William’s mission. The last thirty-three years of Henry’s life were years of exceptional peace and prosperity in England.

The most powerful king in Western Europe
Though Henry I is considered the “least-known” of all English kings, the reason for his obscurity is that he simply worked quietly to establish his father’s mission. Albeit known in his lifetime as the most powerful king in Western Europe, he never expressed an interest in enlarging his dominions.

All he ever did was conquer back territory that had been lost by his older brothers’ ineptitude. His Coronation Charter became the basis of the future Magna Carta.

An embarrassment to his memory
William’s first two sons were an embarrassment to his memory. He bequeathed Robert, his oldest, the dukedom of Normandy, knowing that he could not give him the crown of England because of his traitorous nature. (Even as William was lying on his deathbed, Robert, with the aid of the king of France, was staging a rebellion against him.)

William Rufus, the second son, was loyal to their father in his fashion, but gave no evidence of understanding William’s mission, and dedicated himself wholly to his own power, position, and glory. Perhaps a hiatus in William’s mission was necessary for his true spiritual heir, Henry, to develop a deep understanding of it.

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A different kind of conquest
Yogananda, like William the Conqueror at Hastings, came to America to establish a beachhead—not, in this case, of worldly conquest, but of divine communion.

Like William the Conqueror, Yogananda was divinely ordained to play a very difficult role. He came to a whole new continent where he was completely unknown and opposed by many. He needed an indomitable spirit of conquest to be able to bring God’s message to the world for this new age of energy, the age of Dwapara Yuga.

Yogananda’s mission was to change world consciousness. The model he established on all levels of life has been so all- encompassing that I believe he will one day be called, “The Avatar of Dwapara Yuga.”

Yogananda’s spiritual family
Many have been born and are being born in the West to assist Yogananda in his mission. Many others are being attracted to it for the first time by the radiant magnetic influence, the spiritual “gravitational field,” it has created.

Yogananda’s spiritual family forms part of a greater spiritual “nation” of which Jesus Christ and Sri Krishna (in this age, Babaji) are also leaders. Such families are like mighty nations. To them is given the real task of guiding the human race—not in the way governments do, by official ordinances, but by subtler, spiritual influence.

*Excerpted from The New Path — Chapters: “Reincarnation,” “The Guru’s Reminiscences,” and “A New Way of Life.”  (Supplemental excerpts from: The Light of Superconsciousness, Crystal Clarity Publishers; and a March 2007 talk in India.)

For a related article, see below: William the Conqueror: Laying the Foundation for an Age of Energy, by Catherine Van Houten.

Resources:
To view Swami Kriyananda’s talk in India discussing Paramhansa Yogananda and William the Conqueror, click here Discussion of this subject starts at 13:27 minutes.

For information on The New Path by Swami Kriyananda, click here

Clarity Magazine articles can be printed in “text only” format, using your own computer.

Nowadays if a person wants to spend all of their time in spiritual pursuits, there is the question of how they will survive. In India, a person who wants to give his life completely to God is supported. People there believe in this way of life and feel that they will get good karma by helping others pursue it.

The way of a sadhu
The classic way of a sadhu is to sit in one place and meditate. People bring him food if they wish to and if not, he’ll go without food that day. A sadhu will sometimes go from house to house, but he never asks for anything; he just stands there. If people wish to give to him they can; if not, he goes on.

He depends completely upon God but within the framework of a society whose teachings support this way of life. This is the ideal, and there are those who, because of this system, are able to dedicate all their energies to seeking God.

That time will come
My dream is for something similar here at Ananda, but it won’t come about quickly. In the West there have been monastic communities in the past that were supported by a church and a large congregation of believers. Today, however, the monasteries are practically empty because people aren’t able to understand the relevance of that way of life.

When we can bring society as a whole up to a level where people commonly include God in their lives, then it will it be time for the next stage, where a group of people can meditate and chant twenty hours a day. That time will come. For now, however, our duty is to seek God but also to help the world.

A hunger for spiritual values
The first step is to create communities like Ananda to bring back spiritual values. Today spiritual values have been eclipsed by the dry, rationalistic approach of modern science. There is such an emphasis on facts and reason, and such a fear of the “corrupting” influence of feeling, that people believe you must exclude all feeling in order to see things clearly.

Feeling, however, is one of the most important aspects of finding truth, even in the scientific world. Einstein said that great scientific discoveries aren’t possible without a sense of mystic awe before the universe. It’s that sense of awe, of feeling, that uplifts the consciousness to where it can receive the intuitions that permit great discoveries.

Society has lost touch with that level of intuition, and one finds, in many parts of the world, a growing hunger for spiritual values and a new consciousness emerging. But it’s unfocused; people don’t know how to express it. They don’t understand that to live spiritually means to live in the consciousness of God, and to bring Him into every aspect of life: work, marriage, child-raising, money, recreation—into everything.

Small communities like Ananda, where people can create new models of living based on spiritual values, will bring this new consciousness into enough focus that it will have the clarity and magnetism to inspire others.

A new kind of marriage
Marriage is one area of life very much in need of redefining. I had a very interesting discussion about this with friends who wanted to join Ananda and weren’t married. I said, “Why, if you have this love for each other, don’t you get married?”

Their response was surprising. They said that a number of their friends had lived together happily for years without being married. After they married, within six months they were divorced.

The couple explained: Without marriage these friends were able to define their own relationship. As soon as they took the formal step of marriage, suddenly there was this weight of social conditioning that says, “Now that you’re my spouse, you’re supposed to treat me a certain way.” With all these new expectations, the relationship became a burden they weren’t able to handle.

A broadening of ideals
Marriage, to be successful, must be based on a free sharing, not on a mutual sense of obligation. Obligation can be another form of bondage. When married people look at each other with the thought, “What’s in it for me?” love flies out the window.

We need to stop thinking of marriage as a closed corporation. Marriage should be a means of dedicating oneself to a broadening of ideals, of vision. It should be a means by which two people give each other the strength to reach out and embrace the world, not to create a little castle with a mote that excludes the world.

Unfortunately, people are not raised to think expansively. There is, rather, a growing tendency in society these days to think in terms of what the world owes us, and of getting ours, rather than of what each of us, personally, can do for others, and for the world, to make it a better place to live in.

Attitudes such as these are threatening the very structure of society. We are living in an atomic age, and if we are to have the maturity to deal with the challenges posed by weapons that can kill millions at a time, we must learn to think in new ways.

Attunement with nature
Our relationship with nature is another area of life in need of redefining. We must realize that we have a responsibility not only to unborn generations but also to this planet that has lovingly given us birth.

To think that we can plunder the planet and take all of its resources for this generation’s needs is totally irresponsible. The saints in India say that the planet has become so erratic in recent years because people are no longer in tune with the harmony of nature. That’s why we have floods, droughts, excessively cold weather, and similar extremes.

Reawakening the divine forces
The divine forces are leaving this planet because we give them no attention. The spring box near my home at Ananda Village is an example. When I bought the land I was told that the spring had never gone dry. Yet, when we moved there, it was giving us only one or two gallons a minute.

I kept insisting that there was more water, and eventually the others started clearing out the spring box, cleaning the spring. More and more water began to come until very soon we were getting ten to fifteen gallons a minute.

Just as a spring goes dry if it isn’t regularly flushed out and used, so also does the flow of the Divine in nature close down if we ignore it. It’s like a person to whom you don’t give appreciation; gradually he stops giving. In our relationship with nature, as with people, there has to be reciprocity.

We recently started the “nature channels” at Ananda to try to reawaken the divine forces. As each person makes it his or her particular mission to see God in the trees, rivers, stars, or some other aspect of nature, it will help to re-open those channels for the Divine.

A shared vision
Ananda can bring these and other areas of life to a focus through expansive new models. By living according to high ideals and setting that example, we will make a tremendous impact for good on society.

Recently a friend said, “I think that Ananda is the most important thing happening on this planet.” I didn’t say what you might expect, “I’m glad you think so.” I spoke rather from a sense of certainty and said, “Yes, I know it is.”

It’s not that Ananda specifically is the important place. It’s rather a spearhead, one of several, of something happening today that’s showing people a way to the future.

Throughout history, the real steps forward have often come when a few people are fired by a new vision and support each other. A good example is the Renaissance in Florence, Italy where many of the artists knew each other and fed each other’s inspiration.

This pattern occurs over and over throughout history. For the current age, it’s communities like Ananda that are laying the groundwork for the future. We are creating a way of life so dynamic and beautiful that it’s destined to become a force to be reckoned with because it’s a solution to so many of society’s problems.

Excerpted from an August 26, 1985 talk at Ananda Village, The Light of Superconsciousness, and Expansive Marriage, Crystal Clarity Publishers. To buy a recording of the talk (CD or MP3), call Treasures Along the Path, 530 478-7656 or email treasures@ananda.org.

In this 40th anniversary commemorative issue, we invite you to see how “high thinking and simple living,” as Paramhansa Yogananda phrased it, is not only a possible way to live but, in his words, destined to “spread like wildfire.”

There have been specific events and developments in Ananda’s forty-year history that have set an overall direction for Ananda’s work—events such as the start of a householder monastic order; the 1976 Ananda fire; the start of centers and urban communities; the publication of certain books, to mention only a few.

In this 40th anniversary commemorative issue, we review these events and developments, often following them up to the present day. Whenever future directions are apparent, we also take a look ahead.

One of the themes emerging from this account is the over-arching importance of the type of leadership provided by Swami Kriyananda: strong, supportive, visionary, intuitive. Without his leadership, Ananda would never have survived.

This issue also provides glimpses of the spiritual challenges, inner awakenings, and divine blessings that form the heart and soul of Ananda’s forty-year adventure in spiritual living. Through the perspectives of Swami Kriyananda and others, we offer a composite portrait of the many individuals whose selfless dedication and divine attunement have produced the miracle of Ananda.

Perspectives: Swami Kriyananda
Why Has Ananda Succeeded?

Ananda was not so much founded by me as by Paramhansa Yogananda. It was founded by his inspiration, and with his blessings. He declared on the occasion of his garden party speech exhorting people to start communities, “I am sowing these words in the ether, in the spirit of God.”

For this reason I consider him the patron saint of intentional communities, of “world brotherhood colonies,” as he called them. In creating Ananda, I did my best to carry out his teachings and ideals.

The most important factor in Ananda’s success, certainly, has been the fact that every day since our beginning, I have given this whole project to him and asked him to do with it as he would, albeit it through our own physical struggles.

A principle I established—one with which everyone came in time to agree—was: People are more important than things. In practice, this means that people’s spiritual well-being is more important than anything else. If a job needed to be done, but the best person for it would not benefit from it spiritually, someone else was sought for the job. If no one was found, an entire project was sometimes abandoned.

Closely related to this is the second principle: Where there is dharma [adherence to truth and right action], there is victory. This means that any hardship imposed by life will prove, in time, to be a blessing when embraced with courage, gratitude, non-attachment, and deep faith in God.

A spirit of harmony and cooperation has been fundamental to Ananda’s success. We have found that the inner peace that comes through meditation acts like a lubricating oil on the machinery of human relationships. Through meditation we learn also to see God in one another, and in all people, which dissolves all sense of differences between us.

People who are harmonious and do things together, instead of each one battling alone, can move mountains. An Ananda saying puts it well: “Many hands make a miracle.”

Finally, and most important, as a spiritual community, we always try to tune in to the will of God. The essence of life at Ananda is attunement to God and to the universal consciousness that Yogananda expressed. Ultimately, we want only to project God’s will for this time in history, in response to humanity’s needs to which God Himself is responding.

1
The Vision

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Brotherhood is an ideal better understood by example than precept! A small harmonious group may inspire other ideal communities over the earth.

“Far into the night my dear friend–the first Kriya Yogi in America–discussed with me the need for world colonies founded on a spiritual basis. Man is a soul, not an institution; his inner reforms alone can lend permanence to outer ones. By stress on spiritual values, Self-realization, a colony exemplifying world brotherhood is empowered to send inspiring vibrations far beyond its locale.” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“I remember how stirred I was by a talk Paramhansa Yogananda gave at a garden party in Beverly Hills on July 31, 1949.

“ ‘This day,’ he thundered, punctuating every word, ‘marks the birth of a new era. My spoken words are registered in the ether, in the spirit of God, and they shall move the West. We must go on—not only those who are here, but thousands of youths must go North, South, East and West to cover the earth with little colonies, demonstrating that simplicity of living plus high thinking lead to the greatest happiness!’”

1967:  Land purchased for a meditation retreat
1968: Ananda officially starts
1969:  Land purchased for a community

Ananda officially starts
The dedication of the Ananda Meditation Retreat in August 1968 marked the official start of Ananda. The first Retreat buildings had been built, and a few hardy souls were able to stay there during the winter of 1968-69.

The first Retreat season began the summer of 1969, with Swami Kriyananda leading meditations, giving classes, conducting Sunday morning worship services, and leading evening programs. At the end of the 1969 season, Ananda held its first annual Spiritual Renewal Week—seven days of classes, kirtans, satsangs, and concerts, culminating with the first Kriya Yoga Initiation.

On July 4, 1969, Kriyananda purchased land six miles down the road from the Retreat for a community. Soon after, a number of people at the Retreat moved to the new land.

Perspectives: Jyotish Novak
Spiritual or Not?

Early on, the new community faced a crisis of self-definition as new people came more out of a desire to live in a commune in the woods than for spiritual reasons. Would Ananda be a community of Yogananda disciples and based on his teachings? The issue was resolved when Swami Kriyananda called a meeting and asked that people make a choice, adding that he was willing to leave if people did not want a spiritual community.

He didn’t impose his will, but simply made it clear that people needed to make a choice. I’ve always appreciated his non-attachment, his being ready to leave everything behind if that was what people wanted. Fortunately, most of us wanted a spiritual community. Those who didn’t soon decided to leave.

2
Sustainability—Housing and Jobs

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“To earn money abundantly, unselfishly, honestly for God and God’s work, and for making others happy, is to develop many sterling qualities of character that will aid one on the spiritual as well as the material path.” East West Magazine, 1928

Swami Kriyananda: Regarding the challenge of having to raise large sums of money to launch Ananda: “My gain was far more than the money I earned. Most of all, it was spiritual. I’d grown in inner strength by doing what I’d had to do despite every obstacle, even that of intense personal reluctance. And I’d done it for God.” A Place Called Ananda

1969: The first dwellings
1969-70: Community businesses started

Finding a way to survive
The most difficult challenge the first year was establishing a community that could actually survive. Since there were no suitable living spaces on the new land, most people put up teepees, simple but adequate dwellings. The bigger challenge, however, was to find ways to earn an income.

To earn money and create jobs, a few enterprising people started businesses to make products that could be sold: incense, essential oils, jewelry, granola. By the end of 1970, there were nearly ten businesses, including the Meditation Retreat and the publishing business started by Swami Kriyananda to sell his books and new yoga correspondence course.

The next few years saw the start of a farm, a community market, a dairy, new cottage industries, and a contract with the U.S. Forest Service for seasonal tree-planting work. New people came who started private businesses, including, in 1974, a construction company.

Looking ahead: Earning income
Today it is possible for individuals and groups of people to sustain themselves far away from the big cities without depending on the usual rural means of self-sustenance, like farming. With telephones, computers, e-mail, and fax machines, even isolated areas can be in active contact with the world. There are individuals living in the Ananda communities who support themselves and their families through computer-based work, often from their homes.

Perspectives: Jyotish Novak
A Strong Spiritual Focus

Amidst the flurry of building homes and starting businesses, we managed to keep a very strong spiritual focus. Swami Kriyananda gave Sunday services and spiritual classes weekly and, in the beginning, his magnetism was the primary force keeping our consciousness focused on God.

Gradually, as we matured spiritually, there developed a large group of people who were unshakably committed to the yogic path. But it took some years to establish a strong spiritual magnetism.

Devi Novak:
Exploring New Frontiers of Consciousness

The life and growth of Ananda, and its story, have become for me my life and growth, my story. From the beginning there was an exciting feeling that we were pioneers, both in the sense of creating a new way of life, and of exploring new frontiers of consciousness. These two concepts went hand in hand.

Through the practice of meditation, we deepened our awareness of being part of a greater reality than we could experience through our individual egos. This, in turn, developed our understanding of how to create these communities.

This openness to the guidance from higher wisdom was one of the keynotes of how Ananda developed. The experience of trying to find the truth in a situation, rather than just responding to our own opinions or desires, began to change all of us who lived here.

3
Sustainability: Farming and Food

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Let every man gather from five to ten thousand dollars and, in groups of thirty, build self-sustaining, self-governing colonies, starting with California. Buy farms and settle down with harmonious friends and have time to meditate and constructively exchange divine experiences.” Praecepta Lessons, 1934

Swami Kriyananda:
“There were several things Master wanted to do that he could not accomplish during his lifetime: a school in America (he tried to start one at Mt. Washington in 1925); “world brotherhood” communities; and another one we might do well to consider now: self-sustaining farms.” January 2005 letter to Ananda

1970: Community farm started
1972: Community market started

A biodynamic farm
In 1970, Swami Kriyananda invited Haanel Cassidy to move to Ananda Village to help develop a self-sufficient organic farm at the new community. Then in his sixties, Haanel was a long-time disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda with considerable experience in biodynamic gardening.

The soil at the community was poor, however, and the climate far from ideal. With hard work and composting, the farm began to produce vegetables, berries, herbs and flowers, and eventually produced nearly six tons of food a year, including, in the summer months, food for the Meditation Retreat and the community market. Ultimately, however, the farm proved uneconomical and the effort was abandoned in the mid-1980s.

Looking ahead: Cooperative farming at Ananda Village
In 2008, Ananda Village entered into a cooperative farming arrangement with a nearby farmer by leasing him two acres of land at Ananda Village for an organic farm. Community members participate in the farming venture on a subscription basis by paying in advance for a percentage of the harvest.

The Ananda Village sustainability effort also includes a new central composting system, the hiring of a gardener to assist community residents to grow food in the housing clusters, the building of green houses, and the planting of more fruit, nut and olive trees.

The tradition of gardening is well established in Ananda’s urban communities. There are flourishing community-wide vegetable gardens and fruit orchards at the Ananda communities in Palo Alto and Sacramento, California, and in Seattle, Washington.

Perspectives: Parvati Hansen
The Start of Master’s Market

By the fall of 1972, the need for a place where people could buy food was becoming very apparent. Swami Kriyananda had been saying to us in almost every satsang: “If you see something that needs to be done here, then do it!”

He was letting us know, right from the beginning, that we were the ones who were going to make this community a reality. He was also teaching us by his own dynamic example of energy and magnetism, how to use the spiritual principles taught by Paramhansa Yogananda.

So starting with a few boxes of fruit, which was all I could afford, the market began in a vacant room in the old farmhouse — the only adequate building on the land at that time. My understanding of how to begin a business was limited, but Divine Mother helped me each step of the way. A few months later, a young man interested in helping the market grow moved to the community and donated five hundred dollars—a huge amount in those years. After that, the market grew rapidly.

Jyotish Novak: “Management by Willingness”

From the start of the community, Swami Kriyananda was the type of leader who let others take responsibility and make their own decisions. By empowering people, he was much more subject to the vagaries of human nature, but it allowed everyone to develop their own strength. As soon as people were willing to take responsibility, he gave them not only responsibility, but also authority—the right to make decisions and to experience the successes or failures of those decisions.

I would call the management style that permeates Ananda, “management by willingness.” As soon as someone begins to show the willingness to take responsibility, he’s given the opportunity.

Devi Novak: A “Dharmocracy”

Over the years Swami Kriyananda had to work out a new style of leadership. In the beginning he made only two rules: no hallucinogenic drugs, and no alcohol. He wanted the community to be guided not by rules, but by the creative exercise of common sense.

He also wanted people to have the freedom to grow in their own understanding and ability, and not to be forced to accept decisions mindlessly, simply because the decision had been made. As much as possible, he allowed decision-making to take place at a “grass roots” level.

Thus, Kriyananda’s leadership style emerged slowly as one based on wisdom, compassion, and enduring patience. In community decisions, he guided people to ask, “What is right?” and, “What does God want?” rather than, “What do I want?” Swamiji has described Ananda’s government as a dharmocracy, “a community dedicated to actions leading to soul-freedom, and not to furthering one’s ego-involvement.”

4
Education for Life

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“The ideal of an all-sided education for youth had always been close to my heart. I saw clearly the arid results of ordinary instruction, aimed only at the development of body and intellect. Moral and spiritual values, without whose appreciation no man can approach happiness, were yet lacking in the formal curriculum.” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“Paramhansa Yogananda laid much of the groundwork for Ananda’s Education for Life system in the school he established in Ranchi, India.

“Inspired by his efforts, we committed ourselves to the premise that a growing child needs to learn how to live in this world, and not merely how to find and hold a job. He or she needs to know how to live wisely, happily, and successfully according to his own deep inner needs, and not to meet life with the expectation that money and a nice home will give him all that he really wants in life.

“The goal of Ananda’s Education for Life system is to teach children the art of living, while giving them, in addition, the knowledge imparted by a conventional education.” Education for Life

1972: The first Ananda school
1986: Publication of Education for Life

The philosophy
The Education for Life system emphasizes the balanced development of body, feeling, will, and intellect. By developing this foundation, or “tools of maturity,” students are optimally prepared for the life-long adventure of finding ever-deeper levels of purpose, meaning, and lasting happiness.

The first school
Ananda’s Education for Life system got underway in 1972 when Nitai Deranja, a newly arrived teacher, was asked to start a school for seven community children, ages four to seven. Starting out in a ten by twelve shed and a budget of fifty dollars a month, the school moved into one of the first new buildings at the community six months later. Both the elementary school, and the junior high school that came later, soon attracted day and boarding students from outside the community.

To more clearly distinguish them from the Education for Life system, Ananda’s schools have been renamed “Living Wisdom Schools.” Today there are Living Wisdom Schools in Palo Alto, California; Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Assisi, Italy.

Looking ahead
As a non-sectarian system based on universal spiritual principles, the Education for Life system can be implemented wherever there is receptivity and interest. Hundreds of like-minded teachers in public and private schools have taken the teacher training programs offered yearly at the Ananda Institute for Alternative Living at the Ananda Meditation Retreat.

Beginning Fall 2008, the newly formed Seattle Institute for Living Yoga will offer a week-end teacher training program in both Seattle and Portland led by Usha Dermond, an  experienced Ananda Education for Life teacher and founder of the Portland Living Wisdom School.

Education for Life teacher training is envisioned as one of the main thrusts for The Yoga Institute of Living Wisdom, recently started by Ananda India.

Perspectives: Helen Purcell
Changing the Educational Landscape

In 1986, right after Education for Life had been published, Swami Kriyananda called a meeting at Crystal Hermitage with a number of people to discuss how to disseminate the ideas in his book.

I was surprised when Swami began the meeting by asking us to share our thoughts on the subject of education. However, over the years, I came to realize that this was Swami’s way: to plant the seeds and then let us use own creativity and inspiration to nurture them.

The ideas Swami had articulated in the book thrilled us, both as parents and as educators. We saw Education for Life as a breath of fresh air in a system that has become stagnant. We shared from our own experience how it could be adapted for any classroom, by any teacher who was not afraid to re-evaluate the fundamentals of traditional education.

Swami was emphatic that the Education for Life philosophy is much more expansive than any single spiritual path. He wanted us to share it with anyone who would listen. When the meeting broke up, the energy was high even though the task was daunting—a small group of six or eight people sent out to change the whole educational landscape!

Today, as principal of the Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto, I receive emails from teachers all over the country who want guidance to create their own Education for Life schools. Recently I received an email from a teacher with nineteen years of experience in public elementary school. She dreams of opening a school like our Living Wisdom Schools. “Just knowing that your schools exist brings healing to my heart,” she writes.

5
Renunciation

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“A true yogi may remain dutifully in the world; there he is like butter on water, and not like the easily-diluted milk of unchurned and undisciplined humanity. To fulfill one’s earthly responsibilities is indeed the higher path, provided the yogi, maintaining a mental uninvolvement with egotistical desires, plays his part as a willing instrument of God.” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“Renunciation of egoic desires forms the basis of the spiritual life, regardless of a person’s outer calling. At Ananda we’ve based our lives on renunciation, but generally it’s householder renunciation. It was Lahiri Mahasaya who first established this pattern of life. Paramhansa Yogananda approved of it, and, indeed, recommended it for most people.” Sadhu Beware

1971: Start of “The Friends of God”
1987: Start of a householder monastic order

The evolution of new model of renunciation
In 1971, Swami Kriyananda started a renunciate order for men and women, “The Friends of God.” It was not possible, however, at that stage in the community’s development to segregate the men and women as in a traditional monastery and, over time, many of the monks and nuns decided to marry. The monastery was dissolved in the early 1980s.

Building on that foundation, in 1987 Swami Kriyananda started a new kind of monastic order that includes householders, based on the ideals of non-attachment, simplicity, service, and self-control. To live a monastic life as a householder, the primary requirement is not celibacy but a dedication to doing God’s will, even though it may be personally difficult.

Looking ahead: A new monastery
As a spiritually mature work, Ananda is now able to accommodate a renunciate order with a degree of separation from the main communities. In 2005, Swami Kriyananda started a traditional monastic order for men and women, focused initially on a monastery for men in India.  He gives these reasons for the new direction:

I feel that spiritual communities need a monastery to set the example of selfless service, which is harder keep in mind when you have children to support. When you have people who truly feel that they don’t want anything except God, and that all they own belongs to Him, their example will make it easier for everyone else to tune into that attitude.

It would be good if new Ananda residents could get grounded in the monastic attitude before they thought about marriage. In the Buddhist tradition at least the young men live in a monastery for one year.

Let’s first be devotees seeking God. Then, as we bring that level into marriage, we can begin to set an example for people everywhere of a kind of marriage that our culture doesn’t prepare us for. We need to have a different concept of human love than what Hollywood films give us. It’s got to be on a soul level. Future of Ananda, 1999.

Perspectives: Jaya Helin
A Lifelong Commitment

In 1971, Swami Kriyananda invited a number of people to a meeting at his dome at the Meditation Retreat to discuss the idea of possibly starting a monastic order. At the meeting, Swamiji spoke very personally. He spoke about his life with Master, his life as a monk at SRF, the six months he had spent at a Catholic monastery near Big Sur, and the lessons he had learned.

He discussed his vision for Ananda, and whether a monastery would be possible. When he talked about renunciation, it was not in terms of what one is giving up, but as a life lived wholly dedicated to God.

I was enraptured listening to this. At the end of his talk, he looked at me and said, “Would you like to embrace such a life?”

After I said, “Yes, “ I knelt before him and he blessed me and gave me a piece of a rose petal from an initiation by Paramhansa Yogananda. He then asked the same question of everyone else and blessed each of them in turn.

I walked out of there deeply inspired and from that moment forward, my life totally changed. I became a different person. I began to understand what it meant to be a devotee on the spiritual path. I realized that renunciation is not about what we give up. The heart of renunciation is what we embrace, and what we embrace is God. We give our life to God. That’s the spirit of renunciation that Swamiji asked us to embrace that evening.

I eventually left the monastery to marry as did others. But when I left, I didn’t feel I was leaving. I simply moved to another room of the house, you might say. I was still in my heart, and to this day, a renunciate.

6
The Ananda Fire

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“An even-minded individual is like a mirror of discretion reflecting the true nature of seemingly favorable and unfavorable events. He thus holds himself in readiness to act wisely and properly without being misled by emotional disturbances.” Inner Culture Magazine, 1938

Swami Kriyananda:
“When you meditate and feel God’s presence, then these things are all just a dream. I don’t mean that the fire was nothing. But in truth conditions are neutral. It’s the way we take them that determines whether they’re positive or negative, whether they’re bad experiences or happy experiences.” From a talk after the fire

1976: Forest fire sweeps through Ananda

A time of testing
A June 1976 forest fire that destroyed 450 acres and twenty-one of the twenty-two homes at Ananda might easily have sounded the death-knell for the community. Ananda had no insurance and no financial reserves from which to rebuild. Many decided to leave the community at that time, and most departing members asked Ananda to pay them for houses they had lost.

It was later discovered that faulty county road equipment had caused the fire. Ananda had sustained the largest loss and could have sued the county, but Swami Kriyananda wrote to the Nevada County Board of Supervisors,  “We don’t want to take our bad luck out on our fellow citizens by increasing the county’s insurance rates. Anything that harms the county will, in the long run, harm Ananda also.”

Ananda eventually repaid all departing members, and with hard work, joyful faith, and God’s grace, rebuilt the community. The fire had tested the community’s commitment to one of its guiding principles, “Where there is dharma there is victory,” and Ananda’s commitment to that principle had held firm.

Perspectives: Jyotish Novak
“This House Is Yours, God”

The fire started several miles from the community, and we could see smoke for quite a long time before we realized our property was being threatened. At one point, the fire jumped the road and began to move through dense brush towards one of our housing clusters.

My wife, Devi, and I had a geodesic dome about three hundred yards from where the fire was burning, so I hurried back down to our house. I tried to save the house by cutting a trench around it and hosing it down with water.

A teenager, Dwayne Smallen, came down the hill in a truck very excited. He shouted, “You’ve got to get out of here. The flames are really high and will be here in five minutes.” I looked up the hill and saw this enormous wall of fire and it was obvious my little trench wasn’t going to save anything.

At that point I went into a state of complete detachment, saying to myself, “I’m not attached to anything. This house is yours, God. If you want to take it, go ahead. Take everything.”

Dwayne had the presence of mind to yell, “Grab what you can and throw it in the truck.” Devi had recently boxed up everything in our meditation room to clean it, so I grabbed the box, took an armful of clothes from the closet, and that was it. We threw it in the truck and drove downhill through the brush and out of danger.

Only days after the fire, Ananda began to rebuild itself. Because of our strong foundation in meditation, there was no sense of devastation, which was so prevalent among our neighbors. We knew we would have to put out a lot of energy, but the challenge of rebuilding was exciting rather than distressing.

7
Community Planning

Swami Kriyananda:
“Ananda Village has grown from Spartan beginnings to become a place of man-made as well as natural beauty. Simple but charming homes, school buildings, offices, and places of business express in architecture the twin principles Yogananda recommended: ‘plain living and God-thinking’” The Path (1996): Afterword

1974-1978: Ananda develops Master Plan

A community-wide upgrade
The initial “plan” of the Ananda community reflected two main concerns: the desire for privacy and the need to get a road and water to one’s home. The result was scattered, uncoordinated clusters of houses.

The purchase of three hundred and twenty-six acres next to Ananda Village in 1974 was the first impetus for the community to think more seriously about planning, but only after the 1976 forest fire did in depth planning actually begin. By then, county building regulations and Ananda’s desire for a more “conscious” community gave birth to a “Master Plan” for Ananda.

The Master Plan, which went through three drafts in four years before being finally approved by the county, provided for cluster housing and large areas of open land. The plan also allowed Ananda to move its public retreat to the newly constructed Expanding Light Guest Retreat in the early 1980s.

Perspectives: Jaya
Helin Starting Over

Once the new Master Plan was completed, it was as if we were building the community all over again, but this time in a more socially “responsible” way. We couldn’t continue living in teepees, trailers and tiny cabins; everything needed to be brought up to code.

This meant we had to have better houses, better roads, and better water systems. Many people in the community were starting to have families and needed more adequate housing and suitable places to send their children to school.

Devi Novak: Opening to the Light

In time, with hard work and better planning learned from experience, Ananda became more beautiful than ever. Even more importantly, the community had come of age. As one member put it, “We’re not here to build buildings. We’re here to build character, by living for God.”

The challenges we faced in creating Ananda on the physical plane were the exact same challenges we each faced in our quest for spiritual expansion—the ability to focus and commit to the deepest spiritual goal we could perceive.

As each individual at Ananda opened more to God’s light, then that same power was expressed in the community. For the individual, there was a gain of inner freedom; for the community, there was the creation of a physical, social and spiritual manifestation that reflected the inner growth of individuals.

8
A New Phase of Outreach

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Strive to become an apostle of Christ-Consciousness. Try to be one of the world’s ‘Fishers of Souls’ with your inspirational words and writings, and with your voice saturated with the Holy Ghost vibration of Aum.” East-West Magazine, 1932

Swami Kriyananda:
“Emphasize principles. Win people on the strength of their needs. We need to talk in terms of solutions to those needs, not just of the needs themselves. In short, we need to stress positive values: inner happiness, peace of mind, love of high ideals, cooperation, and kindness—in fact, all the good things we’ve learned from Master. We are part of a great tide of loving, joyful energy that wants to give and give as long as people are happy to receive it.” From a 1999 talk

1977: Publication of The Path
1977: Circle of Joy started
1978-79: The Joy Tours
1983: World Brotherhood Retreat opens

Expanding the light
Outreach has been central to Ananda’s vision from the beginning, but the publication of Swami Kriyananda’s autobiography, The Path, his first major book with broad appeal, launched a new, more dynamic phase of outreach.

Swami Kriyananda traveled twice across America in 1978 and 1979 with ten to twelve Ananda members on what he called “The Joy Tours,” addressing large crowds in dozens of cities. The tours drew many new members to Ananda, including some of Ananda’s current leaders.

A spiritual family forms
As Ananda began to view itself as a spiritual movement that embraced like-minded people everywhere, it established the “Circle of Joy” as a way for people to belong to Ananda wherever they lived. The name was later changed to the “Ananda Spiritual Family,” and more recently to “Ananda Sangha.”

Since 2002, Ananda has supported Spanish-speaking members of its spiritual family through its Spanish Ministry, which has focused initially on devotees in Central and South America, Spain, and Portugal.

A new guest retreat
Ananda’s need to expand its guest facilities led to the construction of a new guest retreat on a newly acquired parcel of land adjacent to the community. Initially called “Ananda World Brotherhood Retreat,” Swami Kriyananda was later inspired to rename it “The Expanding Light.”

Since officially opening in 1983, The Expanding Light has attracted thousands of guests from around the world.

Looking ahead: Electronic outreach
The Internet has opened an important new avenue of outreach with the potential of making Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings available to anyone in the world free of charge through website offerings from Ananda Worldwide.

Recent live, interactive videoconferencing with Swami Kriyananda portends another important new direction for Ananda. Swami Kriyananda and others can now address groups from a distance, with questions, answers, and other interactions.

Perspectives: Mary Kretzmann
“A Wave of Peace”

It was 1978 and I had recently read Autobiography of a Yogi.  I was desperate to know if Paramhansa Yogananda was my one true Guru.  I then heard that one of his direct disciples, Swami Kriyananda, was on a national tour, and speaking in Chicago!  My husband, Tim, and I drove the 750 miles from our home in Arkansas to meet him.

At Swamiji’s talk, I was inwardly praying to Master, ”Please give me a sign if you are my Guru.” At the end of the lecture, Swamiji played his piano sonata, The Divine Romance, and I felt a wave of blessings and love fill my heart. I knew without a doubt that Yogananda was my Guru.

One of the Ananda devotees traveling with Swamiji encouraged us to start a meditation group and we agreed. When Swamiji met us and heard of our deep interest, he invited us to come see him again in Houston, several months from then. So this time, my husband and I drove 1000 miles roundtrip to see Swamiji and ended up staying with him in the new Ananda ashram in Houston.

It was powerful staying in the same house as Swamiji. While there, in meditation, I saw Master’s face at the spiritual eye and felt his deep blessing—and I knew that Ananda was my spiritual path. We told Swamiji that we were interested in Ananda and wanted to go check it out but that our jobs made it difficult to get away: Tim had a landscaping business and I was a preschool teacher. Swamiji said, “Why not move to Ananda?”

Riding back to Arkansas in the pickup truck, Tim and I felt a wave a peace surrounding us and we knew, then and there, that we should sell our house and move to Ananda Village sight unseen. We moved two months later.

9
Start of Centers and Colonies

Swami Kriyananda:
“Ananda Village is the model community, and it is taking my energy and presence to get it started. But once the model is established, it will be easier to reproduce it, and others will be able to do so.” Reflections on Living

1977: Start of Sacramento Center
1979: Start of Ananda San Francisco
1984: Start of Ananda Europa
1989-1995: Start of urban colonies

• 1989: Palo Alto acquires apartment complex
• 1991: Sacramento acquires apartment complex
• 1992: Seattle acquires apartment complex
• 1995: Portland acquires apartment complex

2003: Start of Ananda India
2007: Start of Ananda Los Angeles

A common pattern
Beginning with the Sacramento Center in 1977, Ananda’s urban colonies all began either as meditation groups or small ashram-based centers. With the support of local devotees, these small beginnings evolved into apartment complex communities in Sacramento, Palo Alto, Portland, and Seattle, each with beautiful park-like settings and separate temples or mandirs for worship services and classes.

In 1980, Ananda purchased East-West Bookshop, a large metaphysical bookstore in Menlo Park, California. Today the Menlo Park bookstore (now in Mountain View), and  two East-West bookstores in Seattle, Washington not only serve the larger spiritual community, they also attract new members to Ananda and provide jobs for local devotees.

An international work
The interest of European friends drew four people from Ananda to Como, Italy in 1984 to launch Ananda’s first work in Europe. Now based near Assisi, Italy, Ananda Europa includes residents from throughout Europe. Its Temple of Light is dedicated to all religions.

Since 2003, Swami Kriyananda and a small group of Ananda members from different countries have been building a new Ananda colony in Gurgaon, India near New Delhi. They recently purchased land in south India to start a residential community and teaching center.

Looking ahead: New centers and meditation groups
Ananda’s newest center in Los Angeles, California officially opened July 22, 2007 with a dedication ceremony led by Swami Kriyananda. By November 2007, the center was offering ongoing classes and worship services.

As meditation teachers receive training in programs offered throughout Ananda worldwide, many are starting meditation groups and actively spreading Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings in their own areas.

A likely new pattern
The start of Ananda Michigan in 1999 heralds what may be the pattern for other new Ananda centers and communities. Unlike Ananda’s main colonies, which were sponsored by Ananda Village, Ananda Michigan owes its start to the inspiration of a single Ananda individual, Lorne Dekun. (See below, “Perspectives”) Ananda Michigan serves devotees in Lansing, Michigan and the Detroit Area.

Perspectives: Asha Praver
“Babaji Is Very Pleased”

“Babaji is very pleased with this community.” When Swami Kriyananda said those words to the few hundred people gathered for the dedication of our community in Palo Alto in 1989, it caught me and everyone else by surprise.

We tend to think of Babaji as being off somewhere in the Himalayas, overseeing the unfolding of major cosmic dramas but too lofty, too exalted, to be concerned with the establishment of Ananda’s first apartment complex community. Continuing, Swamiji said, “Ananda’s purpose is to show people that because we’re now in an ascending age, Dwapara Yuga, they can integrate spirituality into their every day lives.”

The masters have come at this time to help us, and others like us. Babaji said, “The vibrations of many spiritually seeking souls come floodlike to me. I perceive potential saints in America and Europe, waiting to be awakened.”

Throughout Ananda we are planting seeds for the coming Dwapara Yuga. Will we see the fruit of what we are planting? I don’t think we’ll see a huge amount. We’ll see little bits of growth, little bits of change.

But our masters are avatars. They come with power, and the power they plant is never obliterated. Paramhansa Yogananda said that he had planted the thought of thousands of world brotherhood colonies one day covering the earth “in the ether, in the spirit of God.”  He predicted that his words would “move the West.”

Though we may not live to see it, we can be certain that the divine effort we put forth to establish this everlasting work in the name of God and Guru will go on and on.

Lorne Dekun: A Message in a Dream

Ananda Michigan officially began on May 1, 1999 when I returned to Lansing, Michigan  after spending twenty years in California,  twelve of  them at Ananda Village, Ananda Palo Alto, and Ananda Sacramento combined. However, one could say Ananda Michigan began ten years prior to 1999. It began with a dream.

In 1989, another Ananda Village resident and I went on a book-selling tour in the Mid-West as representatives of Crystal Clarity Publishers. After we finished in Chicago, we drove to Grand Rapids, Michigan and stayed overnight at the home of a good friend of mine.

That night I had a dream of a short conversation with my first spiritual teacher, Yogacharya Oliver Black, Paramhansa Yogananda’s direct disciple. At the time, Mr. Black was ninety-six years old and living at his summer home in Northern Michigan. At least I thought he was living there. I was to soon learn that he had left his body just a few hours earlier.

In the dream, Yogacharya was sitting across from me at a table. He gave me one of his radiant smiles and said, “I want you to help with the work in Michigan.”

After I returned to Ananda Village, I sought out Seva Wiberg who had guided me to come live at Ananda Village. I told her of the dream and the circumstances under which it had happened. Seva smiled at me in friendship and love and said, “I think you need to start making plans to move back to Michigan.”

It wasn’t until ten years later that I made the move. By then, I had been acting in a ministerial capacity at Ananda Palo Alto by teaching classes at the Palo Alto teaching center and giving Sunday Service at two nearby Ananda centers. I felt I now had something to offer Ananda Michigan.

10
Rajarsi Day

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Rather than be always striving for personal happiness, try to make others happy. In being of spiritual, mental, and material service to others, you will find your own needs fulfilled. As you forget self in service to others, you will find that, without seeking it, your own cup of happiness will be full.” Praecepta Lessons, 1935

Swami Kriyananda:
“Service is ennobling. It is a way of offering up our human littleness into the great Reality that is God.” Affirmations for Self-Healing

“It isn’t really important what we do, so long as we see everything we do as an opportunity for service, for working for the welfare of all, for expanding our sympathies and awareness, and for attuning our consciousness to the Infinite Intelligence. Money Magnetism

1981: First Rajarsi Day

A tradition of volunteering
Regular workdays, times when people at Ananda come together as volunteers on community projects, are an integral part of Ananda’s commitment to selfless service. Workdays started with the building of the Meditation Retreat in 1969.

Since1981, Ananda Village has also held an annual “Rajarsi Day,” named after Paramhansa Yogananda’s spiritual successor, Rajarsi Janakananda. Community members spend an entire day working together on community projects such as remodeling buildings, landscaping, creating new walkways, and removing debris.

Most of Ananda’s urban communities now also hold annual Rajarsi Days. In addition, teams of volunteers from throughout Ananda periodically travel to the Palo Alto, Portland, Seattle, Sacramento, Assisi, and Gurgaon colonies to assist with construction projects.

Perspectives: Jaya Helin
Learning Teamwork

Workdays received an important boost the winter of 1971-72 when a group of about fifteen of us from Ananda Village embarked on three weeks of tree-planting in northern California, under contract with the U. S. Forest Service.

We approached everything cooperatively, sharing all risks, responsibilities, losses and rewards equally. Although physically stretched to our core, in the midst of everything, we meditated, chanted, sang, joked, and shared our adventure together as a community.

Out of this experience came teamwork and habits of mutual trust, friendship and cooperation—all things that were used to build Ananda in subsequent years.

Savitri Simpson: “Service is Joy!”

Most people think of a job as a nine-to-five experience; after work you go home and have your own life. Not so at Ananda! When something important needs to be done in the community, we’ve learned to put aside our own desires and concentrate on the project at hand.

I recall the time in the 1970s when I was still fairly new at Ananda. I worked as office manager of the Meditation Retreat and got called upon to wash dishes in the Retreat kitchen on a Sunday afternoon at the end of major guest weekend.

There was no dishwasher and everyone else had gone. I was there by myself washing mountains of dishes and, briefly, the thought came to me: “What am I doing washing dishes? I have a college degree!” In that same moment, however, I realized that this was exactly what was needed at the time.

“Service is joy” is one of the themes of Ananda workdays and Rajarsi Day, especially, epitomizes this spirit of service. The magnetism and joy become very strong when people work selflessly together toward common goals.

A few years ago, my husband and I had guests during the Rajarsi Day weekend. This couple was fairly new to Ananda and had never participated in an intense workday of this sort. We had explained to them that we would be busy all day Saturday and that they could join us or not, as they chose.

Not only did they choose to work along with us, they worked hard. At the end of the day, they were both pretty exhausted but all smiles. And to this day, these friends often comment on how this was one of the most important days in their lives—a day during which they got to see and feel firsthand the spirit of selfless service which is the essence of Ananda.

11
A Music Ministry

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Because man himself is an expression of the Creative Word, sound has the most potent and immediate effect on him, offering a way to remembrance of his divine origin.” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“Music is the most important of the arts because it affects feelings, consciousness. It’s not just entertainment; it’s not just a nice melody. Listening to certain music and absorbing it, changes your consciousness. That’s why we should listen to music that is born of Spirit.” Music and The Art of Living

1981: The Joy Singers
1983: Christ Lives: An Oratorio

A turning point
Two events in the early 1980s launched Ananda’s music ministry as we know it today: the formation of The Joy Singers in 1981, and Swami Kriyananda’s composing of Christ Lives: An Oratorio in 1985.

In the early 1980s, the newly formed Joy Singers toured California and western states, presenting Swami Kriyananda’s “Songs of Divine Joy”—songs that express in words and music the consciousness of humility, devotion, and joy.

A deeply inspiring pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1985 led Swami Kriyananda to compose an Oratorio of the life of Jesus Christ, Christ Lives. Discussing the Oratorio, he said,  “I couldn’t have expressed myself more sincerely, musically, than I did in that Oratorio.”

In the mid to late 1980s, Ananda singers and musicians presented the Oratorio to Christian churches in northern California and the San Francisco Bay area. Since then, it has become an integral part of musical programs throughout Ananda.

In 2001, a fifty-five-member choir from various Ananda communities toured Italy with the Oratorio, giving concerts in six cities. A French man said after hearing a performance: “I couldn’t understand a word of what was sung. Yet I understood everything! The inspiration of this Oratorio was extraordinary!”

Instrumental music: a new dimension
In the early 1990s, Swami Kriyananda began a fifteen-year period of composing primarily instrumental music, which brought an important new dimension to the music ministry. With the writing of instrumentals, the music alone, without words, could transmit the underlying consciousness.

Today there are choirs and instrumentalist at all Ananda colonies, and the beginnings of an orchestra at Ananda Village.

Perspectives: Bhagavati Nani:
“Something Profound Was Happening”

When I first came to Ananda Palo Alto in 1998, I had been working as a professional freelance flutist and private teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area for over fifteen years. I’d never met Swamiji and, although I was well on my way to accepting Paramhansa Yogananda as my Guru, I had a harder time understanding how Swami Kriyananda fit into the picture.

I had picked up a free tape one Sunday after service, entitled “The Spirit of Ananda in Music,” which consisted of a variety of Swamiji’s music—including several selections of him singing solo. So one night I decided to play it while I worked on an art project.  On the one hand, I was enjoying the vibration of the music, but on the other hand, my trained musician’s ears were critically assessing every note and intonation.

When “Love Is a Magician” began and Swamiji started to sing the words, I felt something pierce my heart, bypassing my mind and intellect altogether, and I began to cry. Actually, sob is a more accurate word, and that’s what I did for the entire song. Thankfully, I had some experience of how God works, so I immediately “got it” that something very important and profound was happening to me.

From that moment I simply accepted that Swami Kriyananda was someone I could trust—as my spiritual teacher and friend, and as a musician—and I opened my heart to him.

12
Crystal Hermitage

Swami Kriyananda:
“I remembered how often Paramhansa Yogananda quoted the suggestion made to him by an architect: ‘Immortalize your teachings in architecture.’ The Master agreed with him. A spiritual teaching ought to be clothed in a form that expresses the consciousness it seeks to inspire.” A Place Called Ananda

“I built Crystal Hermitage not as the perfect ‘headquarters’ for myself, but to make it possible for me to share better with others. Crystal Hermitage is a personal statement, but vital to that statement is the wish to offer the energy of this house in non-attachment into a larger flow of energy: into the streams of others’ lives; into the river of humanity everywhere.” Space, Light, & Harmony

1984: Crystal Hermitage created

A beautiful spiritual center
In 1984, Swami Kriyananda expanded the buildings and grounds around his dome to create a beautiful spiritual center for Ananda residents and visitors, and for his own enjoyment, which he named, “Crystal Hermitage.”

Crystal Hermitage includes a large main building used for meetings, banquets, and social gatherings; Swami Kriyananda’s apartment on the lower level, beautifully landscaped upper and lower gardens; a chapel; a museum containing relics of Yogananda, Sri Yukteswar and other masters of this path; a boutique; and a nearby guest house.

The chapel and upper gardens are open to the public for weddings and receptions. The expansive lower garden adjoining Kriyananda’s apartment is used for outdoor concerts and other programs.

Six thousand tulips!
Nearly four hundred people from the local area visited the Crystal Hermitage gardens in April 2008 after a front-page article in the local press announced a Crystal Hermitage Open House featuring six thousand tulips in bloom. Both upper and lower gardens and were open to the public.

One first-time visitor to the community commented, “When I first saw the gardens at Crystal Hermitage, I felt God’s presence in my heart and I understood what Ananda was all about.”

Perspectives: Patrick Lynch
“An Old Dear Friend”

I was participating in a Kriya Prep Week at Ananda Village when I first visited the Crystal Hermitage. Walking into the museum felt like going to visit my Guru.

I was filled with such joy to see relics from each of the masters in Paramhansa Yogananda’s lineage: Yogananda’s meditation mat, instruments he played, his mother’s wedding bangles, Lahiri Mahasaya’s water pot, Sri Yukteswar cane, and much more.

Afterwards, we walked through the gardens to Swami Kriyananda’s home. I went out onto the back deck and gazed across the beautiful canyon. I then went inside for the group meditation. Though I had been having difficulty meditating during this first visit to Ananda Village, the minute I shut my eyes I was powerfully pulled into a deep meditation.

Over the next few years, whenever I visited Ananda Village, I would spend time at the Crystal Hermitage and meditate in the museum or chapel. I had never met Swami Kriyananda or even seen him, and thought I might never have the opportunity. Nonetheless, I discovered I could have a relationship with him as a friend.

Knowing of his receptivity, I would inwardly share with him my thoughts, concerns, and questions, as well as always give him my gratitude. And I always got a response. I would mainly do this in meditation. At other times I would just think about him.

By developing an inward friendship with Swamiji, I learned that I could do this with anyone who is receptive.

In 2007, I learned that Swamiji was going to be at Ananda Village for his birthday celebration, and I wasn’t going to miss it!  I met him in person at his home at the Crystal Hermitage and expressed my gratitude. When I first looked into his eyes it was like seeing an old dear friend.

13
New Ceremonies

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Religious ceremonies are symbols of wisdom.” East West Magazine, 1929

Swami Kriyananda:
“Nothing, perhaps, could so clearly convey our sense of inspiration in the life we lead as the Festival of Light.” Cities of Light

1987: Festival of Light and other ceremonies introduced

In 1987 Swami Kriyananda introduced a number of new ceremonies designed to make Yogananda’s teachings a more dynamic part of spiritual life at Ananda. He also created new levels of ministers, including Lightbearers.

In one of the most important ceremonies, the Festival of Light, God’s light is invoked to flow down to earth, and into the hearts of worshipers both present and afar, through the channels of Ananda’s line of masters and the great saints of all religions.

There are also ceremonies for inner purification, for higher attunement, and for when people leave this world.

Perspectives: Swami Kriyananda
Why a Festival of Light?

For years I felt the need to condense our central message into ceremonial form that would make it possible to repeat it at every service without the repetition becoming tiresome. But whenever the thought arose in my mind, the answering thought came, “The moment isn’t right.”

Then when I felt the inspiration for the first of them, the Festival of Light, it came in a flash. I was in Assisi in seclusion, and the inspiration just flowed. The other ceremonies came almost as smoothly.

The ceremonies we have serve to remind us of the need for inner awakening, for an inner upliftment of consciousness. When, for example, we offer “the little light that is in us” in the arati during the Festival of Light, and again when we receive that light into ourselves, we are reminded repeatedly of the changes we need to effect in our own consciousness.

If you don’t know what to do when you go inward, these things can be helpful. If on the other hand, you are deeply dedicated to the inward path, these outward reminders can still help to make that path more dynamic to your awareness, particularly in your worship with others.

These ceremonies are not a combination of Eastern and Western religious practices. The similarities, such as they are, are more a matter of “feeling.” Otherwise, they express, simply and clearly, the way God’s light has been expressed in this age, through our line of Masters.

We have a message in each of our ceremonies that is universal, inasmuch as it is focused not on single events in human history, but on the cosmic “event” of creation itself. This is the eternal aspect of the ceremonies.

There is also another benefit in having these ceremonies. Not every minister is a born speaker. The Festival of Light enables every minister to give the congregation something living and uplifting.  It even helps the minister to attune himself more deeply to the truths he has to offer.

Master believed in ceremonies, though he, too, stressed the need for simplicity. These new ceremonies came through meditation on him, and I think that it is in keeping with his teachings that we perform them.  Interview, Clarity Magazine, 1988

14
Kriya Yoga

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“‘Kriya Yoga, the scientific technique of God-realization,’ Babaji finally said with solemnity, ‘will ultimately spread in all lands, and aid in harmonizing the nations through man’s personal, transcendental perception of the Infinite Father.’ After a vibrant pause, Babaji addressed me again, ‘You are the one I have chosen to spread the message of Kriya Yoga in the West.’” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“Kriya Yoga is the most central of all techniques because it helps to magnetize the inner spiritual spine, and thus bring everything into alignment with a higher reality.” The Light of Superconsciousness.

1990: Start of Kriya Ministry

Kriya Yoga at Ananda
Although Kriya Yoga initiations have been given annually at Ananda since 1969, the establishment of a formal Kriya Ministry in 1990 marked the beginning of an especially dynamic phase in Ananda’s dissemination of the ancient science. Since then, Ananda Village has offered monthly initiations and ongoing support to Kriya initiates worldwide via phone, email, newsletters, recordings, booklets and a special website.

Today, there are thirteen Ananda Kriya ministers serving devotees in the United States, Europe, India, and Central and South America, where they offer programs and ministries tailored to the specific needs of the devotees in those locales. As Paramhansa Yogananda said, “The time for knowing God has come!”

Perspectives: Peter Kretzmann
“What Is It They Are Doing?”

Having grown up around hundreds of Kriyabans* at Ananda Village, I always thought that becoming an adult meant that you were an honest, respectable, trustworthy and generally joyful person. After attending the local public high school and meeting my friends’ parents, I realized that this was not necessarily the case!

While some of the adults that I met were good happy people, many were unhappy, jaded, disillusioned, and angry at the world. After seeing this again and again, I had to step back and ask myself, “What is the difference between Ananda adults and the parents of my friends at school?”

Swami Kriyananda has mentioned that when you find such a high quality collection of people in one place, you have to assume that it is not so much the people that are amazing, but more what the people are doing. Naturally, the next question I had to ask myself was, “What is it that these Ananda adults are doing that sets them apart?”

As I had learned growing up, Ananda practices the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, at the core of which is Kriya Yoga. In my heart I knew that Kriya Yoga was what I wanted.

While the world so often offers bitterness and frustration, here right in front of my nose, I had the tools to fill my heart with love, peace, happiness and joy! What a divine blessing simply to be given that choice. With these tools, I knew I could grow to become the person I want to be.

As my Kriya practice deepens, I know in my heart I am on my way to becoming who I want to become and achieving the ultimate goal of Self-realization.

* One who practices Kriya Yoga.

15
Unity of Religions

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“When the blindness of ignorance and denominational prejudice is healed by the Self-realization of God, then the whole elephant of Truth will be perceived as the essence of all religions. Then inter-denominational wars and religious and racial prejudice will cease, and there will be one church, one brotherhood, one scientific highway of religions, and one Temple of Truth everywhere.” Praecepta Lessons, 1938

Swami Kriyananda:
“Paramhansa Yogananda told us clearly and repeatedly the kind of religion that will predominate in the new age. He said it would be free from dogmatism, free from rigid institutionalism, and strong in its emphasis on Self-realization.” Religion and the New Age

1987: Publication of Rays of the Same Light
1998: Publication of The Hindu Way of Awakening
2001: Publication of Promise of Immortality
2006: Publication of The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita
2007: Publication of Revelations of Christ

An inner approach
One of the main goals of Paramhansa Yogananda’s mission to the West was to show the unity of religions through his commentaries on the original teachings of Jesus Christ and Krishna in The Bible and Bhagavad Gita.

Yogananda’s basic message was that the unity of religions is achieved not through outward religious similarities but through the inner experience of divine communion. For as Swami Kriyananda writes: “In silent communion with God there no longer remains Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism, as such.”

It is this inner aspect of the unity of religions that Kriyananda clarifies in some of his most important books, including Rays of the Same Light, The Promise of Immortality, The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, and Revelations of Christ, showing it to be the essence of all true religions.

In The Hindu Way of Awakening, Kriyananda explores the subject of unity through the deeper teachings of Hinduism, which he describes as the only religion in the world whose adherents “present Self-realization as the goal of life.”

Perspectives: Swami Kriyananda
“You’re Doing the Right Thing!”

Master stated that he had been sent to teach the original teachings of Jesus Christ. It is clear also that Master was sent from Hindu India, rather than born into the Church as a reforming Christian saint, because such reform from within would have been impossible, given the realities of the present Church with its rigid institutionalism.

Padre Pio, a modern Christian saint, gave confession many years ago to an SRF member in Italy, a friend of mine. This friend related the story to me.

“During my confession, I told Padre Pio that I practiced Kriya Yoga.

“‘Oh, hush!’ Padre Pio replied. ‘You shouldn’t talk about such things. But,’ he added with a conspiratorial smile, ‘you’re doing the right thing!’”

Saints themselves, you see, are powerless to change the teachings of their own church, heavily institutionalized as it is.

For contrast, look at religion in India. There, religion is not really organized at all. Yet the original teachings of the Vedas—thousands of years older than the New Testament, and indeterminately older than the Old Testament—are still offered in a relatively pristine form.

It is true that Master came also, as he told us, to bring back the original yoga teachings of Krishna. The basic truths expounded in the Vedanta, however, are widely known in India, and are as purely and sublimely expressed today as they ever were.

The difference is that, in India, the purity of the teachings has been preserved from age to age not by some smoothly run institution, but by living saints.

16
“Yogananda for the World”: A Twelve-Year Battle for Freedom

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“We must have fellowship for the good of all, one “Church of God” to shed its light to all mankind, and not sects and “isms” which cause separativeness. The time will come when only souls of realization will give instruction and draw souls and crowds.” Praecepta Lessons 1938

Swami Kriyananda:
“God was using Yogananda as the avatar of a new age, to change an entire civilization. Don’t let anyone tell you that one organization, one person, one statement can ever, even remotely, define what he brought to the world. The present legal tiffs are not between two organizations, but between two different ‘takes’ on his cosmic mission.” In Divine Friendship

1990: Ananda changes its name
1990:  Publication of Essence of Self-Realization
1990: Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) sues Ananda

A challenge to universality
In 1990, SRF initiated a major lawsuit in federal court to prevent Ananda from using “Self-realization” in its name. SRF also demanded that Ananda not use Paramhansa Yogananda’s “name or likeness” in any advertising or publicity, and that it not use quotes from any of Yogananda’s writings without its permission.

Ananda had changed its name to “Ananda Church of Self-Realization” to convey more clearly the nature of its “religion” and the universality of its work and mission. “Self-realization” was the name used by Paramhansa Yogananda to describe his “religion.”

The universality of Yogananda’s teachings was the focus of The Essence of Self-Realization, a compilation of Yogananda’s statements, recorded by Swami Kriyananda, published shortly before the lawsuit.

After twelve years of litigation, Ananda won on nearly every count—essentially ninety-five percent of the lawsuit.

The court invalidated SRF’s trademarks in the names “Self-realization” and “Paramhansa Yogananda.” Numerous photos of Yogananda, many of his articles and lessons, and all books published by him before 1952, including Autobiography of a Yogi, were declared to be in the public domain.

The court also found that since SRF did not own Yogananda’s publicity rights, it could not control Ananda’s use of his name, likeness, voice, or signature.

Perspectives: Swami Kriyananda
“The Power To Rise”

God has given us countless marks of His love for us. He has given us tests also, and for these we should be just as grateful. For only when we are challenged to our foundations can we know inner peace and love for Him as truly our own. By remaining unshaken during trials, it is ourselves we convince that God is truly our only Beloved, and the wellspring of our existence.

Whatever happens to us in this life, it is God’s dream. If we live steadfastly for Him alone, whatever trials we are put through will generate in us the power to rise ever higher in divine consciousness, until we achieve our hearts’ only lasting desire: oneness with Him.

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Ananda Yoga

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Through yoga postures we can remove or relieve the congestion in the nerves or vertebrae and permit the free flow of life energy.” Scientific Healing Affirmations, 1924

Swami Kriyananda:
“Hatha Yoga [yoga postures and breathing techniques] is the physical branch of Raja Yoga and its real purpose is spiritual—to still the body so you can meditate deeply. I consider Ananda Yoga to be Paramhansa Yogananda’s system, and that he taught it through me.”  Interview with Gyandev McCord

1967: Publication of Yoga Postures for Self Awareness
1995: Publication of Ananda Yoga for Higher Awareness

A new system
Ananda Yoga dates back to the 1960s when Swami Kriyananda gave yoga postures classes in various northern California cities. In keeping with Hatha Yoga’s original spiritual purpose, he introduced a new dimension through affirmations that enable one to attune to the consciousness underlying each posture.

Kriyananda presented this new system in Yoga Postures for Self Awareness, published in 1967. More recent editions of the book have been renamed, Ananda Yoga for Higher Awareness.

Ananda Yoga is now taught in most Ananda colonies and centers. In extended programs such at the Yoga Teacher Training program offered at The Expanding Light Guest Retreat at Ananda Village, students are introduced also to meditation and Yogananda’s Energization Exercises.

The spread of Ananda Yoga:
Since 1978, thousands of teachers have been trained in the Ananda Yoga system. They remain connected with Ananda through the Ananda Yoga Teachers Association  (AYTA) and its newsletter, “Awake and Ready!”

Similar yoga teacher training programs are now offered at the Ananda colonies in Palo Alto, Seattle, Portland, and Assisi.

Perspectives: Gyandev McCord:
“I Am So Much More Than I Ever Thought”

In January 2008, The Expanding Light began a study of the therapeutic effects of Ananda Yoga, the Energization Exercises, and meditation on 28 people with multiple sclerosis. The experience was tremendously inspiring, starting when participants braved a severe winter storm to come to the initial five-day program. I thought, “These people are doers”—which is, of course, exactly who we wanted.

We taught them a specialized program of the Energization Exercises, yoga postures, meditation, affirmation and visualization. Ananda Yoga, for example, has an entry point for everyone, and we adapted the practice to what each individual could do. We also gave them DVDs to guide their home practice during the four-month study.

These warriors for wellness gave it their all, and we saw gains after just five days. At the tear-filled farewell, one participant said, “I think you guys are onto something here.”

Fast-forward to the joyous reunion and final assessments in May. We knew just from seeing participants move and hearing their stories that they had made great strides. (Analyzing the data will take longer.) Every component of the program made its own contribution. Energization was a valued tool, and meditation proved more popular than we had dared hope.

I had expected the gains to be more physical and psychological than spiritual because we had emphasized the first two more than the latter. Yet many others echoed one woman who said, “I don’t know what lies ahead for me, but I do know this: No difficulty could outweigh what I’ve gained spiritually from this. I am so much more than I ever thought, and nothing can take that away from me.”

Participants departed amid great optimism, love, gratitude, and plans for an October reunion. We too were deeply touched and grateful—to God and Guru as well as to those great souls.

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Joyful Arts Festival

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“In India, music as well as painting and drama is considered a divine art.” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“If art is to fulfill a divine mission—and everything on earth is a divine mission if understood properly—it should help you to uplift your consciousness through color, form, melody, harmony, or rhythm.” Joyful Arts Festival 2007

2005: First Joyful Arts Festival at Ananda Village

Why an arts festival?
Swami Kriyananda introduced The Festival of the Joyful Arts at Ananda Village to increase awareness of the importance of art in producing positive, uplifting changes in individuals and also in society as a whole.
The first Joyful Arts Festival, and those that followed, offered exhibitions of paintings, sculptures and photographs by Ananda artists and others; musical concerts; a performance of The Peace Treaty; and classes and workshops exploring all aspects of artistic expression.

Perspectives: Devi Novak
“I’ll Try To Do Better”

What Ananda brings to the arts is the ability to live from your own center and the divine power and inspiration that come when you do that. The Festival of the Joyful Arts is almost an allegory—a symbol of people channeling a higher power.

While in India in 2004, my husband, Jyotish, and I had the blessing of experiencing how powerfully that can happen. We went to a recording session with Swami Kriyananda where he recorded an album of songs, I Lived My Life as a Stranger. He was accompanied by guitar, tamboura, and piano.

The pianist, a devotee and a very accomplished pianist, had been asked to accompany Swami on the song, “In the Spirit,” but he had never played it before and had only been given the music that morning. When it came time to record that song, Swami had been in the studio three or four hours and he was tired. There were no windows and it about 110 degrees inside.

The pianist started playing, but he couldn’t get the mood of the music, or the melody— he couldn’t get any of it right. Finally, Swami stopped singing and asked,  “What are you doing?”

The pianist said, “I’ll try to do better tomorrow, Swami.”

He spent all night practicing, returned to the studio the next morning, and again played the song while Swami sang. At one point Swami paused. He said, “No one has ever captured that piece like that. You played it the way I heard it, and no one’s ever done that before.”

The pianist later told us, “I played it and I played it and I played it—until I felt it within myself and it was a part of me.” He had gone into his center and attuned to the inspiration Swami felt when he wrote the piece.

19
New Models of Living

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“If God is not conceived in such a way that we cannot do without Him in the satisfaction of a want, in our dealings with people, when earning money, in reading a book, in passing an examination, in the doing of the most trifling or the highest duties, then it is plain that we have not felt any connection between God and life.” Praecepta Lessons 1934

Swami Kriyananda:
“I saw Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings as the hub of a great wheel from which central truths radiate out in all directions like spokes on a bicycle wheel. The hub that formed the center of his teachings had the potential to energize humanity’s entire existence.” The Story Behind the Story

The spokes of a wheel
Some of Swami Kriyananda’s creative applications of Yogananda’s teachings are discussed above. Others include the following training system, books, and lessons:

1979: Superconscious Living (SCL): A system of training that explains the importance of living from the highest level of consciousness, the superconscious, and offers practical techniques and exercises that help people develop that level of awareness.

1987: The Art of Supportive Leadership—A Practical Guide for People in Positions of Responsibility: A view of leadership based on service to others and concern for their highest good, not on personal power or position.

1994: Money Magnetism: A discussion of the universal principles and techniques that enable one to attract true abundance, both material and spiritual.

1995: Expansive Marriage—A Way to Self-Realization: An approach to marriage based on the understanding that the purpose of human love is to expand one’s consciousness to embrace a universal love.

1999: Art As a Hidden Message: A discussion of art as a vehicle for bringing a deeper purpose and vision to life.

2004: Material Success through Yoga Principles: A 26-lesson course explaining why living by spiritual principles brings both inner and outer success, and offering techniques and practices to guide one’s efforts.

Perspectives: A New Approach to Friendship

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“In pure friendship you will find God. If you would be a true friend, you must recognize the soul. When you consider yourself as a soul, then you can be a perfect friend.” Inner Culture Magazine, 1940

Swami Kriyananda:
“Remember, God is the soul’s one, true Beloved. Only when He is loved first can there be true harmony in human life. Seek the Lord first. Be impersonal, even somewhat distant from others. That is the road to freedom. Remember, all that you are seeking can only be found in your own Self.” The Art and Science of Raja Yoga

Nirmala Schuppe: “A Gift from God”

People often think that in the early days Ananda was a cozy little family, because we were so many fewer people. It is a mistake to view Ananda in this personal way. It misses the point. Ananda is not about getting cozy, creating a utopian suburb: having barbecues, singing songs around the campfire, and creating the “good old boy” network!

Ananda is about spiritual support. This is the support Swamiji has given every person, relating to every individual soul to soul. Following his example, and seeing what joy it can bring to life, Ananda people try to relate to the God in each other, not to the personality. This has created many very deep friendships.

These true friendships have a foundation in Spirit; they aren’t a product of “ego vs. ego.” This is why Ananda friends can be apart for years, but when they come together again, it is as though no time at all has passed: the joy and love are ever fresh.

Because Ananda people consciously bring God into their relationships with others, God uses these friendships to help us in countless ways. They are truly a gift from God. That spirit of divine friendship is the same now as it was forty years ago, and available to everyone.

Savitri Simpson: “I See the Divine within You”

I see Swami Kriyananda very seldom these days, but when I do he always greets me and looks into my eyes with a look that says to me, “I see you, Savitri, but not the ‘little you’ with all your struggles and faults. I see the Divine within you.” In that look there is a blessing that far surpasses any human love or friendship I have ever known.

Nakin Lenti: “Invited to a Banquet”

Kriyananda’s influence on my life had been both personal and impersonal at the same time. Personal in the sense that I have a relationship with another human being, yet, it is a sacred trust that doesn’t lend itself to an easy-going familiarity, but demands the highest in me. This impersonal quality is what has made his spiritual leadership at Ananda unique, and very different from other teachers I have known, because grounded in the higher qualities of the soul.

Swami tries to help us in what we are already trying to do, which is to find God. I have found that to the extent that I am inwardly receptive to his help, to that extent is he able to work with me. It’s a reciprocal thing, like being invited to a fine banquet. If you’re not hungry, no one is going to force you to eat.

Dhyana Lynn: “Tune into Master”

Swami Kriyananda describes his role as that of our divine friend—someone who helps and guides us along the path and offers us loving friendship in God. I came to understand in time what it meant to have Swami as our divine friend.

In 1984, when four of us from Ananda USA were helping to get Ananda’s work started in Italy, I was still fairly new to Ananda and had no experience in starting a center. In the beginning, Swami was in Italy with us and gave many talks that attracted large crowds.

When Swami was about to return to Ananda Village, I asked him if he had any advice on developing our work. I was looking for concrete answers and a step-by-step plan. Instead Swami said, “Tune into Master and Divine Mother, and you will know what to do.”At first I didn’t understand what this meant, but as I tried to follow his advice and “tune in,” I began to feel the flow of ideas, inspiration, and inner guidance. I could also feel Swami’s prayers and silent support. Even though he called us frequently and offered advice, it was clear that he wanted us to gain our own strength, and to make decisions from inner attunement to Master.

More than anything else I feel the greatest gift of Swamiji’s friendship has been his attunement to Master and his guidance on how we can develop our own inner attunement to find Master’s guidance within ourselves.

Anandi Cornell: “Meditate on This”

One of the things I appreciated about Ananda from my first days at Ananda Village was the respect with which people treat each other. Everyone is given the space to develop naturally from the inside out — to make their own decisions and to let their own integrity guide them. People rarely give you unsolicited advice.

Swami Kriyananda has been a great model in this. He’s not afraid of people making mistakes because he knows it’s the way people learn, and he trusts that our good intentions, sincerity, and intelligence will bring us to the truth eventually.

In the early years, when I asked Swamiji for guidance about new directions in my life, he gave the questions back to me with the guidance, “Meditate on this. Ask God what He wants you to do.” He wanted me (and all of us) to develop our own intuition, to learn to get our answers from within.

20
Yoga Institute

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Dr. Lewis and I halted above the lotus pool near the hermitage. Below us lay the illimitable Pacific.

“We shall arrange here for many conferences and Congresses of Religion, inviting delegates from all lands…. As soon as possible,” I went on, “I plan to open a Yoga Institute here.” Autobiography of a Yogi

Swami Kriyananda:
“Yoga means union. As a yoga institute we will offer teachings that unite the various branches of learning in a higher vision of spiritual purpose. Basic to this approach will be the universal insights and world mission of India’s great modern yoga master, Paramhansa Yogananda.” Prospectus, Yoga Institute of Living Wisdom

2003: Ananda Institute of Alternative Living (Meditation Retreat)
2006: Yoga Institute of Living Wisdom (India)
2007: Ananda Institute of Living Yoga (Seattle)

A new approach to higher education
Inspired by Yogananda’s vision of a yoga institute, the three Ananda yoga institutes now in existence offer an approach to higher education grounded in Yogananda’s teachings.

The Ananda Institute of Alternative Living that began in 2003 at the Ananda Meditation Retreat, offers a full curriculum of standard academic subjects together with a wide variety of spiritually based courses, including Education for Life, holistic health and healing, dharmic business, and others.

The Yoga Institute of Living Wisdom in India, which got underway in 2006, will eventually address “every essential aspect of modern knowledge.” Already there are programs in inspirational art, leadership, dharmic business, and yoga philosophy, among others.

The Ananda Institute of Living Yoga in Seattle now offers teacher training and certification in Ananda Yoga, meditation, and Education for Life, as well as programs in Raja Yoga and other yogic disciplines.

Perspectives: Gaurja Prasher “The Best of Both Cultures”

I came to America to study at the Ananda Institute of Alternative Living because I believed that whatever I was to do in my life would start here.

I had always been fascinated with America. Growing up in India, I would often be around the American and British people who did business with my parents. Those interactions were very positive and I saw how each side gained from them.

Then, when my mother became involved with the Ananda work in Gurgaon, India, I was introduced to the spiritual side of America. How surprising it was to meet an American swami!

More and more, I’m discovering that all people seeking God are similar. Many of the institute students are from different countries, and it’s been interesting to learn how each of them was drawn to a spiritually oriented education, and especially to Ananda. Six of us are Kriyabans and the rest are very open to Yogananda. Many of the classes are based on his teachings.

As I try to make the most of my time here at the Institute, I am realizing more and more that Master is not just giving me good experiences, but he is also teaching me how to share these experiences and blessings with all. Right now, I am learning the best of both cultures, East and West, and my goal in future is to share that with others in every way I can.

I would like to be actively involved in spreading Master’s vision of world brotherhood colonies, perhaps by helping different groups start communities or perhaps by becoming involved in Education for Life.

But whether I work with children or adults, ultimately I see my life being dedicated to helping others find happiness within themselves through Master’s teachings.

21
The Future of Ananda

Paramhansa Yogananda:
“Wars are bound to go on in the world until the United States of Europe and the United States of Asia are evolved, to prepare the way for the United States of the World, with God guiding all nations through their realization of human brotherhood.” Inner Culture, 1942

Swami Kriyananda:
“At Ananda, brotherhood is a living reality, one which readily expands into a kinship with all life. Cooperation, rightly understood, ought not by any means to be limited to the community. It should reach out to embrace the larger ‘community’ of mankind. Hence, of course, Yogananda’s term, ‘world brotherhood colony.’” Intentional Communities

Perspectives: Swami Kriyananda
The World Is Our Community

People ask me what I see for the future of Ananda. The divine blueprint for Paramhansa Yogananda’s mission is not something that’s fixed.  It’s an energy, a direction. For the future I see more of the same spirit as there is now; how it expresses itself is secondary. If we have the right spirit, then everything will go right.

At Ananda we are not trying to create a beautiful New Age village. We’re here to serve God and to create an environment supportive to our devotion, one that will enable us to grow toward the universal goal of all life: Self-realization in God.

The ideal of communities is something that devotees everywhere should seek. Apart from that, people everywhere would do well to seek another kind of community. Human beings live together in planetary community. The good of each must be sought for the good of all.

Much thought has been devoted in modern times to finding solutions that depend entirely on human effort, without God—and without even such high ideals as love, happiness, and voluntary (as opposed to enforced) cooperation. Is there any hope that a community without such a foundation can succeed?

No, frankly, I see no such hope. If people live selfishly, what hope have they of clambering out of their habit-worn mental ruts? Attempts have been made, and the results always have been disappointing.

No mere economic system can possibly create a successful community. No mere decision to live and work together, without a high purpose in life, can possibly bond people in unity during stressful times. No merely social experiment will ever work.

It’s people who make communities, and more than that, it’s people in tune with a state of divine consciousness. This state of consciousness is something given to us by God, and it’s this consciousness that makes Ananda what it is.

In today’s world where people are adrift in a sea without direction or spiritual values, God wants to use Ananda to show others a positive way to guide their lives. It’s not you or me doing it, but God through us, because He has something to say to the world at this time about the need for communities.

We are living in an age when coming together in spiritual communities will bring new understanding, new perspectives. The world needs a focus for this movement, and Ananda provides this focus.

In our Ananda communities we have shown that people can live by high ideals, love all, and have communal harmony. Through our example, we can be of practical service to those who feel in harmony with what we’ve done.

Paramhansa Yogananda predicted that, “The day will come when this colony idea will spread through the world like wildfire.” Ultimately, Ananda’s isn’t the story of a community. It’s the story of great waves of consciousness that are needed in our times.

Perspectives: Shivani Lucki
“It’s People I Care About”

A conversation I had with Swami Kriyananda that especially stands out in my memory occurred in the mid 1970s while we were at a spiritual conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Swamiji had been invited and introduced as “the father of spiritual communities,” an honorific he gently rejected with this interesting comment: “I don’t care all that much about cooperative communities; it’s people I care about, and their spiritual growth. That is the only reason I’ve created Ananda. And if ever in the future it is not helping people in this way, then it should not continue to exist.”

Vidura Smallen:
“Ananda Exists for You”

From a political standpoint, the core values of Ananda very much represent the early values that America was founded on—in God we trust. Hard work and God’s blessings have made Ananda what it is.

Swami Kriyananda laid down the principle that the primary job of the Spiritual Director of Ananda is to guard the rights of the individual. He once said, “You do not exist for Ananda, Ananda exists for you.”

At Ananda, you have many people living this principle and, as a result, people look out for one another. For instance, the primary qualification of an Ananda minister is the willingness to put the needs of others before his own.

Contributors

Swami Kriyananda is the founder of Ananda Worldwide. Now retired and living in India, he serves as Dharmacharya (upholder of the spiritual vision) of Ananda  Sangha Worldwide.

Jyotish and Devi Novak are the Spiritual Directors (Acharyas) of Ananda Sangha Worldwide. They are both Kriya Ministers. Jyotish is also Spiritual Director (Acharya) of the Ananda Sevaka Order, Worldwide.

Parvati Hansen is the Executive Director of The Janaka Foundation based at Ananda Village.

Helen Purcell is Principal of the Ananda Palo Alto Living Wisdom School.

Jaya Helin is a teacher and Kriya Minister at Ananda India.

Mary Kretzmann is Director of The Healing Prayer Ministry at Ananda Village.

Asha Praver, together with her husband David, is Spiritual Director (Acharya) of Ananda Palo Alto.

Lorne Dekun is Center Leader for Ananda Michigan.

Savitri Simpson is a teacher at the Expanding Light Guest Retreat at Ananda Village and also serves in the Sangha Office.

Bhagavati Nani is a flutist and part of the Music Ministry at Ananda Village.

Patrick Lynch, together with his wife, Amber, is Center Leader for Ananda Ashland (OR).

Peter Kretzmann works as a computer specialist for Ananda Village.

Gyandev McCord teaches Ananda Yoga at The Expanding Light Guest Retreat at Ananda Village.

Nirmala Schuppe, together with her husband Dharmadas, is Spiritual Director (Acharya) of Ananda India.

Nakin Lenti serves in the Sangha Office at Ananda Village.

Dhyana Lynn is a Kriya Minister and Director of the Kriya Ministry at Ananda India.

Anandi Cornell teaches at The Expanding Light Guest Retreat at Ananda Village.

Gaurja Prasher is a student at the Ananda Institute of Alternative Living at the Ananda Meditation Retreat.

Shivani Lucki is a teacher and Kriya Minister at Ananda Assisi.

Vidura Smallen is a teacher and Kriya Minister at Ananda India.

When we asked him what he meant by that, he said, “They’re relating from personality to personality, and divine friendship is relating from one soul to another soul.”

“I see you as light”
Divine friendship is one of the most important things that Swami Kriyananda has expressed in his life, and also modeled for us spiritually. In the early 1970s, a few of us went with him to Reno, Nevada and stayed overnight. When he greeted us the next morning he said, “Hello all you great souls!” That was his usual way of greeting us.

But it was deeper than mere words. He held the vision of us as souls, as God in human form, to help us grow into the understanding that we are not egos, bodies, or personalities but souls, part of God.

That’s how Paramhansa Yogananda related to the devotees around him. He said, “I don’t see you as bodies and personalities. I see you as light. You have no idea how beautiful you are.” It was not that they were a special group. Yogananda related that way to everyone, and Swami Kriyananda was sensitive enough to perceive it and pass it on.

A great flow of divinity
Kriyananda has always related primarily to the divine presence in the world. And he has had the spiritual depth to be able tune into the powerful flow of divinity coming through many great saints—Paramhansa Yogananda, Ananda Moyi Ma, Sri Rama Yogi, and others.

When Kriyananda first met Ananda Moyi Ma in 1958, very quickly a strong bond formed between them. But it was not what we would think of as a close personal relationship. Often, he didn’t relate to her outwardly at all. He would just meditate in her presence and feel the vibration. When they did speak, it was through a translator.

Some of the devotees in Ananda Moyi Ma’s ashram had been with her for thirty or forty years, yet she was quoted as saying: “Many bees have come to this flower, but few have sipped the nectar the way Swami Kriyananda has.”  Kriyananda was able to tune into the great flow of divinity coming through her. He related to her not on a personality level, but soul to soul.

Three radically different personalities
Several of us were with Swami Kriyananda at Ananda Moyi Ma’s ashram in Hardwar in 1974 for a period of three days. On each of those days, Ananda Moyi exhibited a very different outer personality.

The first night we saw her, she was very distant, as if she were somewhere out in the galaxies. When people went up to greet her, with one or two exceptions, she didn’t relate to them at all.

The next day we had a private interview with her, and those of us who were with Swami Kriyananda with asked questions through a translator. She answered our questions and was very kindly, but she also conveyed the sense that we weren’t quite “getting it,” that we were a bit “off.”  A statement she would often make was: “I’m like a drum and as you beat me, so I will sound.” In the outwardness of our questions, we didn’t have the drum strokes right.

The third day we saw her, there was a much larger gathering and she was laughing and giggling like a teenager. At one point, she laughingly threw a garland of marigolds at Swamiji and it landed right around his neck.

Here was an example of the outer personality shifting radically three times in three days. What remained constant, however, was the powerful flow of love, joy, and grace coming through her. Kriyananda related mainly to that flow of divinity because that, not the personality, was the essence.

Holding the vision
He relates mainly to the Divine in us. That’s why it’s called “divine friendship.” People have blossomed spiritually at Ananda in part because Kriyananda has held very strongly the vision of us as souls, not as egos or personalities. When a person thinks of God as residing in others, he invites God to bless those people inwardly. This thought also increases the likelihood of his recognizing the divine presence within himself.

We, too, need to hold that vision for each other. And yes, we can laugh and joke and have our human relationships, but that should be the sub-theme. For devotees, the primary theme should be the relationship of my soul to your soul. Holding on to that vision allows Yogananda’s magnetism to flow through us.

“I want to be your disciple.”
In 1999, Kriyananda wrote a paper about the mission of Ananda, in which he said, “When I met Master, my first words to him were, “I want to be your disciple.”  He went on to say:

Any statement of purpose Ananda makes must be understood in the light of that thought: “I want to be your disciple.” For whatever Ananda is derives not from me, but only through me from Paramhansa Yogananda and his teachings.

Of all the things that Kriyananda has modeled for us, the most important is what a life of discipleship looks like. The core of that discipleship is deep, deep attunement to the Divine as it flows through Yogananda, and complete openness to be used however God and Guru want to use him.

Yogananda told Kriyananda that his life would be one of intense activity and meditation. In thinking about that “intense activity,” we tend to look at the form—at the 400 songs, the ninety books, the communities he’s started, the thousands of lectures, the hundreds of TV programs.

But that isn’t the essence of it. The essence of it is the complete no-holds-barred self-offering to be used as a channel by God and Guru. It was not from personal desire that Kriyananda founded communities and did these various things. He did them because his Guru asked that of him. If Yogananda had told Kriyananda to go to the Himalayas, he would be in the Himalayas. He will do whatever is asked of him, even if it means great hardship to himself.

A total self-offering
Who at the age of 80 picks up and moves to India to start a new work? We were with him in Assisi, Italy when he was packing up to move to India. He threw a couple of items of clothing in a suitcase, along with his swami shawl, and that was all. He was just like a little kid going off into the woods with a little bandana on a pole.

If it were possible legally, he would own absolutely nothing. He would not have a house, a car, or even a bank account. He’s free from that kind of concern or fear. His life is completely offered into the hands of Divine Mother, and whatever She gives him is fine, and whatever She doesn’t give him is fine.

Even if he’s having trouble physically, he’ll do his best to give a talk. And then, because of that willingness, after not being able to get out of a chair, he is able to stand up for an hour and a half and deliver a powerful talk. It is his complete openness to the flow of God’s grace and energy through Yogananda that allows him to do this.

No longer any boundaries
And he’s becoming freer and freer. When taken far enough, the fruit of a life of discipleship is the release from ego—there are no longer any boundaries between you, the Guru, and God.

Recently Kriyananda said he can no longer tell where he stops and Yogananda begins. He relates to himself as an extension of Yogananda.

Not that attunement with the Guru somehow melts who you are; it empowers who you truly are. Yogananda is empowering the divine essence within Swami Kriyananda to be more fully God in that form.

Excerpted from an October 10, 2007 talk at Ananda Village.

Jyotish and Devi Novak are Acharyas (spiritual directors) for Ananda Sangha Worldwide. Jyotish is also Acharya for the Ananda Sevaka Order, worldwide.

Other Clarity articles by Jyotish and Devi Novak are listed under “Nayaswamis Jyotish and Devi.”

When Yogananda spoke this way about his body and personality, he was not speaking of himself in his expanded consciousness. So often when we talk about a great master, we emphasize the personality and forget the underlying reality that animates him. It’s important to hold the thought that Yogananda wasn’t that personality. He’s as much here today as he is in the astral world, or anywhere in space, because he’s one with the Infinite.

Get rid of self-definitions
We have all been through many incarnations. I tremble to think of how many. Even after we achieve human birth we still have many more incarnations to go through before we realize our true nature.

Our job as devotees is to get rid of the countless little self-definitions that limit us. As we reduce these, we finally discover that we too are one with the Infinite. This is the state of cosmic consciousness. When Sister Gyanamata, Yogananda’s most advanced woman disciple, reached that state at the moment of death, her last words were, “Ah, too much joy!” You, too, will ultimately find such joy, which you’ve been seeking for many lifetimes.

The upliftment of the whole world
It’s helpful for us to discuss why Paramhansa Yogananda came to the world at this time. He came to help all of us, surely, but he also came for the upliftment of the whole world. In the Bhagavad Gita, it says, “Whenever darkness increases and virtue declines, I incarnate myself on earth as an avatar to re-establish dharma.”

I don’t know how many lifetimes Yogananda has come back as an avatar, but as he said, “It’s been a long time.” He’s had many missions, and his special task always seems to be to overcome the opposition to a new movement in history. He told us that in a past lifetime he was the divine warrior, Arjuna, and in another, William the Conqueror.

In this lifetime, Yogananda was divinely ordained to play a very difficult role. Like William the Conqueror, he came to a whole new continent where he was completely unknown and opposed by many. He came as a Hindu to a basically Christian America, but he had so much power and joy that he took the country by storm.

Yogananda’s mission was to change world consciousness. He needed an indomitable spirit of conquest to be able to bring God’s message to the world for this new age of energy—the age of Dwapara Yuga. The model he set on all levels of life has been so all encompassing that I think in the future he will be called, “The Avatar of Dwapara Yuga.”

An emphasis on energy
All of Yogananda’s teachings are centered in the concept of energy: the Energization Exercises, the many techniques for drawing energy through breathing and from the food we eat. In India during higher ages, prana was understood as energy, and pranayama meant not just control of the breath, but “control of subtle energy.”

Yogananda taught that the breath accompanies the flow of energy in the astral spine—the upward moving energy in the ida causes the inhalation, and the downward flow in the pingala causes the exhalation. This control of prana as energy is the essence of Kriya Yoga. Fundamental to all Yogananda’s teachings is this emphasis on energy.

How to live with joy
So much of religion in the Dark Age, or Kali Yuga, was based on the consciousness of sin. Yogananda came to change this consciousness by showing us how to live with joy.

He brought the awareness that you are not a sinner—you are a perfect being! Your destiny is not to go to hell, as so many people believe, but to become one with God. Your most important job in life is to think of God and understand that He is your own highest reality.

Yogananda emphasized that it’s not a consciousness of sinfulness that will make us grow—it’s joy. We should never beat ourselves up over the mistakes we’ve made. It’s much better simply to say, “All right, I made a mistake. Now I’m going to dust off my hands, and try again.”

Spiritual communities
Another new expression of energy brought by Yogananda was the ideal of spiritual communities or, “world brotherhood colonies,” as he called them. At every single Sunday service that I heard, he spoke about building communities and tried to get others enthusiastic about the idea.

Yogananda told me I had a great work to do, and part of that has been building communities. When people visit our communities, and see the joy in the eyes of our people, they say, “I want to join this, or do something like it.” That’s the way you can change people—not by telling them what to do, but by doing something so attractive that they will do it on their own.

The war between the angels and asuras
There’s a war going on now in heaven between the angels and the asuras, or demonic forces. We can see that asura energy in the increase in violence, terrorism, and adharmic activities in this world.

The whole world seems to be saying, “God is separate from our daily lives.” He’s not! He created this world, and He has come anew to the world today through Paramhansa Yogananda. In time, Yogananda’s teachings will bring a change in people’s consciousness that will bring peace, happiness, and beauty to the world.

Many people think you just can’t be happy, you can’t be kind—that it won’t work to live that way. But in the nearly forty years since we started Ananda, we have had enough experience to declare emphatically: it does work.

At Ananda we have spiritual communities that are like families. I don’t like to stress this aspect of it, because it sounds as if I were trying to win people for mercenary reasons, but the truth is that it’s the best possible insurance you can have—to live with people who love and support you. Our highest concern is, and has always been, the individual. One of the guidelines I’ve used in building Ananda is, “People are more important than things.”

I invite all of you in India and everywhere to think seriously about this concept. Together we can create communities that are supportive of everybody and help people to live more in God.

An energy-based system of education
The system of education that we’ve developed in our communities is also based on Yogananda’s principles of energy and consciousness. We provide a school environment where children are happy. By teaching them how to direct their energy in positive, harmonious ways, they stand out as examples of calmness, understanding, and wisdom.

On top of that, they excel academically. They score in the top five percentile in national scholastic tests given throughout the country.

The former superintendent of schools in Sacramento, California toured our “Living Wisdom” school at Ananda Village and said, “If these principles were used in all our schools, it would change the world.” Yogananda very strongly wanted to create such schools that had a balanced approach to the children’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs.

No spirit of competition
When Yogananda spoke of the benefits of living in communities, he said: “If a thousand people work against each other competitively, each one has nine hundred and ninety-nine enemies. But if they work in a cooperative society, each will have nine hundred and ninety-nine friends.”

At Ananda there is no spirit of competition. In fact, I never appoint someone a leader if I see he wants to be a leader—I appoint those who want to serve.

That spirit of service, again, is something Yogananda brought. He said business should be done as a service to others, thinking in terms of what you can give, not what you can gain. In Ananda’s businesses, we work in this spirit, and by treating our customers as friends, they return to our shops again and again.

Change the world by example
How can we change the world?  By example! By doing it ourselves, and not wasting time telling everybody else how they should be.

If we commit ourselves to living Yogananda’s teachings and creating models for others, we can change the world with the consciousness that he brought. His mission to our age was to bring divine consciousness into every conceivable aspect of society. To me that mission was who he really was.

Each master who comes into the world is one with the same Truth. There is no rivalry in God, and God expresses Himself differently through each one. When Yogananda was asked if he had brought a new religion, he replied, “It is a new expression.” God has blessed the world with a new expression of timeless truths, and all of us must work together to do our part to fulfill the great mission that Paramhansa Yogananda brought.

Excerpted from a talk March 4,2007 talk at the International Mahasamadhi Celebration, Gurgaon, India.

A deep desire to help others
One thing I haven’t talked about much, however, is that I had a two-fold desire in going to meet him. First, of course, I wanted to be his disciple, because I knew that no efforts on my part could free my heart and mind from the obstacles that kept me from finding God.

The other reason was that I had always wanted to find joy not just for myself but to share with others. It was only after meeting him that I was able to fulfill this deep desire. I wanted everybody in the world to know him and the deep teachings he presents in Autobiography of a Yogi.

Weeping by the wayside
During my teenage years World War II was raging. At that time I thought, “Mankind doesn’t understand why we’re here on this planet. We’re wandering in darkness and confusion without any idea of the real meaning of life.”

When I found my Guru, I found what that meaning was. It was stated long ago in India by Swami Shankaracharya: The goal of life is satchidananda—ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new bliss.

Everyone in the world is seeking this unalloyed happiness. They think to find it in money, or power, or pleasure, and all the things of this world, but eventually all of this turns to dust. Man becomes disappointed again and again and ends up weeping by the wayside, wondering, “Where can I find happiness?”

“I was liberated many lives ago.”
Over the years, I’ve meditated on my Guru’s words and also on his least gesture, because even there I could find deep teachings. He sometimes said to us, “I was liberated many lives ago.” I am now convinced that he and our line of gurus, all of whom are avatars, have come back to this planet again and again to help lift humanity out of the mud of delusion.

Once I asked him about the roles he said these masters had played in past incarnations. “Can they play such roles and still be in nirbikalpa samadhi?” I asked. “What is their state of consciousness?” His answer was interesting: “ No matter what part a master plays, he never loses the consciousness of inner freedom.”

The masters come again and again
These great souls come into the world again and again and play certain roles as instruments for God. Lahiri Mahasaya took on the role of businessman, householder, and father before he met Babaji. Swami Sri Yukteswar also had family responsibilities before he met his guru—he had been married and had a daughter.

Yogananda, in a sense, was born a monk. Even as a child he was wrapped in God. Nonetheless, he still had to go through the challenges of misunderstanding relatives and all the other struggles that everyone has to face. The masters play these roles to help us understand that we, too, can achieve the divine goal. It’s open to all of us.

In everything yet not in anything
Yogananda was a real “paramhansa,” one who is able to swim in the ocean of delusion, and yet be untouched by it. He was equally at home in divine consciousness and in the world. His perfection was totally natural, without any pretense.

When he was with us, he would sometimes laugh uproariously and with so much delight in life and humorous situations that tears would stream down our cheeks. I remember a poem he quoted with great glee: “Her teeth are like stars. They come out at night.” How he laughed at these things! He was human and enjoyed these little amusements. Yet in his presence, you could feel that it was divine joy alone that filled his consciousness.

I never saw him less than absolutely perfect, anchored in the Infinite. Even when he was laughing, you could look into his eyes and see that he was completely untouched. He could grieve over people’s sorrows, and still be untouched. Like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, he was in everything and not in anything, in everyone and not in anyone.

Proud of my intellectuality
Whenever I was with him, I felt that I was in the presence of God Himself. Once he was talking with some of the monks about a very mundane task that needed to be done—filling the potholes in the road. I didn’t have that job to do, so I just sat there and tried to tune in to his consciousness. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by joy.

I lived with him very closely for three and a half years until he left his body. The wonderful thing was that in living with him, I felt myself gradually changing. When I first came to him my problem was that I was much too intellectual, and, I have to admit, proud of my intellectuality—of how much reading and thinking I had done. It was stupid to be proud of this, but then we’re all stupid about something.  Still I didn’t want to be that way—I wanted devotion.

Yogananda kept telling me, “Develop devotion.” It was a mammoth task to transform my whole state of consciousness, but with a lot of chanting and meditating, I began to feel a difference. After a time I heard that he had said of me, “Look how I have changed Walter.”

Then I realized, yes, I had done the work, but it was his power and grace that had changed me. We have to do the work—they’re not going to do it for us. But if we try our best, the divine power of God and the guru is there.

The beginning of a new era
This weekend marks a very important time in the history of this work. The publishing of Yogananda’s explanation of the Bhagavad Gita in terms that people today can relate to and understand, marks the beginning of a new era. Through this little beginning that we have initiated in India, millions of lives will be changed, and I invite all you to be a part of this drama. The most important thing that any of us can do is to serve as instruments of the divine ray that God has sent into this world at this time.

The tendency of man is to say, “Oh, yes, I hope it happens.” But God wants people to say, “I will help make it happen.” From the moment that I read Yogananda’s Autobiography, I had an urgent desire to share anything I gained with everyone, and he treated me accordingly. I don’t think that I had any special spiritual gifts, but with my whole heart I wanted to show people the way out of suffering.

We can bring great light into the world
I urge all of you to be a part of this, because we can change the world. As few and insignificant as we are, we can bring great light into this world if we are willing to be instruments for the light. If we just stand by passively and let the show go on, it does goes on—and we keep coming back again and again.

If you are willing to serve as instruments for this cause, God will use you and He will bless you. In difficult times such as we’re living in today, God will give you very special blessings if you are willing to act as channels for His love. There is a great need for that love in the world today; the world is in great trouble right now because that love is lacking.

The meaning of his life
If we open our hearts to God, He can do much through us. This was the example of that great soul, Paramhansa Yogananda, who went to America from India when he was in his twenties. The year was 1920, and it’s amazing what he accomplished in that lifetime.

Yet there were many things he couldn’t finish, so he had to leave them to us to complete. Only as we’re willing to help make that great vision happen can it enter the world and change it.

I plead with you – become a warrior of the light now. That is what Yogananda wants of us and that ultimately is the meaning of his life.

From a March 12, 2006 talk at the celebration of Paramhansa Yogananda’s Mahasamadhi in New Delhi, India.

Early one morning he telephoned Jyotish and Devi Novak, who were also in India, and said, “I’ve something very important to discuss with you.” When they arrived at his room, Dharmadas Schuppe, Yogacharya of Ananda Sangha India, and his wife, Nirmala, were already there.

Kriyananda told them: “At two o’clock this morning I woke up with this wonderful idea for describing Ananda’s membership.” He had written a statement of the beliefs and principles held in common by those who are part of Ananda. He called it, The Way of Ananda Sanghis.

“As he read it to us,” Devi recalled, “I just felt this wave of blessing. We could feel that this was something that had been given to him, and through him to all of us.”

At Spiritual Renewal Week at Ananda Village in August 2004, Jyotish discussed some of the deeper implications of Kriyananda’s statement:

The Way of Ananda Sanghis is based on the highest principles of India’s spiritual teachings. Yogananda said that the teachings he brought to the West are the “cream of the cream” of yoga. The Way of Ananda Sanghis gives us the essence of those teachings.

This is the first time in Ananda’s history that we’ve had such a statement. It’s as if we’ve had to live these teachings for a while before they could be stated outwardly. As Yogananda has said, we not only have to churn the ether with our thoughts, we also need to bring those thoughts down to the physical plane. Otherwise, there’s a tendency to let the statement substitute for the action.

Kriyananda has often waited many years so we can live a truth before he states it. But now we have a clear, succinct statement of our overall beliefs.

One of our meditation group leaders recently said, “When people have asked me, ‘What is Ananda, what do you believe?’ I would tell them what I thought. Now I can give them this brochure!”

The Way of Ananda Sanghis is universal and nonsectarian. Kriyananda wants Ananda to be a movement that’s open to everyone, not an organization.

The Way of Ananda Sanghis and information on how to become a member of Ananda Sangha can be found at http://www.ananda.org/sangha/sanghis/index.html

Recognized by the great saints
But a surprising number of people think of Yogananda as a fortunate young man who got to meet the great saints of his day. In his last years he told us that when he visited those saints, they actually wanted instruction from him. They recognized him as a great master even though he was still a youth.

There are only a handful of great masters who are fully liberated (as he told us, “I was liberated many lifetimes ago.”), and yet keep coming back to this world to raise the consciousness of humanity. He said, for example, that Babaji was Krishna in a former incarnation and that he himself had been Arjuna.

These great masters come again and again to uplift the world. It’s very important to understand that a great master like Yogananda comes with a mission.

Yogananda—a divine warrior
Yogananda’s mission was similar to Arjuna’s in the Bhagavad Gita in that he had to fight to make righteousness transcendent over evil. His life demonstrated that it’s not enough to say, “I will withdraw into samadhi and forget that evil exists.” There’s a part of the divine play that needs to fight evil, and this was the role that Yogananda took up. To bring these teachings to people he had to be a divine warrior like Arjuna.

Now that he’s physically left this world, we must carry on his mission and serve as his hands and feet. He brought a call to divine battle, inflaming people to change their lives and bring Kriya Yoga into action. It’s a good thing to be centered in your spine, but today it’s even more important to take this centeredness out to others.

The role of communities
At almost every public lecture Yogananda gave, he spoke of the importance of coming together to create communities, or world brotherhood colonies, as he called them. I was present at a talk he gave in Beverly Hills at which he said that thousands of youths must go North, South, East, and West to spread this concept. I vowed I would do it. There were several hundred people at that garden party, but I’m the only one who took him seriously and founded communities.

I would like to plead with all of you to join hands with us to start communities in this country. Right now we have mostly Americans living in the ashram here, but I hope in time that it will be far more Indians, and we’ll be a small minority.

The beautiful thing about living in such communities is that everybody becomes joyful, forgiving, and filled with love. I believe with all my heart that in the future people will look back and say that the most important thing happening in the world at this time was the founding of communities, places where people got together and said, “Let’s live the right way. Let’s not worry about what other people do.”

We must share our joy with others
Today isn’t the time for a few monks to be hidden away in monasteries. It’s the time for people everywhere to live lives dedicated to God. You’ve no idea what an impression these communities have already made. We get letters from people from all over the world saying that their lives are more worthwhile knowing that our communities exist.

Just as Master pleaded with everyone at that garden party to join in this mission, I plead with you now to take these words seriously. This was one of the most important things he came to bring. He knew that if people could live together in harmony, practice Kriya Yoga, and understand that their reality is within themselves, they could change the world.

For India, a return to spiritual values
Today we see that India has been drawing from the West in the wrong ways. Going Western is one thing, but bringing materialistic values to India is quite another. There is something in India that no other country has—a power implanted in the soil for millennia by great rishis seeking God. I have encountered many Indians who say, “How can we bring these values back?”

This is our job. I’ve incarnated in a Western body, but I’m not a Westerner at heart. I’m an Indian. But my job, our job if you will accept it, is to bring these values back to India and to help people to realize that we need both God and material efficiency.

America and India must unite
There is a karmic bond between India and America that goes back thousands of years. It’s the divine will today that these two cultures be united to blend the best of East and West. Yogananda predicted that some day India and America would unite to lead the world in a balanced life of material and spiritual efficiency.

This is Yogananda’s mission, and this is what I’ve come to India to help accomplish. I would love to start communities where this ideal can be brought to a focus, because otherwise these words just disperse into the ether. But if a few people can get together and create such communities, then we can set an example for others to follow.

The need for divine warriors
We are at the very beginning of a new age, and I’ll tell you quite truthfully that this isn’t going to be an easy beginning. My Guru said that a time will come when no corner of this planet will be safe from bombs. He spoke also of great economic depression. We have great suffering and trials ahead, and we will need to be divine warriors.

But at the same time, spiritually, this is a wonderful time to be born, because we don’t grow when everything is smooth and easy. An easy life is not a victorious one. We have an opportunity now to be warriors for God, like Arjuna.

We will see the real fruit of these teachings after these trials are over, but now we are at the beginning of it. In our own small way, if we can help to bring Master’s teachings out, we can help to change the world.

Kriya Yoga must be put into action
I’m grateful to be in India now and do what I set out to do forty years ago: to make Yogananda and his mission known. I don’t do this with the ego of a disciple who wants his Guru to be known, but with the conviction that what Yogananda brought is what India and the world need at this time. You can change the world if you live these truths.

This was the message that the Masters sent to the world through Yogananda. Kriya Yoga needs to be put into action. We need to meditate, to feel the divine joy within, and to bring that divine joy outward to all. The surest way of doing this is if a few people who believe in these values band together, grow their own food, build their own buildings, and educate their own children.

We have done this in our communities for the past thirty-six years. We can do it here. I know that this is what Yogananda wants to do through me and through all of us here.

During Yogananda’s last moments before his mahasamadhi on March 7, 1952, he pleaded with us to bring the best of the East and West together, and to live in a better way in order to know what life is really all about.

Excerpted from Kriyananda’s March 7, 2004 talk in New Delhi, in commemoration of Yogananda’s mahasamadhi.

I had the opportunity to meet and live with a great Master from your country. I’m sure that many of you have read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda. I read it when I was a young man of 22 in New York. I’d been seeking truth in all possible ways except the right one. I looked for it in science, in the arts, in political systems.

Always I tried to avoid thinking of God because I believed, as modern science teaches, that you can’t prove God, so why think about Him? I tried to find fulfillment without Him and, thank God, I failed.

It was in a mood of extreme desperation that I came upon Autobiography of a Yogi. That book so changed my life that I took the next bus from New York to Los Angeles, a journey of four days and nights, to meet him.

“I want to be your disciple.”
I had been a very arrogant young man. I never thought I’d say such words to anybody, but when I met Yogananda my first words to him were, “I want to be your disciple.” He must have seen how desperate I was, because that same day he gave me the vows of discipleship and accepted me in the monastery.

That was in 1948, and for these past fifty-six years I’ve been sharing his life and teachings, as he instructed me to do, through lecturing and writing books.

For everyone the goal is the same
I’ve just finished writing a book called, Conversations with Yogananda, and I’d like to read two passages from it. The first one is:

A professor from Columbia University came to lunch with the Master in his third floor interview room at Mt. Washington. At a certain point in their discussion the professor asked: ‘Do your teachings help people to be at peace with themselves?’ ‘They do indeed,’ the Master answered, ‘but that is the least that they do. We teach people above all how to be at peace with their Creator.’

Ultimately we all have to make peace with our Creator. We have to understand who we are, where we’ve come from, and what the purpose of life is.

The goal of life for everyone is to seek God, whether they know it or not. We are all children of God. And the beautiful thing is that this is true of the lowest beggar, the most vicious criminal, the most brutal dictator.

In living with Yogananda I found that he saw in all people the same one God. He had the same love for everybody. He didn’t look at anybody with judgment. You might ask, “In his greatness did he look down on us?”

The difference between the Guru and the disciple
This next passage in Conversations with Yogananda answers this question: He was asked, ‘How do you distinguish between yourself and your followers?’

All are waves on the same one ocean,’ the Master replied, ‘composed, as ocean water is of the same substance: Spirit. Some of the waves are higher than others. Some waves don’t want to distance themselves from the ocean. All waves, no matter how high, are in essence one and the same.
The difference between the Guru and the disciples, then, lies only in their respective closeness to the ocean: in how conscious each one is of his own essential reality…

This is how it was living with him. He was not somebody up there looking down on us. He was our own Selves.

I’ll never forget the time when I had given someone advice. When I next saw Yogananda, he corrected the advice I’d given. I was amazed that he knew what I’d said even at a great distance from him. He said, “I know every thought you think.”

How did he have that ability? Because he was in everybody. It’s not like a wave that is higher than others. Rather there’s no wave at all. A Master has no sense of separation from God.

The religion of the universe
Yogananda was one of the greatest ambassadors of Indian culture that your country has ever sent to the world. The Sanaatan Dharma of Hinduism, which he taught, is the religion of the universe.

You might call your religion Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism, but all true
religions have the same purpose—to give you the understanding that the goal of life is to ?nd who and what you are—as bliss. Yogananda came to show us that motivating all life from behind is the soul’s desire for bliss.

The “blessings” of Western civilization

Over forty years ago when I lived here, I realized that India would have to experience worldly prosperity. You would inevitably have cars, televisions, and all the so-called “blessings” of Western civilization. I also knew it would be a horrible thing, but I believed India would have the power to come through it. I see that it has.

God is the joy we seek
I see that young people in India today are realizing that we don’t find happiness in these things. India can’t get away from itself. There is a power in this country, a joy that wells up out of the soil. As Yogananda said in his poem, My India, “I am hallowed, my body touched that sod.”

This is why India is the guru of the world. Truth is eternal. What the great rishis and yogis have left in the soil of this country is a power that will ultimately change not only your lives but the lives of everyone.

When you travel the world, you see that people everywhere are seeking happiness, and it comes back to this same truth. God is not dead, as some people proclaim. He is alive. He is the joy, the bliss we all seek.

This is the goal of every one of us. The same God that’s in Yogananda or Jesus Christ or Krishna is in you. Underneath all that you’ve been seeking in life is that One Universal God.

This is what Yogananda came to show us. Because of his great humility many people in this country who have read Autobiography of a Yogi, think of Yogananda as a simple devotee who visited other saints. If I have a mission, it is to get him and his message known in this country.

Yogananda’s message
Yogananda’s message is the path of Kriya Yoga. He was the representative of a line of great gurus who, through Lahiri Mahasaya of Benares, brought this great message down from the heights.

Yogananda showed us how to bring the teaching of Kriya Yoga into daily life, and how to bring the Divine Reality into everything we do. This was, to a large extent, Yogananda’s mission to the world, and to a large extent that’s why I am here. I’ve come to India now to show that the practicality he gave to the Indian teachings is as real here as anywhere.

Spiritual communities
Another aspect of Yogananda’s mission was to develop spiritual communities. Nearly every time he talked in public, he spoke of the importance of such communities to the world today.

Why not live with people who share the same values? Why not be surrounded by friends who love God? Then the people living around you actually help in the realization of your ideals.

This is what we’ve experienced at the Ananda communities in America and Italy. Ananda has been in existence now for 35 years, and the love for God, harmony, and cooperation there are an inspiration to all who come.

I would love to introduce such communities in India. I think they can be established here more easily because you naturally understand these concepts.

This world is only a school
But remember we’re not here to bring perfection to this world, for this world is only a school. The goal is not to make civilization perfect, but to use the teachings of civilization to achieve perfection in ourselves.

The highlight of my life was meeting and being with my Guru. It was like being in the presence of God. Behind everything he said or did was a message—to realize the bliss of our own being. He saw all of us as potential gods filled with divine bliss.

What these great masters are, not only can you achieve, you must achieve. You are eternal, although you’ve lived in this world wandering in delusion. That search can go on forever, but there is something that never leaves you—the longing for the bliss of God. Someday you will awaken and know yourself as a child of the Infinite Lord. I bow to that Lord in all of you.

Ananda’s work in India is  well underway! In less than a month from when Swami Kriyananda first proposed this new direction, Ananda found a large, recently built mansion in Gurgaon, a New Delhi suburb, to serve as a possible ashram. Approving the choice, Kriyananda quoted Sri Yukteswar’s words to Yogananda on the eve of his departure to America: “All doors are open for you. It is now or never.”

The Ananda Sangha staff, assisted by leaders from various Ananda colonies, set about furnishing the new ashram, getting out publicity, printing brochures and arranging for satsangs. Though an enormous undertaking, there was a surprising ease about it.

Jyotish Novak from Ananda Village observed: “We couldn’t have accomplished anything without the grace of Yogananda and the other gurus. I could feel it more palpably than I have ever felt it in the entire history of Ananda.”

The ashram opens
On Friday, November 28, 2003, the new Ananda ashram was officially opened with a Vedic ceremony led by Swami Kriyananda. Other doors have been opening. Indian publisher Aswani Goyal who, ?fteen years ago, was the ?rst to publish Kriyananda’s books in India, offered helpful advice on starting a publishing company in India.

But then Yogananda appeared to him in a dream and said, “You’re not doing enough to help these people.” Two days later, Aswani offered to provide office space, training, secretarial support, and whatever else was needed for Ananda to start its own publishing house. Aswani and his wife, Vini, hope to become the ?rst members of Ananda Sangha in India

An overflow crowd
The weekend of January 9-11, 2004 saw the official launching of Ananda’s work in India to a very positive response. Saturday evening, January 10th, Kriyananda spoke to an over?ow crowd of 700 people in an auditorium in downtown New Delhi. His talk wove together the two themes of everyone’s need to seek God, and his experiences with Yogananda.

Predicting that India’s powerful spiritual heritage would change the world, he said: “India is now copying the West and its values, but this will not last for long. India needs to reclaim its right as guru to the world. This is your destiny.”

The talk received key publicity the previous day when Kriyananda answered callers’ questions during a thirty-minute television interview on “The Sadhna Channel,” which reaches millions in India and South Asia.

Conversations with Yogananda
Conversations with Yogananda, Kriyananda’s newest book, (published in India in record time) was available for this special weekend. These in-depth conversations, recorded by Kriyananda at Yogananda’s request, offer Yogananda’s first hand thoughts on a wide range of subjects. The newly published Indian edition of God Is for Everyone was also available for the event.

The following morning there was a Sunday Service attended by 100 people at a smaller hall in downtown New Delhi, led by Kriyananda. Since January, Kriyananda has been giving Saturday satsangs at the ashram, and leading Sunday Service in New Delhi, alternating at times with other Ananda ministers.

Televised talks and a regular column
Starting in January, Kriyananda recorded numerous programs, entitled, “The Way of Awakening,” for The Sadhana Channel. These twenty-minute talks, which began airing on January 28, were shown every weekday night for two months through the end of March, followed by one show each week until the end of 2004. Kriyananda is also writing a regular column on meditation and yoga for the Hindustan Times, India’s largest newspaper.

A staff of thirteen
The Ananda staff, though still in ?ux, presently numbers thirteen people, mainly devotees from Ananda Village and other colonies, and includes one Canadian-born Indian of Bengali parentage. Peter (Dharmadas) Schuppe, most recently from Ananda Village, has been appointed Yogacharya (spiritual director) of Ananda Sangha India. He has also been made a Kriya minister.

Since January, Ananda staff members have been offering an ongoing four-week meditation class series in central New Delhi. Others on staff have been looking for land to start a community. There are also plans to start a traditional, Indian-style monastic order for men and women.

Radical answers to today’s problems in education
Six years ago I became director of Ananda’s Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto, which is based on Education for Life principles, and I found myself right in the middle of a revolution. Education for Life has given us radical answers to the problems in education today, not just for devotees but for everyone.

Not long ago a woman came to check out our school for her child. She said, “Every school in this area promises to deal with body, mind and spirit. They all promise to create moral, ethical individuals, and to work with students’ emotional and social challenges. But you are the only ones that seem to be doing it.” This was an exaggeration, perhaps, but she was tuning into something.

Another time a professional, who specialized in assessing children with possible learning challenges, said to me, “I go to all the schools in the area. I test the kids and talk to the teachers. And your school is the optimal learning environment.” But she couldn’t say why; she couldn’t put a name to it.

They’re exuding joy!
And then one day, when I was giving a tour to prospective parents, there was a young woman who asked questions that allowed me to address all the important issues. After everybody left, she stayed.

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “I’m not a parent. I’m really a spy.” It turned out that she was working on her PhD dissertation in education and child psychology and was visiting all the schools in the area.

She continued, “I knew this place was different when I stepped on the grounds. But I didn’t know why until I saw the kids.  Your kids smile a lot.  They’re laughing. They’re exuding joy. You don’t find that in other schools.”

What these people had tuned into was the consciousness with which our teachers and children come together to learn—the consciousness of joy in everything. The premise underlying Education for Life is that the sole purpose of life is to learn who you truly are. And who you truly are—beyond the body, mind, and personality—is the soul, and the soul’s nature is joy.

Our job is not to “fix” them
I say to parents of prospective students: “What we’re doing here may look on the surface pretty normal, but this is a radical approach to education, and it will challenge all of your traditional notions. It’s radical because, first and foremost, we’re addressing the original goodness in our children. And when you do that, the whole educational scenario becomes positive, affirmative.”

The children who come to our school are accepted as souls, sparks of the Divine who carry within soul perfection. Our job is not to “fix” them or prepare them for the new global economy, even though all that will conceivably happen.

Our job is to give them the tools that will enable them to express their unique gifts. In order to do that, one has to define education in terms of life’s true goal, which is Self-realization. And then, one has to shine on the children the light of total affirmation of their souls, and of all their gifts.

A false equation: money equals happiness
One typical case is a student who came to us from a very high-powered private school. The focus of that school is to get the students into a premier college, so that they can get a premier profession, make a lot of money, and be happy. But experience tells us that this equation doesn’t work. We all know too many highly educated, successful professionals who are desperately unhappy in their lives.

The only point of anybody’s life is to find true happiness. And when you’re really clear about that, you don’t impose on children this other very false equation. Instead, you see who they are at the deepest level and support them. That doesn’t mean you turn away from any areas of weakness. It simply means you don’t define the child in terms of them.

And so when this student first came he had some difficulties. But we soon realized that he was truly gifted, though not in ordinary ways. However, at the first parent conference, his parents wanted to focus on his deficiencies.

I finally interrupted and asked, “What do you see as his strengths?” And they began to delineate them. But they were all within the paradigm of what’s going to work for him when he goes to college. Yet this child’s talents lie a bit outside convention. His artistic sensibility is comic. He makes people laugh! And so, we support him and give him a stage—within reason. He is now coming into his own, even in the academic areas that have typically challenged him.

“When I help these people I’m happy”
We have one student, a girl, who went with us on a service project to a place in San Francisco that offers weekly suppers for the homeless. The idea behind this program is to remind the guests of our shared humanity. So each week the same people are honored at a sit down dinner with multiple courses, and volunteers serve them.

This girl, who tends toward the “glass-half-empty” approach to life, said to her teacher one night, “You know, my parents are trying to talk me into therapy. And I tell them that all I really need to do is to just come here. Because when I’m helping these people, I don’t even think about myself, and then I’m happy.”

I thought to myself, there’s no way in the world we could have taught her that. She had to experience it. And that’s in large part what Education for Life is—the opportunity to experience these truths for ourselves.

Teaching meditation
Because our children are in an environment where meditation is a key idea and practice, and they see the teachers modeling it, most want to experience it for themselves. We start with the breath.

When our children get too excited or upset, we teach them to breathe, and we draw the connection between controlling the breath and calming the mind and emotions. We let them practice calming the breath before a big test or baseball game and they find out for themselves that it works.

An academic track record
Inevitably there are the parents who say, “I know this is a magical school, but the magic stops at 5th grade. Then we get serious. Right? We have to prepare the children for the real world.” Sometimes they have a crisis of faith, even parents who’ve been with us for years. That’s when I am grateful that we now have a track record.

After 11 years, graduates of the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School are beginning to make their way into life’s larger arenas. And the evidence shows that when a child is affirmed at the soul level, everything else follows, including academic excellence and personal development.

Our students who take the national private high school entrance exams tend to score above the 90th percentile across the board. Students who have great capabilities are testing out in the top 1 or 2 percentile nationally. Some students, who, because of learning challenges, don’t perform as well on standardized tests, leave us with their self-worth intact, affirmed as fine artists, poets, computer whizzes, athletes. Admissions officers at premier private schools in the area characterize our graduates as independent thinkers, self-possessed, friendly, and creative.

We’re academically rigorous, but it is not as obvious as it might be at other schools. One parent said, “I got upset because I thought the kids weren’t getting enough homework. Then I looked around, and I realized—gosh, my son was doing three hours of homework a night, but he was so happy about it, I didn’t realize it.”

Now that’s an extreme case. But when the priorities are right and you have the power of your conviction behind them, the revolution is possible.

A Lightbearer and long-term member of Ananda, Helen resides in the Palo Alto Ananda community. She is the principal of the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School.

Systems and efficiency
Throughout history people have made the mistake of thinking that a community can be created and determined by a system. It isn’t systems that do it; it’s good will. You can have the worst system in the world, and if the people have good will, it will work beautifully. You can have the best system, but if people don’t have good will, it’ll be a disaster.

This is not something that you can put on paper or in a procedure book. You have to learn by osmosis. If people want to start communities, I say “Come and live at Ananda for a while. Learn how we do it.”

The biggest thing that can hurt Ananda’s future is for us to become super efficient. In the history of churches, the movement toward more and more efficiency has resulted in a movement away from devotion to God. Not that efficiency is wrong in itself, but each movement in that direction has its own momentum.

Our priority should always be our relationship with God. As long as Ananda holds to that high principle, it won’t fall.

The secret of right action
You can do impossible things if you realize that you’re not the one doing it. It’s not a question of, “I am doing it.” Don’t define yourself in any terms. I’ve seen that if I don’t define myself as what I’m doing I can do it a hundred times better.

Whatever you try to do—be it work, hobby, or avocation—instead of studying and learning how it’s done, get into your own center. Try to find that level of reality in yourself from which everything is produced.

At your center, ask God to guide you, to give you the inspiration for whatever you’re trying to do. The more you offer yourself up to Him and let His energy come in—the more you can do anything. Don’t ignore the need to do a thing well, but let your understanding of what it means to do it well come from inside.

This will work in your life if you do two things. Meditate, above all. Second, have the faith to put these things into practice.

“All-Flowing I, I Everywhere”
The deeper you meditate, the more you feel a kindness and sympathy for others. You understand that they are your own, that there’s no difference, except superficially, and that all of us really are one. You become aware that this self, which is you, is everywhere.

In his poem “Samadhi,” Yogananda expresses this truth in the simple line, “All flowing I, I everywhere.” The consciousness of “I” is in every atom, every petal, every leaf. “I” is a part of everything. It’s an absolutely marvelous reality—we’re not giving up the ego at all. We’re expanding it into omnipresence.

Everything in this universe is an expression of God and has to go back to Him, eventually. You have that potential. And so, concentrate on that potential. Always keep in mind that’s where you’re headed. Not ego, but infinite, “I, I, everywhere.”

*Swami Kriyananda’s seminal talk during the first annual Joyful Arts Festival will be featured in the Spring 2004 Clarity magazine.

Years ago when Paramhansa Yogananda first put me in charge of the monks at Mt. Washington, he didn’t sit down and say, “Now, Walter, this is how you should run things. Do this, but don’t do that.” He said nothing, but I found that by tuning into his consciousness, I immediately understood what needed to be done.

At Mt. Washington and later in the founding of Ananda, crises would often arise, but time and again I would understand what was needed by tuning in to Master’s consciousness. This is what Rajarsi meant when he said to me, “Master has a great work to do through you, Walter, and he will give you the strength to do it.”

Ananda is a state of consciousness
In today’s world where people are adrift in a sea without direction or spiritual values, God wants to use Ananda to show others a positive way to guide their lives. This is an age when people coming together in spiritual communities will bring new understanding, new perspectives, and a new power into the world.

Every book that I’ve ever read on utopias talks about the political or philosophical systems behind them, but no system will make a community. It’s people who make communities, and more than that, it’s people in tune with a divine state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is something given to us by God, and it’s this consciousness that makes Ananda what it is.

Last night we had a concert here at Ananda Village in honor of my birthday. How wonderful it was to hear the choir, all the different soloists, the musicians, and even the children playing so beautifully. Why was it so lovely? Because, as a community, we don’t emphasize personal glory.

In one of the pieces they played, “Life is a Quest for Joy,” there is a beautiful cello solo. Our music director, who plays the cello exquisitely, chose not to play it himself, but instead had a violinist play it to give her the chance to shine in the solo role. That was the kind of spirit that made the concert so beautiful.

Forget yourself, your talents and skills
The more we forget about pushing ourselves forward, but rather try to push forward the ideals we’re living for, the more we’ll find that Ananda becomes successful. But if we begin to think, “We’re pretty good,” that will be the moment we’ve peaked, and it will be down hill from then on.

Forget yourself, your talents or skills, and give all that you are to God. He has so much He can do through you if you let Him. On the other hand, don’t think, “Who am I? I can’t do anything.” Always have the attitude that says, “There’s nothing I can’t do if God does it through me.” You’ll be amazed at what begins to happen.

It’s important to understand that we’re a part of something much greater than ourselves. We’re here at Ananda under the umbrella of consciousness of great masters. They are here, and their presence is alive. Under the umbrella of their consciousness, we all thrive, but if we get out of tune with it, we’ll drift off and find other things to do.

By tuning in to this over-arching consciousness, we give it more resonance and power. The more there are of us doing this, the more that consciousness begins to swell like a wave until it can influence an entire culture, the entire world. In building communities like Ananda, we have a chance to do something extraordinary.

If you look at the movements that have taken place in history like the Italian Renaissance, you realize that they were started by a very small, but highly committed group of people. These people were willing to get themselves out of the way and express what God wanted to do through them.

We don’t want just to do things “our way.” What is “our way?” It doesn’t exist! Once somebody who wanted to write music said to me, “You write music yourself, so you understand how someone feels compelled to do it.” I said, “I could never write another note in my life, and it wouldn’t matter to me. I’m not doing it because I have to, but as an offering to God.”

Don’t define yourself by anything
Be free in what you do—don’t think it defines you, and don’t define yourself by anything. We’re all doing God’s will, and the less ego there is in what we do, the more we can accomplish. There’s a beautiful saying in India, “The road of life is too narrow for both God and the ego to walk it together.”
But the thought always arises, “What about me?” The more you can get rid of that thought, the more you find your sympathies, your understanding, and your love expanding. Don’t give the ego the power it demands, but try to think, “I’m nothing. You, God, are everything.” You’ll find so much freedom in that thought. It’s exhilarating!

Think of this example: When you look at the beautiful clouds at sunset, sometimes you can become so engrossed that you almost feel the symphony of life behind it. Then suddenly you say, “I think I could paint that just as well.” Suddenly you’ve forgotten the sunset, the beauty, the power, and the glory of it all, and you’re just thinking “me.” What a silly little thing to think about!

Get rid of the thought of “me”
How wonderful it is to enjoy something without this confining thought of “me.” This is what living in community does for us. None of us is important in our own right, but what we’re doing is important because it can help thousands of other people. It’s not you or me doing it, but God through us, because He has something to say to the world at this time about the need for communities.

This is an important aspect of the divine mission Master came to fulfill. In lecture after lecture I heard him depart from his chosen topic to talk about communities. He wanted to sow these thoughts in the ether. I don’t mean everyone has to leave everything and move here, but if you can, join us. If not, then be in tune spiritually, and come here when you can.

After all, our community is not just this little piece of land or the people who live here—our community is the world. But even more, Ananda is made of people who share our ideals. How wonderful it would be if when you go to the gas station, there would be a Kriyaban putting gas in your tank!

We need to break the barriers of our thoughts and realize that community means people loving God together. But the world needs a focus for this movement, and Ananda provides this focus. The more people join this community, either by living here or by being in tune wherever they live, the more we can make an impact in this world out of all proportion to the numbers involved. Most people today are just treading water in their lives. A few people who really decide they want to swim are the ones who can make the changes in the world.

What would Master do?
Let God’s power use you—then together we can bring this ray of God’s joy and light into the world. You can do it in many ways. You don’t have to write music or books; you don’t have to take photographs or even start communities. Just be a channel for God’s love. Remember this simple thought anytime you have a decision to make: What would Master do? It’s a very simple question, but it opens up horizons!

What would Master do? He wouldn’t want you to be selfish or mean. He wouldn’t want you to think only of yourself. The more you think in the ways he thought, and live in the ways he lived, the more you’ll find yourself expressing who he was—and that’s what he wants. He wants thousands of hands and feet to carry his teaching, his message, his vibration out into the world to everybody. Every one of you can be an instrument of the masters—it’s your choice.

But let me tell you what that choice means: if you choose this way, little by little your life will be completely drawn into God. I don’t say everybody should come this way, but if you feel in tune with it, then don’t be a coward. Dive in! Forget if the water’s cold—take the plunge! You’ll see that you’ll be protected, and everything will go well for you. I can say that with some experience, because I’ve lived my life this way and I know that it is true.

From a May 18, 2002 satsang by Swami Kriyananda.

It was because of attitudes like these that the monasteries during the Dark Ages were so forceful a presence. One reads about how the monks and nuns inspired others. An individual may be able to exert a positive influence on his own, but unless his energy is combined with that of others, he will be likely to draw attention to himself as a unique person, rather than to inspire others to develop his qualities themselves.

To think of others’ needs first, rather than of one’s own, is more easily generated in a cooperative community than in places where people oppose generosity with the slogan, “Look out for number one!” Indeed, if a community has a truly expansive outlook, it will embrace the larger community also in its concerns, instead of focusing only on its own needs.

From Hope for a Better World, Crystal Clarity Publishers.

Let every man gather from five to ten thousand dollars and, in groups of thirty, let them build self-sustaining, self-governing colonies, starting with California. Do not spend the principal of the money, except what is necessary to buy land and start the colony. Put the money in a trust fund. Pay taxes with the interest… Produce only the necessities of life. Time should not be wasted in producing luxuries.

The need for colonies
In the first edition of Autobiography of Yogi, (1946) Paramhansa Yogananda spoke of colonies as a cure to the world’s ills.
Far into the night my dear friend—the first Kriya Yogi in America—discussed with me the need for world colonies on a spiritual basis. The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called “society” may be laid more realistically at the door of Everyman. Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower in civic virtue. Man is a soul, not an institution; his inner reforms alone can lend permanence to outer ones. By stress on spiritual values, self-realization, a colony exemplifying world brotherhood is empowered to send inspiring vibrations far beyond its scale.

Hermitages for families
During the fall of 1951, four months before his mahasamadhi, Paramhansa Yogananda spoke with Kamala Silva, a disciple since 1925, about the importance of spiritual communities.
On one of the drives along the coast, Master spoke to me of the value of world brotherhood colonies. He referred to the forming of groups within a city or rural area in a manner of hermitage life, among members who do not desire to become renunciates, or cannot do so because of certain obligations.

Such a life would enable each one to be in daily association with those who share the same spiritual goal. He described such colonies as made up of married couples and their families, as well as single people, who have the will to serve, and to live in harmony with one another. Master envisioned the idea as one in which all may work together in a self-supporting group wherein each one is dedicated to God.

Excerpted from The Flawless Mirror by Kamala Silva (1964), distributed by Crystal Clarity, Publishers.

A counter-balance to federalism
In The Road Ahead, Swami Kriyananda recorded Yogananda’s predictions on the future importance of communities.
Cooperative communities of the future, the Master said, will exist everywhere. They will be places, as Ananda is now, where people will gather for commonly held, high-minded purposes, and not only for economic security. They will serve as an important balance to governmental centralization, and will to a great extent relieve the governments of the world of the burden of caring for the sick and the aged; for such communities would naturally look after their own.

Such villages would not be isolated from the rest of the world, as they used to be in times of slow transportation and communication; they would form a vital part of the world at large, and would reach out to that world in a spirit of broader cooperation, learned on the field of actual, personal experience at home. For world brotherhood can hardly be developed except through this doorway of direct experience in brotherhood on a small scale first. It can hardly even be understood without at least a few small, model examples.

Excerpted from The Road Ahead, by Swami Kriyananda, 1967.

History’s great theories don’t work
Walters states, unequivocally, that change begins with the individual, not with grandiose theories that don’t take into account flesh and blood human beings. Much of the book is devoted to analyzing the theories of great thinkers such as Plato, Copernicus, Machiavelli, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Walters shows not only how their influence has proved adverse, but also offers deeply considered alternatives.

Yet, as Milton Staackman says in the introduction, “This book…doesn’t reject the wisdom of the past. It is even-handed, intelligent, and respectful of the genius every culture possesses. At the same time, it repeatedly asks a very simple question: ‘Does it work?’” This key question shows why the great theories of history have failed to create the perfect world.

Communism, for instance, while promising a utopia, has inflicted only misery on large segments of humanity. Machiavelli’s book, The Prince, which advised rulers to behave ruthlessly, became a virtual bible for men like Napoleon and Hitler and ultimately led to their downfall. Sigmund Freud offered learned theories, but concentration on one’s problems, as distinguished from positive life goals, is clearly not the best way to reach a solution.

A need for practical solutions
In a recent interview Walters said of these authors, “I realized that most of them had simply asked the wrong questions. It wasn’t so much that they were wrong given their own contexts.  Rather, it was that the contexts were too narrow. And the conclusions they came to were discouraging, not hopeful. I saw in every case that their vision was limited.”

Walters goes on to say that first and foremost what cooperative communities have to offer is practical solutions, not mere theories. What is needed, according to Walters, is a change in consciousness, something that small groups in particular can demonstrate. As people see changes in action, they will be convinced. The beauty of conducting small experiments is that they can be adjusted as necessary by those interested in doing so, instead of trying to force the experiments on people who aren’t interested.

Cooperation: a key to success
The “great thinkers” of the past based their theories upon the idea of competition between individuals, but Walters shows that cooperation is the key to success in any field of endeavor. Drawing upon his personal experience in developing communities, he describes how, by fostering a spirit of cooperation, communities can inspire people to fulfill their own higher potentials and to deepen their relationships with others.

Walters argues persuasively that just as the Wright Brothers persuaded people that a heavier than air object could fly, even though all the experts said it was impossible, so also will people be convinced of the value of small communities when they see for themselves the kinds of changes communities make possible.

Hope for a Better World! offers compelling solutions to many of the challenges that face humanity today. In so doing, it succeeds in offering real hope for a better world.

Hope For a Better World can be ordered by calling 800-424-1055.

Clarity Magazine articles can be printed in “text only” format, using your own computer.

When you meditate and feel God’s presence, then these things are all just a dream. Many people look upon a tragedy of this kind as all bad. I don’t mean that the fire was nothing. But in truth conditions are neutral. It’s the way we take them that determines whether they’re positive or negative, whether they’re bad experiences or happy experiences.

This fire is a community problem. When a group of people goes out from Ananda and works together to make money, let’s put it in the kitty and call it “Ananda money.” Then we can build house after house right now.

If people work together and really pitch in, they’ll generate more energy than if they’re thinking only of their own house. But if we worry too much about how much we’ll raise, whether it will be enough to meet our individual needs, we’ll have less of the consciousness of pitching in together.

One of the things that touched me so much was to see the real dynamic, joyous determination to build again and not to say, “What a wonderful world it might have been if only this hadn’t happened.” Instead, the attitude is “Well, a year from now we’d feel fine about it. Why not enjoy it right now?”

This doesn’t mean to take it lightly, but to face the facts and do what we can to improve the situation. The right spirit is to say, “We’re going to get in there and build better than ever!”

Excerpts from Swami Kriyananda’s first talks after the fire—6/29/76 and 7/1/76.

A. The age of the child makes a big difference. For younger children, 6-12 years old, when something like the World Trade Center attacks happens, you mention it to them, you let them know what’s happening, but you state it as simply as possible.

It’s best not to show them graphic images of violence or to expose them to adults who are emotionally upset. One of the worst things for a small child is to see violent images over and over again.

Children from 6 to 12 are wide open and very vulnerable emotionally, so at our school we shield them as much as possible from the storms and extremes of life. It’s like cultivating a garden. Children at this age don’t have a lot of defenses, and can be hurt deeply by violence of any kind.

Q: What if the younger children have already seen violent images?

A: Then it’s important to find other images to reduce the impact—beautiful scenery, nature, animals—and especially scenes of compassion related to the event such as images of people helping each other or praying for the victims.

Q: What about the children over 12?

A: Our junior and senior high school students knew right away what had happened and we discussed it a number of times.

Q: What were the main concerns?

A: They wanted to know what in the Muslim religion would make people want to do something like this. So we brought in a member of the Muslim faith from our local area to discuss his religion. He explained that the people who committed these acts were unbalanced and weren’t acting from Muslim beliefs.

Q: Had you done anything before September 11th to help the teens learn how best to respond to challenging events?

A: In fact, we had. In our “Understanding People” course, we studied how different cultures interact with each other, how natural it is to have differences, and how these differences sometimes lead to conflict.

A particularly powerful experience for the students was studying Mahatma Gandhi’s and Nelson Mandela’s responses to discrimination and injustice. The students read books on the lives of these men and also watched the movie “Gandhi.”

They learned that when faced with injustice, or with any challenging situation, we always have a choice. We can embrace the challenge and expand and grow, or we can push it away and be afraid and contract. The challenge, of course, is always to find a way to expand.

Q: I guess the lesson is that a contractive attitude can lead to the kind of acts that occurred on September 11th?

A: Right. When you stereotype the other side as “devils,” it’s easy to think that whatever you do to them is okay because you have God on your side.

Q: How do you help teens choose the direction of expansion?

A: This question is especially important when working with teens. They’re outgrowing their little enclosed world of childhood, the secure garden you tried to provide for them. It’s a time in life when they need to develop their will power, and challenges are an important means of accomplishing this.

For example, there was a boy in our school who tended to freeze mentally when confronted with new situations, academic or otherwise. One day I handed him the book Affirmations and Prayers, by Swami Kriyananda, and said, “I want you to find and memorize an affirmation that will help you get through these blocks.”

He picked the one on “willingness” that goes “I welcome everything that comes to me as an opportunity for further growth.” We also made a list of all the “I can’t” words and phrases he used as negative affirmations, and then focused on removing them from his vocabulary. From then on he started making progress. He began to see that he could deal with algebra, with learning to debate, and with the many other challenges that are a part of life. Gradually that new attitude became part of who he is.

Q: I imagine that teaching teens how to serve is also important?

A: Very much so. We have problems with teens in our culture partly because there are so few ways for them to get constructively involved in life’s challenges.

When kids reach their teens they become aware of life’s problems and have a deep need to do something about them. Young teenagers especially are very open and idealistic. If they have ways of expressing that idealism, they learn how to find solutions to life’s challenges instead of being upset by them. But if there’s no outlet for their idealism, they become cynical and angry.

So we get the students involved in service projects that involve working with handicapped kids, homeless people, the elderly, and other needy groups. This type of one-on-one service is very helpful to teens.

They begin to see that change can happen. The experience of giving food to a hungry person or of playing with a handicapped child affirms the teenagers’ self-worth because they’ve been able to be an instrument to help others.

When hard times hit, whether it’s economic turmoil, terrorism, or some other difficulty, we don’t want to contract in upon ourselves. There’s a simple formula for transcending that—and that’s doing something for others. It’s a very important part of a young person’s training.

Q: Where does God t into the picture? Is there any particular age at which a child is more receptive to learning about God?

A: There’s a lot of individuality but also certain patterns. I’ve seen incredible devotion in children during the feeling years, 6-12. They will just fall in love with Krishna or the baby Jesus. This is the positive side of their being so open. But this type of devotion generally comes to an end around the age of puberty.

The natural focus of teenagers is on exploring the outer world, so their spiritual growth comes mainly in this domain. Our high school is based on adventure, service and self-discovery.

Through adventure, students feel the expansion and empowerment that come with overcoming limitations. With service there is the tangible experience of upliftment in helping others. Both lead to a greater sense of self-discovery, which is then supported and deepened through meditation.

But for teens the primary focus is “God in action.” Their spiritual activities must reflect this.

Q: It seems that Education for Life tries to help students become strong in themselves—to be able to meet whatever life brings.

A: Yes. Even when we’re not dealing with September 11th events, these are still troubling times. You can’t get away from it. We’re training the children to be spiritual warriors, to learn to respond with creative, solution-oriented energy and not to become discouraged when there are challenges in life.

Nitai Deranja, a Lightbearer and longtime Ananda member, serves as Director of the Living Wisdom High School at Ananda Village.

The Living Wisdom High School at Ananda Village combines college prep academics with life skills to offer a balanced education that prepares students for the joys and responsibilities of life. The school is now accepting applications for boys and girls 8-12th grades, boarding and day students. Contact: livwishc@hotmail.com. or (530) 478-7643.

It was quite a surprise, in the early ‘90s, to find the above paragraph in a tattered notebook from sixth grade. Partly because I was amazed that I had been keeping a journal as early as age eleven, and that, in my very first year of playing the flute, I was already aware of the power of music to uplift and transform one’s soul. Some thirty years later I would come to experience the inner reality of making music an important aspect of my spiritual path and a key to my personal dharma.

When I first came to Ananda Palo Alto in 1998, I had been working as a professional freelance flutist and private teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area for over fifteen years. As I felt more and more drawn to Ananda, I was deeply moved by the singing; I recognized that something was going on that wasn’t your typical church choir experience. I’d never met Swami Kriyananda and, although I was well on my way to accepting Paramhansa Yogananda as my guru, I had a harder time understanding how Swami Kriyananda fit into the picture.

The power of Kriyananda’s music
I had picked up a free tape one Sunday after service, entitled “The Spirit of Ananda in Music,” which consisted of a variety of Kriyananda’s music— chants, Joy Singers’ songs, choir pieces, and several selections of Kriyananda singing solo. So one night I decided to play it while I worked on an art project. On the one hand, I was enjoying the vibration of the music, while on the other hand, my trained musician’s ears were critically assessing every note.

When Love Is a Magician began, my critical faculties prepared to resume their fun and games. But as Kriyananda started to sing the words, I felt something pierce my heart, bypassing my mind and intellect altogether, and I began to cry. Actually, “sob” is a more accurate word, and that’s what I did for the entire song.

Thankfully, I had some experience of how God works—that combination of intense emotional release and deep inner knowing that often signals major shifts in my awareness. So I immediately “got it” that something very important and profound was happening to me. From that moment I simply knew that Swami Kriyananda was someone I could trust—as my spiritual teacher and friend, and as a musician—and I opened my heart to him.

I was accustomed to diving into the music scene at every church where I’d been a member. But at Ananda it was different. I soon learned that the skill with which I played the flute wasn’t of primary importance. The focus was on attunement, which required of me the flexibility, patience, and openness of mind that would allow me to tune in to what Divine Mother had in mind for me. This is a challenge musicians often face at Ananda—the willingness to humbly ask, “How can I be Divine Mother’s musical instrument?” Without that willingness, we can miss much of the sweetness and potential for inner growth that the music of this path offers.

The “warm-up queen”
As a college music major, I was known as the “warm-up queen,” because I would start my practice session with an hour and a half of harmonics, long tones, and scales, leaving limited time to actually work on my assigned music. Looking back, I realize that my routine was a form of meditation, requiring great concentration and mindfulness of every subtle nuance. I would remain in that focused space for up to thirty minutes at a time, actively centering, refining, and purifying the tone. The wonder of it was that, when I maintained that routine, I grew to trust that things would work just fine in performance, allowing me to lose myself in the music in a way that couldn’t happen otherwise.

Deep inner feeling
What I loved most was pouring myself into the music and feeling the energy of it take over my entire being—whether playing Bach trio sonatas in recital or experiencing Puccini’s La Boheme from the center of the San Francisco Opera orchestra pit.

For me, music has always been about deep inner feeling. But what a profound difference it makes to immerse myself in Kriyananda’s music—music that comes from the highest level of consciousness with the power to uplift and inspire both listener and performer.

I now realize that these thirty-odd years of playing flute were simply preparing me for the joyous experience of being able to say, “OK, Divine Mother, here I am, make your music through me.” And, to my continuing awe and gratitude, she does—blessing me deeply in the process.

Sharon Brooks lives at the Ananda Palo Alto community and works at the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School.

The central goal
How does this apply to Ananda Yoga™? Last spring, referring to the origins of Ananda Yoga™ in the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, Swami Kriyananda told me: “Yoga’s purpose is spiritual, and since Hatha Yoga is the physical branch of Raja Yoga, Hatha Yoga must have a spiritual purpose. It can’t be just to give you a good body. . . [The goal of the postures is to] advance the purpose of the foundation of Hatha Yoga, which is Raja Yoga: to awaken the energy, loosen the spine so the energy can reach the brain more easily, bring it up the spine to the brain, and give you the experience of centeredness and upliftedness.”

That’s the key. Ananda Yoga™ practice is not just about getting “a good buzz,” as one person put it. It’s about generating and increasing an inward and upward flow of energy in a safe, balanced, conscious way. Therefore, every part of Ananda Yoga™—including and especially one’s attitude—should contribute to this goal.

From vine to branches
Let’s examine how some familiar aspects of Ananda Yoga™ help us accomplish this.

Energization: Mastering Energization takes our practice to an entirely new level. It’s the technique par excellence for increasing energy and our awareness of it. Only with awareness can we draw energy inward and upward—without awareness, all the energy in the world won’t do us much good. Energization also prepares our nervous system to handle more and more energy. It’s a prime contributor to the overall goal.

Sequence: Ananda Yoga™ routines are sequenced to bring energy inward and upward. Standing asanas (postures) come first, to center the awareness in the spine and begin to tune into energy. Then we move to a variety of floor poses, designed to stretch and open the spine, and focus energy there. Inverted poses follow, to draw the awakened energy to the brain with the aid of “subtle gravity.”

Deep relaxation in Savasana then helps us internalize this energy in the brain. Finally, meditation brings energy to the spiritual eye.

Continuous awareness: We move slowly, smoothly and consciously into and out of the asanas, so as not to diminish or interrupt our awareness of energy flows generated through the asanas. By moving in this way, our awareness will increase throughout the routine—and as awareness increases, so does the energy. Similarly, we never strain with the asanas, because that would diminish both the energy flow and our awareness of it.

Pauses: Why do we pause in a “neutral” pose between “active” poses (e.g., in Tadasana between two standing poses)? It certainly runs counter to most of the Hatha Yoga we see today, in which asanas are not held very long, and the pauses between asanas are brief or nonexistent!

Swami Kriyananda was quite blunt when I mentioned the trend of not holding poses: “It’s not good yoga,” he said. “If you hold a position, that’s when you can get into the consciousness behind that position. Constant motion isn’t the answer. It just becomes calisthenics.” He later expanded on this: “Ours is a path of constantly coming back to the center, to the spine. That’s the core of it, and you can’t do that if you’re always moving from one asana to the next. The time between poses is very important.”

So the pause is not just to rest. It’s to move toward the goal by working with energy and consciousness to assimilate the benefits of the preceding pose.

What About Affirmations?
If there’s one thing that’s unique about Ananda Yoga™, it’s asana affirmations. It’s tempting to say, “Ah, here’s the essence: without affirmations, it’s not Ananda Yoga™.”

When I asked Swami Kriyananda about this, he took a different stance:
“Obviously, the center of Ananda Yoga™ is not the fact of having
affirmations. The center of Ananda Yoga™ is the way in which it helps our meditation, our stillness. Sometimes those affirmations can seem a bit childish, and I can see how people might resist doing them and still feel they were working with the energy and so on. Nonetheless, they’re a good thing, and they do help your consciousness. Beyond that I don’t know what to say; you’ll have to use your own intuition on the matter.”

Thus, it’s not a question of whether we can do Ananda Yoga™ without affirmations. We can. The real question is— what leads us most quickly to our goal? Affirmations are not the goal; raising our consciousness is the goal. But as Swami put it, affirmations “do help your consciousness,” i.e., they are a means to the goal.

My own approach is like this: Over a long period (weeks, months), the affirmation helps guide me to a more intuitive, more “feeling” understanding of the asana. As my understanding grows, I’ll repeat the affirmation less—eventually just once or twice, to give direction to my attunement efforts. It’s not the affirmation that takes me into that essence; it’s my feeling capacity, guided by the affirmation.

The ultimate criterion
Above all, the essence of Ananda Yoga™ is the vibration of Paramhansa Yogananda. Earlier I said that each yoga tradition is a “specific ray of divine grace.” In Ananda’s case, that ray comes through Yogananda.  Kriyananda drew upon that ray in order to develop Ananda Yoga.™

If you really want to feel the essence of Ananda Yoga™, call upon Paramhansa Yogananda. Ask for his guidance, and try to tune in to his consciousness. It doesn’t matter whether you are a disciple or not.  Great masters will aid anyone who calls upon them.

Rich Gyandev McCord is a Lightbearer and resides at Ananda Village. He is Director of Ananda Yoga™ worldwide, teaches at The Expanding Light guest retreat, and serves as a board member of Yoga Alliance.

SRF: ensnared in karmic patterns
Kriyananda’s book is much more, however, than the story of his treatment by SRF. A Place Called Ananda focuses on the universal principles at stake in what appears on the surface to be a personal drama between him and SRF. The book presents in fascinating detail the longstanding karmic patterns that Yogananda came here to change, and which SRF, ironically enough, seems determined to perpetuate. Amazingly, Kriyananda endured 40 years of scorn and ridicule from SRF before publicly disclosing the extent to which SRF has departed from Yogananda’s fundamental goals for his mission.

Yogananda repeatedly emphasized how the Christian churches have crucified Jesus’ teachings by supplanting them with “Churchianity” or institutionalism. Kriyananda shows how SRF is repeating this same karmic error by making the organization the mediator between the individual and God, even though Self-realization, based as it is on the individual’s direct communion with the Divine, requires no such mediation.

Yogananda’s mission is to help “starving humanity” achieve a balance between material and spiritual prosperity. SRF, however, has put the interests of the organization ahead of reaching out to those living in the world.

Increasingly, it has fallen to Ananda to fill the void. By reaching out to householders, starting communities, creating schools, and transmitting Yogananda’s message through books and music, Ananda has created a dynamic expression of Yogananda’s teachings and a lifestyle that takes people to God.

People are more important than things
A Place Called Ananda has much to tell us about how to live our lives as disciples and avoid the pitfalls of delusion that can so easily ensnare us. We see, for example, how Kriyananda could continue to love and care about the SRF leaders who scorned him: he was simply looking at a much bigger picture. To his way of thinking, it wasn’t simply fellow devotees attacking him unjustly; it was Satan trying to keep the old karmic patterns in place.

It becomes very clear, also, why Ananda’s guiding precept is that “people (and their spiritual growth) are more important than things.”  What is the result of SRF having the contrary precept that the institution comes first?

The book answers the question by allowing us to watch events unfold until they reach the point where SRF sacrifices Swami Kriyananda, a fellow devotee and friend, to what is perceived as the “needs” of the institution. From the details of this great drama, the reader learns the importance of living life in deep attunement with the guru, without regard for the approval of others, even those we hold dear.

A Place Called Ananda contains many new and interesting facts that add greater dimension to the story of Kriyananda’s ouster from the organization. One of the most surprising is an after-death message from Tara Mata, one of Kriyananda’s main SRF accusers.

By the end of the book, Kriyananda emerges as a friend on a soul level, one willing to share with the reader the ups and downs, the trials and triumphs, of his soul’s journey to God.

A Place called Ananda can be ordered from Crystal Clarity, Publishers. Call: 800-424-1055

I began by looking at what I love about Ananda—the inspiration from people I meet, the spiritually uplifting energy, the solitude and quiet to go deep within. I then looked at the differences between my home environment and Ananda.

Accounting for time and energy
I first noticed how much of my time and energy were outwardly directed, and how little time I spent nourishing myself spiritually. Much of my service revolves around teaching yoga, meditation, and helping others as they explore their relationship with the Divine. It is holy work and I feel deeply blessed by it.

Because my work is joyful, it wasn’t obvious to me that I was neglecting my inner life. I was praying, meditating and reading uplifting books. Yet with each visit to Ananda I discovered that what I was doing at home was not enough. My heart and soul longed for more.

I decided to cut back on some of my classes and this helped. Still, it wasn’t simply about doing less—in fact there were things I added to my schedule—it was about creating a lifestyle that supported me in directing more of my energy within.

Cutting back on social activities
I also looked carefully at my social activities and began asking myself whether my usual activities directed my energy inward or outward, up-ward or downward? I discovered that much of the time I spent casually with others was not always in my best interests spiritually.

For instance, I noticed that after going to lunch with a casual friend I was not as spiritually uplifted as before lunch. I started pulling back from social engagements and watched to see if it made a difference. It did! It was easier to maintain the inner joy I felt from connecting with God through meditation and prayer.

This change also brought loneliness and was very difficult at times. I found myself longing for my Ananda friends and realized I needed to create opportunities to connect with others spiritually.

Creating satsang
My husband and I decided to start a meditation group in our home. Eight of us now come together monthly to study, discuss and practice the art of meditation. This has been a truly supportive and inspiring experience, providing the satsang I was longing for. We often share a meal together, to further enjoy the gift of spiritual company.

Our group has been blessed by several visits from Larry and Karen Rider, ministers of the Ananda Rhode Island Center. Karen and Larry have led us in beautiful kirtans and inspiring Sunday services. Many of us regularly visit the Rhode Island Center for weekend retreats or to attend a workshop.

Seclusion is the price of greatness
The next change I felt my heart calling for was more time alone with God. I longed to have a weekly day of solitude when I could concentrate entirely upon God. At first it seemed impossible; there were too many demands on my time. It was easier to find time for half a day, or two half-days, than one whole day—but I did it.

Setting aside a day for God hasn’t always been easy. I’ve been tempted at times to share the day with someone else or use part of it to get work done, but each time I’ve resisted I’ve been deeply grateful. My guidelines for this day are simple: no work-related projects and no phone calls, personal or otherwise. Beyond this, I simply let the day unfold.

I tend to have longer sadhanas, spend more time writing in my journal and reading spiritual books, take longer walks, and in general feel more closely connected to God in all aspects of my life. It’s a day of joy for me, no matter what I end up doing.

Ananda is not just a place
In trying to bring Ananda home, I’ve come to realize that Ananda is more than a wonderful place to visit; it’s an inner experience of joy that I carry with me wherever I go. Bringing Ananda home is about creating a lifestyle that allows me to stay connected to the divine joy within. It’s an ongoing process, a labor of love.

Heidi J. Noh-Kuhn, lives in Annandale, NJ

We’re sending this issue of Clarity Magazine as our Christmas card to you with loving thoughts that you have a blessed holiday season. It’s been a joyful and inspiring year of sharing with you through letters and phone calls, through e-mails and our website, and through satsangs and events all over the world.

At the end of his Autobiography, ParamhansaYogananda says, “Lord, Thou hast given this monk a large family.” We deeply appreciate our friendship and unity in God that bring us closer to oneness with that Friend of all friends.

The theme of this issue is “The Christmas Mystery,” the title of a beautiful song written by Swami Kriyananda and included with words and music later in these pages. The last verse says,

Could it be that in that little One
Spirit’s Universal Love did Shine?
If it’s true, He lives in you and me
Whom Men call the Son of Mary.

The great saviors of mankind have repeatedly come to earth demonstrating the nature of this universal love and helping us express it more perfectly. Once when Swami Kriyananda was with Yogananda, he mentally prayed to him, “Teach me to love you as you love me.” Intuitively perceiving Kriyananda’s thoughts, Yogananda turned to him and lovingly asked, “How can the little cup hold the whole ocean?”

Yogananda was telling Swamiji that we must expand our consciousness and our capacity to love if we want to express the ocean of divine love.

This holy season can provide us with a powerful impetus to expand our capacity to experience and express this universal love. In a Christmas talk given in 1932, Yogananda said, “Meditate on the statement, ‘My Christ-Peace has descended upon every member of my family, upon my country, and upon my world.’ Behold Christ-Peace descending upon your body, upon your possessions, and extending to your neighbors, to all countries, and onto the united altar of all hearts and all creatures. Let Christ-Bliss extend from your body to all lands—to America, Asia, South America, Europe, Australia, to the solar system, to the island universes, and to all beings.”

“Meditate upon the following: ‘My Christ-Peace is descending upon every living thing, upon every living star, upon every speck of matter and space.’ Celebrate Christmas upon the altar of the vast inner silence, and upon the sanctuary of every desire, every living thing in the world, and the Cosmos. Then will you know Christ as the Divine King ruling in your own heart and in the heart of all finite creation.”

Our wish for each of you this Christmas is that the Divine Light guide you forward like the three Wise Men of old until you find the universal love of Christ dwelling forever within you.

In God, Christ, and Guru,

Jyotish and Devi

Other Clarity articles by Jyotish and Devi Novak are listed under “Nayaswamis Jyotish and Devi.”

Living at the orphanage were ninety youths from age six to twenty-two, three nuns, and Father Efrem, the resident priest who oversees the orphanage. A beautiful new dormitory for the older boys, started two years ago by several Ananda members, was recently finished.

Our children found their niche in unstintingly giving of themselves to the Mexican children by daily sharing their lives and service. Mother Theresa has defined love as “giving until it hurts.” I saw our children living this truth. In many ways being there was more challenging for them than the adults because the Mexican children constantly drew on their energy.

One of the most inspiring experiences was watching everyone in our group deal with the physical challenges—intense heat, water running out just before it was your time to shower, the lack of personal space and physical comforts, and the unvarying diet of beans, rice and tortillas. Instead of complaints, there were light-hearted jokes that always lifted any potential downward energy. A phrase coined many years ago by an Ananda member—“turning bummers into blessings”—perfectly describes this experience.

Never have I seen so many transformed bummers in so short a time! The entire experience was truly unforgettable.

Remembering La Paz, Christen Kiser, age 14
A whoosh of hot, humid air hit me as I stepped off the plane into a new culture, and into a new chapter in my book of life. It was early evening and the sky was growing dim. The light surrounding the airport had an eerie glow as the ever- present bare neon lights reflected off the turquoise concrete walls.

We were greeted outside airport customs by a bouquet of joyful faces and two old vans waiting to take us to the orphanage. We stuffed our forty-plus suitcases full of donated clothes, school supplies, and toys into the vans, wedged ourselves in between, and drove off into the night. Our pilgrimage, for that is what it was to become, had begun.

I was first inspired to go on this trip by the descriptions and memories friends had shared of their visits to the orphanage in La Paz. Most of the kids living at the orphanage hadn’t a penny and yet were, somehow, very happy. I felt that I too would like to share in the experience of service and giving from the heart, but I never guessed it would change my life.

To have had such a positive effect on the lives of those wonderful kids gave me great personal joy and feelings of overwhelming gratitude for the experience. I remember thinking: “Now, this is how I should feel all the time. You know the feeling accompanying the starting of something new, the old chapter in your book has ended only to open a whole new world of possibilities? That is what this trip was like for me, a new chapter.

We arrived at the orphanage after dark, tired, curious, excited and suffering more from culture shock than jet lag. We plopped into our new beds and tried to calm our frazzled minds. Sleep came at last, but at 5:30 the next morning it was “rise and shine” to a brand new day.

Looking out the window at the surrounding buildings—and the people beginning to gather in their shade— my first impression of the orphanage was somewhat of a surprise. Outlining the buildings and grounds, surrounding the cement courtyard and dining hall, were patches of well-tended grass and lovingly sculptured ficus trees. Having so little, the orphanage took special care of what it had. The plants as well as the children.

That first day seemed like a week, and I didn’t think I would make it to the end of the trip. But, as I started to develop a personal connection with the kids, and their culture, I began to realize why I was there: to make a difference in their lives and to be their friend. That really was the service.

The loving adults and beautiful kids at the orphanage treated us with such honor and respect that we felt like royalty—and this was more than a little confusing in the beginning. We hadn’t come to La Paz to be served, we came to serve, and it took a little time for us all to relax in each other’s company.

But soon the formality melted. Teaching the kids to make friendship bracelets, helping in the kitchen, or just playing catch became opportunities, in our limited Spanish, to form precious friendships.

That was truly an amazing part of the whole experience—that two different groups of kids coming from such different backgrounds could create a world where we came together as friends. We sang together, worked together and played sports together—teaching our favorite games to each other. On the last night of the trip, the orphanage boys had so improved in skill that they won the Mexico vs. US Gold championship volleyball game.

Throughout the whole trip I found that when I stepped away from my comfort zone, reached out and stepped into my new friends’ world, I could serve them better and we became better friends. We all experienced so much on this pilgrimage, in ways of personal growth, humility, and expansion of the heart. I have never before found such joy in service.

June 30, 2000:
…as I glance back over my shoulder, taking a final look at the orphanage that had been my home for the last ten days, and the children who had so readily taken me into their hearts, I mentally traced each face with my finger. I couldn’t keep the sadness from my face or the tears from my eyes.

The shadows and light were familiar now, as was the smell of salt air. And as we pulled into the airport to board our return flight, I reflected that in this new chapter in my book of life I had grown in ways that I am deeply thankful for.