20 YEARS OF ‘DIVINE JOY’ : Ananda Village has become Establishment, sort of, but only after enduring a forest fire, feuding neighbors and a move to annex it.
Only the gentle patter of raindrops falling on the large red-and-white awning breaks the perfect stillness of the summer evening. Below, candles flicker on a rustic altar as several hundred worshipers seek “superconscious attunement” in the outdoor Temple of the Trees.
Thunder rumbles in the distance over the ponderosa pine and oak-studded San Juan Ridge. And then a rainbow signals the shower’s end.
The followers of Swami Sri Kriyananda, guru of Ananda World Brotherhood Village, see it as divine approval.
“Babaji is smiling on us,” intoned meditation leader Durya Smallen, speaking of the Indian mystic of the Himalayas who is revered as one of Ananda’s patron saints.
Indeed, this New Age commune seems to have come of age.
Started in ’68
Twenty years ago this month, Kriyananda, 62, whose birth name is J. Donald Walters, and six of his followers established in the Sierra Nevada foothills 80 miles northeast of Sacramento what has become one of the most successful New Age communities.
The nation has a tradition of religious and utopian communities that have experimented with various forms of communal life, but very few have flourished or even survived. Nearly all to emerge during the hippie heyday of idealistic flower children have long since faded.
If Ananda is the exception, it hasn’t been easy, Kriyananda recalled the other day as he sat, barefoot, sipping lemonade with a visitor in the sun room of the Crystal Hermitage, Ananda’s “spiritual center.”
The community has weathered a forest fire that destroyed all but one of its dwellings, a feud with gold-rush country old-timers and county planners over an attempt to incorporate Ananda into a separate city, the inevitable comparisons to the ill-fated suicide commune of Jim Jones in Guyana and the dismantled central Oregon spread of the Rolls-Royce-loving Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Today, Ananda, which means “divine joy” in Sanskrit, is home to about 300 adults and 100 children and is a spiritual center for thousands more seekers attracted to a simple life style based on yoga exercises, a vegetarian diet, meditation, and an eclectic blend of Eastern and Western philosophy.
With a thriving worldwide publishing arm and about 30 private and community-owned small businesses, Ananda’s annual income tops $3.5 million. The village is self-supporting.
“We do it all; we don’t have any multimillion-dollar sugar daddy in L.A.,” declared Ananda spokesman Paul Kelly.
Kriyananda has usually shunned publicity about his quiet and remote 800 acres of forest and meadowland 15 miles north of this quaint Mother Lode town. But as the village celebrates its 20th anniversary, visitors are welcomed, and members of the media are given guided tours of the shops, offices and even members’ private homes.
“We’re living in a New Age,” explained the affable, gray-haired Kriyananda, a disciple of the late Paramahansa Yogananda, a Hindu-oriented guru who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1920.
“We’re learning to live in a universe that’s really energy, not matter. . . . God dreamed this whole universe into temporary forms of nature . . . and we are part of this dream. . . . God is the universe but he is also outside the universe, stepping down to our level of personal consciousness.”
At Ananda, disciples seek “cosmic consciousness” by meditating on the universal “light and truths” that Kriyananda believes Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Yogananda, Babaji and “the other great ascended Masters” all embodied.
“The New Age to us is not that we’re into beads or spiritualistic seances or doing Tarot,” Kriyananda explained, folding his hands and leaning back in a rocking chair. “Divine experience through the ages has been defined . . . as a higher consciousness that you can tap into. . . . Meditation is communion with God (through) an awareness of the deeper, higher self.”
New Age Assumptions
Kriyananda believes “rays of energy entering our planet from the superconscious” are guiding society toward greater compassion and harmony, an assumption common in the New Age worldview that sees human nature as essentially good and looks for ultimate social perfection.
Ananda residents are proud of their crime-free, drug-free community and the “normal” life style they follow. The village has only three cardinal rules: no alcohol, no drugs and no dogs.
Other cooperative communities have failed, according to Kriyananda and John Novak, Ananda ministry director, because of their overly regimented communal life and economic systems that stifled individual incentive, democratic leadership and family interaction.
Although some businesses at Ananda are privately owned and others are owned by the community, all workers receive wages and manage their own incomes. Most people, including singles, married couples and families, live in single-family dwellings, although they may share common dining and recreation facilities.
Many build their own houses--which range from well-designed and spacious split-level homes to modest cabins--but residents must finance the construction themselves. If they leave Ananda, they recover their costs in exchange for turning over their housing to the village corporation.
But group projects are the rule. A two-room school was recently erected by village members in just four days.
More than 30 Ananda carpenters have formed a building guild that does construction throughout Northern California. And Ananda’s family medical center, which offers a holistic, New Age approach to health care, draws 80% of its clients from outside the village.
Ananda also boasts a dairy; an organic garden that supplies produce for the Master’s Market and Deli, a focal point of the sprawling community; an auto repair shop; a blacksmith, and an incense and scented oils business.
Kriyananda--he uses the name Walters on the 37 books he has written--also produces music tapes and videos, which sell in Nevada City at Ananda’s natural foods store and its women’s fashion and gift shop.
Meanwhile, the uneasy truce struck between the Ananda villagers and neighboring mountain folk after the aborted incorporation attempt six years ago has ripened into tolerance and even mutual respect.
“Things are less strained than in 1982,” said former Nevada City Mayor Cathy Wilcox Barnes.
The bid to incorporate 614 acres owned by Ananda into a separate city was voted down, largely because of other property owners’ fears that Kriyananda might become an autocratic ruler whose bidding would be executed by a City Council composed of his loyal subjects.
In retrospect, Ananda leaders think the idea was an improper “mixing of church and state,” according to Devi Novak, who with her husband, John, are directors of Ananda’s ministry.
Because they don’t wear distinctive dress as do the adherents of some alternative religious groups, and because they work “shoulder to shoulder” with other residents on fire lines and community projects, Anandans are viewed with less suspicion these days.
“Familiarity eliminates antagonistic feelings,” noted Linda Whitmore, a features editor at the Grass Valley-Nevada City Union newspaper. “There are no strong negative feelings--just a few snickers from those who still think a bunch of hippies live out there.”
More than 35 local businesses--perhaps aware of the estimated $20 million pumped into the county from Ananda in goods, services and property taxes during the last two decades--bought a large advertisement in the Union wishing the village a happy 20th anniversary. Several hundred non-Ananda townsfolk also endorsed the ad.
And last month, the Nevada County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution proclaiming “Ananda Village Week,” praising the village as “one of the most respected, successful . . . New Age . . . communities in the world.”
During the interview in his headquarters, which commands a panoramic view of the Yuba River canyon, Kriyananda said he had wanted to found a utopian community ever since he was 15.
Born in Romania, Walters is the son of an American oil company geologist. He was raised an Anglican and attended Quaker schools. In 1948, he became a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, the author of the widely read “Autobiography of a Yogi.” After studying with Yogananda until his death in 1952, Walters added further Western flavor to Yogananda’s brand of Eastern mysticism.
In Ananda’s early days, Kriyananda, who speaks nine languages and has composed 200 spiritual songs and chants, patterned the buildings after the geodesic domes popularized by architect Buckminster Fuller. Residents were into organic gardening and individual spiritual development then, John Novak recalled.
Early Failures
But efforts to grow many fruits and vegetables proved unprofitable, and domed structures were impractical and hard to build.
Most of the domed homes were destroyed in a 1976 blaze that consumed 21 of the community’s 22 dwellings. About 40 of the 150 people who lived there at the time packed up and Ananda itself nearly folded.
But those who remained rekindled their resolve.
“Energy is Ananda’s bank account,” insists John Novak.
Kriyananda shaved his beard and cut his flowing hair, shed his orange robe in favor of Western dress, and concentrated on making Ananda more cosmopolitan. In the 1980s, a guest facility and meditation training center called the Expanding Light was opened. Outpost centers were formed in Palo Alto, San Francisco and Sacramento; Seattle and Assisi, Italy--the hometown of Kriyananda’s wife, Rosanna.
Kriyananda also sought to put Ananda on a firm economic and leadership base, including a board of managers for its 60 ministers, and an elected Village Council to handle temporal and financial affairs.
A “postulant training program” with a 14-step course to familiarize potential residents with the Ananda life style takes six months to a year to complete and helps prevent community mismatches.
“It has to be right for them and it has to be right for us,” said Ananda’s public relations manager Kelly, adding that only two residents have been booted out during the 10 years he has been at Ananda. About half a dozen leave each year for various reasons, but the community is slowly growing, he said.
After a trial period, members pay $1,500 each, or $2,500 per couple, to join the community, plus a $195-a-month fee once they move in for water, schools, roads and other services. Houses, each with a meditation room, are arranged in clusters.
Last year, optional “monastic vows” were added for those who have lived at Ananda at least five years. The rules include a life of simplicity, self-control and “cooperative obedience.”