Asha Praver  talks about the "unofficial history" of the Ananda Community in Mountain View —not the times, dates, and places, but how the community affects the quality of people's lives.

Asha: When David and I moved to the Bay Area in 1986, I had spent sixteen years living at Ananda Village , and since I was 24 years old when I first moved to the Village, I had essentially been involved in community my whole life. Community has always seemed like such a natural and obvious way to live.

At the time, we had a big ashram house where twenty-five people lived under one roof, with very few bathrooms and a highly inconvenient kitchen. It was an "only certain kinds of people could ever live here" sort of place! Swami Kriyananda suggested that David and I not live in the communal house, because, living there, we would spend about 70% of our time relating to about 15% of the overall church congregation. So we took up residence in a couple of rented houses over the next several years. I'll never forget how peculiar it was for me, when the landlord's gardener came over and I looked out the window and saw a man cutting the grass whom I hadn't ever seen before. It was the first time in sixteen years that there was someone working close to my space that I didn't know. It was a very odd moment, and I realized that, now that we were living in the city, everything had changed. It wasn't that we were fragile flowers who couldn't stand to live outside of a community, it was more just a question of observing the differences and being surprised.

But our ongoing perception was that community is a real boon, and we looked around and realized that apartment buildings were designed to be communities, but that they just weren't being used that way. We were very excited about this discovery, and after we'd been here for a year or so, we drew together some people and started talking about community. And we were just extremely underwhelmed by people's enthusiasm.

They just weren't interested. They were very interested in finding a better job, because most of them really hated their jobs, or they were dissatisfied and looking for solutions for their work. But most of them had created a little nest, and they weren't at all interested in shifting their living situation. In fact, they were actually visibly afraid of shifting. You could see that they had a sense of living in a hostile world, and that it had taken many of them a very long time to find a safe nest, and that they just were not going to sacrifice that for anything.

It was very interesting to us, and it forced us to reflect further on what we should do. We decided that their lack of enthusiasm was commensurate with their ignorance about what it actually means to live in community, and that it was therefore not something we needed to take very seriously.

In this connection, I recall reading recently that politicians nowadays adjust their policies according to the polls. This article gave a quote from Abraham Lincoln, who would also take polls to find out what people were thinking, but he would then roll up his sleeves and get to work communicating his policies more clearly, because the polls just told him people weren't understanding them. So we took Lincoln 's approach, so to speak: we decided that our job was to educate people, because their opinions weren't based on actual knowledge, and their lack of knowledge wasn't going to serve them very well.

So we worked hard to find a place for a community, and meanwhile we held a retreat to discuss the idea of community. But the only people who were genuinely enthusiastic were those who had lived at Ananda Village--in other words, the people who already knew what a wonderful idea it was. The others were very cautiously interestedBvery cautiously, and you could see that everyone wanted the backdoor open. But by now we at least had critical mass--we had enough people who were courageous or foolhardy or experienced enough to start a community.

So we got this apartment complex, and we began moving in. We knew we needed to move in with enough people to create critical mass, because if there were only a few, there wouldn't be enough spirit. But we couldn't expect everyone to come right away, either, so we went forward knowing that we had just enough people to pull it off. But as we got closer and closer to actually moving in, the enthusiasm and excitement of it rose, to the point where one family sold their house and came purely because they felt they just couldn't bear to have it happen without them.

So we got it going, and as soon as it started, the people who were living here realized that, far from being a terrible threat to their security and privacy, it was the greatest gift they could ever have for their security. All of us are under so much stress, because we're constantly surrounded by strangers in this culture, and very often they're dissonant strangers, or even hostile. And people have no concept of how much psychic energy they expend on shielding themselves. Whereas, living in a community, you may hardly ever even talk to the people who live next door, but just knowing that they are harmonious with your values and ideals allows a new level of relaxation.

We're not at all communal here in the Ananda Community, and so, because the community is based on the joy of sharing, absolutely nobody's fears materialized. After our first Thanksgiving celebration, Ron Beaudry, one of our residents, went back to work and told everyone that he'd just had ninety of his best friends over for Thanksgiving dinner. And it was such an amusing statement that he went around repeating it over and over. And, of course, after all my years in community--well, if you had just ninety, it was a pretty small party! But for him to be able to say that he had ninety best friends was pretty shocking, and in fact it stunned the people he worked with. And what was shocking about it for him was that he absolutely meant it.

I also remember our first community meeting. For some, it was a completely astonishing experience. The level of ease of communication, the informality, the laughter, the mutual respect, the sense of working together to see what's "trying to happen," the lack of ego, the lack of hierarchy, the inspirational nature of it. It just goes on and on. People came out of those first meetings with stars in their eyes, thinking "Wow, I never imagined it could be like this."

At the same time, they recognized that this was the most natural lifestyle they'd ever encountered. What's happened in the last hundred years is that we've totally fragmented our culture, to the point where people don't feel that they belong anywhere. They aren't living with their birth families, they're not living where they grew up, and all of their relationships are secondary. Whereas, you come here, and you suddenly find many primary relationships, but without intruding on the smaller circle of friends you might wish to surround yourself with as your natural family.

Q:  This community doesn't aim to re-create the idyll of the American small town, does it? In fact, aren't people closer here because they've chosen their friends?

Asha: Oh, yeah. Swamiji wrote somewhere that the difficulty with small towns is that, with all due respect, they can be so petty and mean-minded. You can think about them in idyllic terms if you want, but often they're just hotbeds of gossip and backbiting. What to speak of the fact that if you're at all eccentric, they can be utterly provincial. Smallness can be stunting, whereas in an intentional community, you end up with a small community of highly pre-sorted individuals who at least are on the same basic wavelength. And at least it's your own wavelength.

Q: In an intentional community, you can still find a few cranks and gossips, can't you? But if you've selected for people who are on the whole basically expansive and good-hearted, don't they form a bigger wave?

Asha: The others are grist for the mill. St. Therese of Lisieux told her fellow nuns that if they didn't have people in the monastery who upset them, it would behoove them to go out and get some, so that they'd have something to chafe against and grow. Let's just say that, here in the Ananda community, we've never had to go out and find them. [Laughs.] God has always done a pretty good job of sending them along.

The real problem isn't that some people are difficult, because it's entirely a question of intention. You don't have to be a saint to live in a cooperative community. You don't even have to be a good person. You just have to be trying to be one. We basically believe that you have to be facing in the right direction. If people are sincerely intended, then they're just grist for the mill. But if they're genuinely discordant, well, it's a big world, and there's another place for them.

Q: Do they tend to fall out?

Asha: They tend to fall out, because nothing is happening here that they'll enjoy. If they want a more emotionally chaotic or egoic life, they'll find here in the community that they're forever battling with a pillow. So it's been self-selecting. And there's a margin in a community like this, because we have enough apartments that people can hang around for quite a long time and not participate, without disturbing the essential vibration that we're trying to create. They drive in and out as if they were strangers. But it's not a problem. And we've kept way above critical mass with positive, community-oriented people, and the few who've really pulled the energy down have moved on.

Q: Do people go through a period of adjustment when they first move into the community?

Asha: It depends entirely on the circumstances. If they come as well-adjusted, happy people who are just opting for something nicer, then the adjustment period is usually zero. They may be in a difficult transition, because people will often move into a place like this when something else has collapsed in their lives. If they're coming in wounded, and they're working out a grief, then of course the transition can be more difficult. Or if people have deep-seated fears of interacting with other people, or big authority issues, they can project that onto the scene around them, and it may take awhile before they wake up and notice where they are. Sometimes it takes a month, sometimes it can take years, but they gradually realize that they're the ones banging the pots and making all the noise about oppression and invasion and so forth. Or it comes to a happy conclusion because they've decided that this isn't where they belong.

The transition sometimes is purely mechanical, in the sense that our apartments are small, our walls are thin, and the traffic noises can be disruptive. Depending on where you lived before, things like that can be disconcerting, but they're more circumstantial rather than community-oriented. And such minor inconveniences are usually balanced by the fun of the community--community dinners, morning meditations, conversations with friends, service to others, swimming, working in the garden, playing volleyball, etc.

Q:  There's a thought in many people's minds that living in a separate community implies that you're closing yourself off from the rest of the community at large, and forsaking your social responsibilities. But here in Mountain View, surrounded by Silicon Valley and Stanford University and El Camino Real, would it even be possible to close yourself off from the life that's swirling all around you?

Asha: Exactly. In fact, here in Mountain View, the "outside world" is just inches away. But that is a common concern that people have, that you might lose the capacity to relate, or that you might become a delicate hothouse plant, or too dependent on the community. Those are real questions, and the short answer is "No, it's not a problem." It's not a problem because there's nothing about the life we live that encourages you to enter into an unreal world or cut yourself off from the society around you.

Now, that doesn't mean that we think it's real important to be able to discuss all the most current television shows. The majority of us have drawn lines that we'd probably draw if we were living outside the community. We just feel little need to be up on all the current gossip, and we've independently decided that a lot of what people are interested in isn't worth the time and trouble. So, in that sense, we do live a little apart from society, but that's a personal choice based on our spiritual values, and analyzing what we think is a waste of time or worse. Collectively, we do support each other in that. You can live and be active here, and no one will ever know that you didn't see the last episode of "Seinfeld" or "Steinfeld" or whatever it's called. It won't matter, and it will never come up.

But what people are really wondering is: are we able to cope with people and environments that are different than our own? And that is also a serious question. But, really, what gives us the capacity to cope? Is it being so familiar with the crowd that we can swim along without being noticed? Or is it developing the inner strength to discern the best choices among our options and act on them. Standing back a little from the crowd and thinking for ourselves, far from weakening our ability to relate, actually strengthens it enormously. Because whatever comes, we're able to relate to it from a level of inner strength, rather than just weakly reacting, like a leaf that's being blown around by the wind.

Living in harmony with people who share our ideals and who support us in our personal development makes us stronger. It's really a no-brainer. But because it sounds unorthodox, the questions have to be asked and answered, over and over again.

Q: The Ananda Community has several major interfaces with the community at large, doesn't it? Not only the church, Ananda Sangha, but also East West Bookshop and Bookbuyers .

Asha: Some of the people who live here work for an Ananda business or the Sangha, and all of those Ananda enterprises interact with the public. In fact, our retail outlet, East West Bookshop, is far more interactive than most people's jobs are, if they're just commuting to a cubicle and writing code or pushing paper all day. Retail businesses are by their nature interactive, and we also run a school that is extremely interactive. The Sangha itself also serves the general public.

Q: The people who work at the front desk at East West Bookshop have remarked that they feel a far greater degree of interaction with the public than when they've worked in other retail businesses, because they're consciously trying to relate to the customers as friends, rather than just selling them goods.

Asha: Exactly. And the fact that we all have ninety close friends living in the community with us forces us to interact far more frequently with "the world," so to speak, than people who don't even know their neighbors. Moreover, the majority of the people who live here and have "regular," non-Ananda-related jobs, go out every morning and spend all day interacting with others. So the idea that we're somehow isolating ourselves from reality is a complete myth. We're really just living a normal life, except that we get to come home to a great place at the end of the day.