Why Did We Create a Community?

 Here's the short answer: "Because it's a great way to practice yoga." There are other reasons for creating communities, of course. Communities where people pool their resources can offer financial advantages. Communities where everyone knows the neighbors can provide mutual support and a measure of security as the residents grow older. Communities can serve as havens of harmony in a society where human contact is routinely sacrificed to material expedience.  

In the Ananda communities, we enjoy and treasure these benefits. But they aren't our main reasons for starting communities. To put it simply, we started communities so that we could live among friends and enjoy, as Paramhansa Yogananda put it, "home, work, and church in the same place." To understand why we feel that's important, you might have to taste the fruits of a life devoted to yoga: fruits of health, awareness of God's love, purpose and direction; concentration and cheerfulness, and last but not least, the joy of inner contact with God.

 The particular branch of yoga that we practice is called Kriya Yoga, after a specific technique of meditation that draws energy and awareness inward to help the meditator attain states of inner communion with the Divine.

 Can People Start Communities Even if They Don't Practice Yoga?

 The short answer: Of course! A more detailed response is given in Swami Kriyananda's inspiring books, Intentional Communities—How to Start Them, and Why (http://www.crystalclarity.com/books/communities.asp) and Cities of Light: What Communities Can Accomplish and the Need for Them in Our Times (http://www.crystalclarity.com/books/cities.asp).

 To read a brief account online of the ideas and events that led to the founding of the original Ananda community, follow this link to Chapter 42 of Swami Kriyananda's autobiography, The Path: http://crystalclarity.com/kriyananda/Chap_42/chap_42.html.

 Any group of basically harmonious people can create a cooperative community--but even with the best of intentions, it helps to know what has worked for others, and what hasn't. Paramhansa Yogananda predicted that cooperative communities would eventually spread throughout the world "like wildfire," and become the basic sociological pattern of the future. It's easy to imagine cooperative communities being started by artists, scientists, healers, craftspersons, educators, parents, and—unlikely as it may seem—lawyers.