The Need for an Alternative

(From the book Cities of Light by Swami Kriyananda)

      History shows people coming together for basically one reason only: economics. There may be a convenient harbor, so commerce flourishes, and a city springs into existence to promote that commerce. People flock there to work, and a community develops out of their need to live, shop, and find recreation nearby.

     The economic motive is taken so much for granted that people rarely question the possibility of other motives. Yet surely there are many people who have wished, if only fleetingly, that their lives could be centered in some higher vision; that they could have neighbors who shared that vision, and who were close friendsCpeople with whom they could interact in harmony and happiness.

     There is a growing need for an alternative. The shrugging off of higher values that has been the hallmark of the Twentieth Century is causing a reaction in many people. They are beginning to want to center their lives more consciously in God.

     Today, total renunciation is not what is being asked of mankind. The present need is for a life of dedication, yes, but in simplicity, not in poverty; in creative self-expression, not in unthinking submission and obedience.

 Heaven on Earth?

     In the 1960's, hundreds of communities were started in a great "back-to-the-land" movement. Why did almost all of them fail? They failed for lack of clarity. First, their intentions were unclear. They didn't put spiritual principles first in their lives, but concentrated on outward, material goals: solar energy, new economic systems, revolutionary architectural concepts. Their idea of heaven on earth was of a system where everything would function perfectly on the material plane.

     Given this approach to the ideal of finding happiness through matter, they were bound to fail.

     One of the most persistent human delusions is the belief that good systems will produce good people. It is people, not systems, that need perfecting. Good systems will function well if the people running them have the good will to make them work. But if people have good will, even bad systems can be made to limp along somewhat successfully.

     A body cannot survive without the head. The body of society, similarly cannot survive without the guiding principles that flow downward from man's higher nature. Man must be guided by inspiration from above, or else find himself lost and struggling through a dark swamp of confusion.

     The time has come for people to live lives of even higher dedication than that which inspired monks and nuns in the past. And the time has come now for people to direct their spiritual awareness also downward into matterCto apply the principles of a life of spiritual dedication to everything they do: to their work, to education, to family life, to friendship, to their communications with strangers, to the way they build their homesCto all the mundane, practical aspects of daily, human life.

     People need now to become God-centered from within, and from that center to see God everywhere, in everything.

     Ananda's notable success as a community is owed to the observance of these principles. It is an experiment not only in community living, but in the creative application of the principles of spiritual living to all aspects of human life.  

Paramhansa Yogananda, "Patron Saint"
of World Brotherhood Communities

      Ananda is a community of people of all ages and walks of life who are dedicated to "plain living and high thinking," as taught by the great mystic, Paramhansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi.

     Yogananda didn't separate spiritual truth from social or material or scientific realities. The high dedication to which he called people did not call for withdrawal to a cave or a remote monastery. Rather, he sought to demonstrate divine solutions to the normal, human problems of everyday life.

     Onto each of these issues he brought to bear the clarity of higher, spiritual vision, in order to show people that the time has come to integrate spirituality into the heart of its life, and not relegate it to an hour in church on Sunday, and to occasional readings from the Bible.

     Paramhansa Yogananda tried also to start a community for people who wanted to live together in God. During his lifetime, however, the time was not yet ripe for such an experiment.

     He therefore empowered the work that has become Ananda World Brotherhood Village . He also placed his vibrations and his blessings "in the ether," as he put it, "in the spirit of God," that other communities in the future might flourish when the time was right. For he believed deeply in the need for an environment where people, whether married or single, might live together for GodCa place where work, fellowship, and worship could be united in a harmonious whole.

     Ananda has been the expression, on every level of its members' lives, of divine principles in action. Like the spokes of a wheel radiating outward from a hub, the various expressions of divine clarity in the members' lives are creative applications of the central vision that Paramhansa Yogananda brought to the West.