Personal Experience

I must speak here once more of my own experience, not because Ananda ranks anywhere among the great business empires -- far from it; it isn't even a business! -- but because Ananda's history is my history, and Ananda's years of experience are my own.

Ananda at present has branch communities in several American states and elsewhere in the world. How Ananda is organized is due partly to a deliberate attempt on my part to tune in to the "rays" of Dwapara Yuga.

Before founding Ananda, I used to ask myself, What business had I in founding a community? The only thing I could see that I had going for me was my enthusiasm for the concept. I did, perhaps, have a certain ability to infect others with my enthusiasm. I had also been for some years in charge of a community of monks, and had had other relatively direct experience of group dynamics. Apart from that, however, I'd shown no noteworthy abilities. I'd had no business experience, no exposure to accounting and bookkeeping practices, no training in hands-on skills such as carpentry or plumbing. Apart from a month spent on a farm after graduating from high school, I'd had no experience in agriculture. I'd never even worked for a living. I'd spent most of my adult life in a monastery, where my lack of practical know-how inspired a certain amount of good-humored chaff from others. Is it any wonder I used to ask myself what I was doing in founding a community?

In addition to all of the above, my besetting "sin" was self-doubt. It often made me deprecate my own abilities, both to myself and to others. This was a weakness, I admit, though perhaps in another sense it was also my strength. I've wondered sometimes whether my "accomplishments" haven't been more by default than due to any special talent of my own. Something needed to be done that hadn't been done yet, and no one else seemed interested in doing it. So -- why not, myself, give it a try?

I must confess also to having had, for years, a deep personal interest in communities, in helping people, and also in inspiring them to help themselves. My solution to my peculiar sense of personal inadequacy was to think rather in terms of giving out to others than of worrying about what I myself could or could not do. What, I asked myself, did my abilities matter? The important thing was simply to pitch in and do my best.

I've written several tracts on leadership in which I have stated repeatedly that a secret of good leadership is to shun self-importance, and, instead, simply to forget oneself. It is much easier to rise above self-preoccupation when one doesn't think of the energy coming back to him from others, but concentrates on the energy he himself is giving out to them and to the world.

I lacked practical knowledge, but I was always ready to listen to others. Having heard their alternatives, I had faith in my choice of the best one, and even in my ability to come up with solutions of my own, for God has given me an ability to see, from almost any contemplated action, what the results will be even miles down the road, or years in the future. I was also very much dedicated to the ideal of communities, having dreamed of creating them since I was fifteen.

Well, I guess I had one further advantage: I wasn't afraid of failing. I firmly believed in the principle Krishna teaches in the Bhagavad Gita: nishkam karma, action without attachment to (or desire for) personal results. This belief freed me to commit myself completely to positive action. Listening to others kept me open also to creative suggestions and ideas.

Leaders who try to tune in to the rays of Dwapara Yuga must make an effort to sense the energies around the people they work with. When a truly Dwapara leader delegates authority, he neither concerns himself over-much with all the details of what his delegate will do, nor turns that subordinate entirely loose to "do his own thing." I would describe the process as holding the delegate within the leader's own "energy-field." A leader must be able to feel that person's realities. This may not be an easy skill to develop, but I would say this much with certainty: The more one tries to do a thing, the better he will become at doing it.

I once assigned a small group the job of starting a community in the north of Italy. It was a mere beginning, and I was obliged to leave them and return to other duties in America. My friends might have felt that I'd abandoned them, particularly since the circumstances for them proved, for a time, quite difficult. However, they and their situation remained very much an active concern of mine. I held them in my energy field, so to speak, phoning them often, revisiting them when I could, and constantly seeking ways of helping them. I don't think they ever felt unsupported by me.

The important thing, I have found, is to view people as individuals -- indeed, as friends -- never as statistics. In an institution with branch communities (or offices), moreover, it is important for each branch to have at least some autonomy. Especially in a Dwapara Yuga institution where quality is recognized as being more important than quantity, such autonomy is necessary.

High energy can lead also, of course, to concentration on high profits rather than on the quality that develops with individual freedom. Chain stores, the focus of which is entirely on monetary returns, may of course succeed better creating rubber-stamped images of themselves. My thought, then, is of service-oriented organizations, particularly those which render spiritual service. In such organizations, particularly, the needs of people may vary considerably.

In the Ananda church and community in Palo Alto, for instance, the surrounding area, known internationally as "Silicon Valley," is focused on high technology. Obviously, the energy there is different from that which exists in our Portland (Oregon) center, where the general consciousness is more "laid back." The consciousness in Portland, again, is different from that in Seattle (Washington), where the general tendency is to focus more on individual freedom. In Ananda's work in Italy, again, there is a more devotional energy than is found on the West Coast of America. And in India there is more general openness to the higher, more abstract spiritual teachings.

People everywhere, however, are basically the same. It would be a mistake to give too much credence to something one sometimes hears: an insistence, uttered with great emphasis, that "Our people are special." A leader must have the wisdom to see beyond superficial differences, and realize that certain guidelines must also apply universally. I say this because I have encountered people, especially among leaders of spiritual groups, who insisted that basic teachings needed to be "adjusted" (for that, read "diluted") in their own situation. I have never surrendered to this argument, nor have I ever found the slightest reason, later on, to regret what those people saw as my "recalcitrance."