Conversations With Ananda — Ch. 48, Aryavan McSweeney

Aryavan and Ishani live in India where they work with Education for Life International, bringing Paramhansa Yogananda’s educational ideals to life in the land of his birth. (Photo: 2014 – Aryavan and Ishani)

Q: You started in kindergarten at Living Wisdom School. That was a long time ago. Do you remember your first years?

Aryavan: I do remember, because I have very positive memories of Living Wisdom School. So much so that I’ve dedicated a very large chunk of my adult life to trying to spread the word, and I’ve been motivated by my own experience there when I was younger.

I don’t recall all of the details of my time in kindergarten, but my general impression is that school was fun and joyful. I remember looking forward to coming to school every day, and that was always generally true. I can’t imagine how I could have been better prepared for life after leaving LWS.

Q: Speaking of the transition to high school, what was it like for you? You went to a highly regarded private high school in Mountain View, didn’t you? Was it difficult in certain ways, or was it a breeze?

Aryavan: When I came to St. Francis, I discovered that I was a much more outgoing person than I’d thought. I went to the first school dance and found myself wanting to meet people, and putting out lots of energy in a way that I wasn’t aware was part of who I was.

I think I was much more fearless than I imagined. So, socially, the transition was very good, but the shift to a more heavily structured, book-based academic system was less inspiring. I didn’t find it too challenging, I just didn’t like it, because I knew from my experience at Living Wisdom what school could be like. But I was at an age when I was open to new experiences, and I sort of assumed “Okay, this is what high school is like.”

For most of the people that I met at St. Francis, it was a natural continuation from elementary school. But it definitely wasn’t like that for me, and it’s part of why I’m highly motivated to try to see a change on a larger scale in schools everywhere.

All of the teachers at St. Francis were very sincere, and I think they were allowed more flexibility than at other schools. But it did feel like they were on a track from which they couldn’t deviate very. Some of my teachers had amazing creative energy, but I missed the exceptional creativity of the instruction at Living Wisdom School – and even more so when I went to college, where there were similar limits on how creative the professors could be.

Q: Was there less individual attention in high school and college? And did it make a difference? Or was it just more structured?

Aryavan: I had nice relationships with some of my teachers at St. Francis, and the people felt really good. But the system was a bit on rails, and you could feel it.  And I hadn’t been used to that, because even though the teachers at Living Wisdom School  had lesson plans, it felt like every day was always new and creative and different. But in high school it was more like, okay, here’s the syllabus and here’s exactly what we’re going to be doing every week for the rest of the year.

And it was fine, because you do need to cover a certain amount of material, but the creativity of the instruction was very noticeably less. There was a lot of lecture in high school, and a lot less of hands-on work – and again, I thought, “Okay, this is what you do in high school.” But I’m much more aware now that the same information could have been delivered in a more inspired way.

I felt very well-prepared socially for the transition, in terms of my ability to make friends and meet people. High school can be a little cliquey, generally speaking. Ours wasn’t as bad as some are, but there were the athletes and the nerds and this and that – all of the distinctions you normally find because people tend to gather by interest.

But I think it was also a product of the system. Because we were so deeply integrated at Living Wisdom School, not only because we were a lot smaller, but because we had so many interactions between the grades on a very dynamic level. And when I got to high school I just assumed I was going to be everyone’s friend, and, in fact, by the end of high school I was vice president of the student body, and I’m sure my earlier experience helped.

I knew just about every person in my class, and maybe I didn’t have deep friendships with every one, because it was four hundred people, but I felt I could talk to them all, and that there weren’t any insurmountable boundaries.

I had friendships across many different types of people and groups, and my feeling, even at the time, was that that it was a result of the way Living Wisdom School had prepared me.

A good example is our all-school walk to the park for phys ed, and how the middle schoolers would pair up with a kindergartener or first grader. And instead of it being a big, heavy, mandated thing, it was very lighthearted and natural. So we would end up talking to the person and getting to know them. And I was amazed, on the few occasions when I would see high schoolers interact with younger kids, to see how different it was. And maybe it’s fine if it’s just a friendly rivalry between the seniors and the freshmen, but seeing juniors and seniors not even able to relate to the freshmen was always mystifying to me.

And then, also, the way they related to older people. The way the students related to their teachers in high school was completely foreign and unfamiliar to me. And even when the teachers might have allowed some familiarity, it was such a contrast to Living Wisdom, in part because of the tremendous familiarity between the students and teachers, and between younger students and other levels of students, where there was a soul-to-soul relationship, instead of it only feeling like a casual acquaintance. In high school, I noticed that a lot of my peers related really well to their own peers, but not so well outside of their own group.

I did sometimes get stressed about grades because so many of the people around me were worried about them. But I was very much more interested in the social side of high school. And of course I know that it might be misunderstood. But I knew that having fun was my priority, and I saw the other things as a bit more transitory. And once I got into the rhythm of high school I was very successful academically, even though it wasn’t my primary interest.

I didn’t see academics as an end in itself. I would see people fall into a rut of studying with their nose to the grindstone, which is all right if it’s expressing who they are. And I was capable of studying hard when I needed to. But I saw the social aspect as being much more important, and I was less likely to believe people when they said, “You need to concentrate on studying so you can get into a good school.”

By the time I entered college, I had begun to feel that there was a bit too much emphasis on conforming my own nature to fit into the environment. It was a period when I was beginning to feel a little lost. I studied at Cal State Fullerton in Southern California, living off campus, and the experience was responsible in a very large way for my coming onto the spiritual path at such a young age, because it was such a strong contrast between what I had experience at Living Wisdom School, and the materialism I was witnessing around me, and how it really wasn’t making people happy.

I saw that people were relating to academics from a  concern for material wealth – I’m talking about the students, not the teachers. The school was in Orange County, which has a very materialistic orientation, and the contrast with my earlier experiences was so striking that for a while I was completely overwhelmed and mystified. And then, no long after I left, I found the spiritual path because it was exactly what I needed. But I was mystified that people could be so obsessed with those kinds of outward things.

Q: I assume you studied film, because it’s the field you’ve worked in for a long time.

Aryavan: Yes, and for a very long time I never really knew what I wanted to do. I picked film because I had to pick something, and I’d enjoyed making videos and short films in high school, so I thought that until something else came along I would try that.

Once I began taking film courses, the class sizes were dramatically smaller, to the point that I could interact with my teachers and build relationships, and that was fun for me, and I started to feel a sense of community. Cal State Fullerton had something like forty thousand undergraduate students, plus graduates. We were the fifth-largest school in California – it was like a small city, where you had to find your own people, and I began to notice how much I valued that feeling of community.

It was a huge blessing that I had such a polarizing experience early on, because it helped me figure out what I really wanted by age twenty-two.

I remember my cinematography professor, and how much I enjoyed her creative energy and passion. I ended up enjoying film and video and doing creative work, which I hadn’t really gotten out of my first two years of college. But it lit a spark – I knew I wanted to do something creative, and film seemed like a good track.

Aryavan and Ishani have been instrumental in bringing Paramhansa Yogananda’s educational ideals to India, as revealed in the following inspiring video.

Q: What was the transition like after college? Did you begin start making films about Ananda, or did you enter the film industry?

Aryavan: In my last semester I took a class called “The Biz.” The teacher was a Hollywood producer – she had produced the Final Destination movies which were blockbuster films, and other major films, so we were excited to have her with us. But what I remember most was she told us, “You are going to have to work on projects that you’ll absolutely hate for at least five years before you can do anything you’ll like.”

That was her big inspiration, and it was at that moment that I realized I wouldn’t be working in the film industry. The vibe I got from the class was that this wasn’t the kind of industry I wanted to participate in, because it sounded extremely cold, and everything in the class was about money, which I guess makes sense for a class on The Biz.

I believe she was painting a picture that was informed by her own experience, and maybe it wasn’t all it could be, because people obviously do make things they believe in, even in Hollywood. But I was very clear that I didn’t want to do things that I didn’t believe in for any period of time.

So I started brainstorming ways to create my own series and pitch it directly to the networks. And that was something that had been instilled in me at Living Wisdom School. It was a complete refutation of the pervasive idea in the film business that you have to suffer in order to advance toward your goals, and more than just working hard, it has to include lots of suffering, and you have to subjugate your values if you want to achieve greatness.

That’s something I found myself rejecting immediately, even as I saw my classmates nodding in agreement. So it set me apart, and I think it came from Living Wisdom School.

Again, all of those tendencies were latent in me. Even in eighth grade, although maybe the teachers weren’t verbalizing those things to the students, we were definitely picking them up.

I don’t remember any teacher at Living Wisdom ever saying, “Live to be happy – don’t live to be rich.” But I knew the deeper values that were implied, and they aligned with my nature. So when I was presented with opportunities to work purely for the money, I rejected it completely.

My best friend in college went into the film industry where he ended up creating a very nice career for himself. But whenever I talk with him, he’s always telling me, “You’re living the dream, and how did that happen?”

He works for Apple, and he’s making outrageous sums of money. He’s been very outwardly successful and he has a good life. He has a wife and a new child and they’re happy, but something is missing and he knows it. And our lives could not have gone in more opposite directions after college.

I wasn’t planning to make films for Ananda. I had no real long-term plans, except for maybe going back to LA and trying to build a creative life for myself.

Just before my senior year in college Iad  heard Swami Kriyananda say, “The young people of Ananda should go to India.” I went to India as my graduation present, and I met Swami there, even though I was still planning to come back and try to create something in the film world. But Swamiji evidently had other plans for me.

I had critical mass going in a very different direction, but then in some mysterious ways Swamiji held onto me for the rest of his life, to ensure that I would stay on the right track toward my own highest happiness.

The trip to India was super cool. I showed up, and right away I discovered that Swami needed to make a series of TV programs, and that he didn’t want to hire anyone outside of Ananda. In the meantime, Dave, the other videographer, suddenly couldn’t come to India, and I have a recording of a talk where Swamiji said, “Oh, I think Bryan McSweeney can do it.” And this was after meeting me just once randomly, or so it seemed to me.

So I’m suddenly recording TV programs for Swamiji, which is way above my pay grade in terms of the skills I’d learned in school. And I literally ended up learning more about video from Swamiji than from school, in important ways. But he gave me the training, and he made me do things I didn’t feel comfortable with, so it was like my postgraduate education, and I got my masters from Swamiji. [Laughs]

Q: There must have been wrenching times, when you wondered where you were going. But for it to work out as a fulfilling career is beautiful.

Aryavan: I’m not sure if it came from my personal karma or from growing up with parents who were following a spiritual path. But here I was, on the other side of planet, after leading a fairly normal college life. And even then, the pull to go back to that life was there, and suddenly I’m traveling with Swami and extending my trip from four to eight months, and then we’re in Europe and I’m recording more TV programs.

I had this weird mental logic, where I would tell myself, “Okay, I’ll probably go back to my old life, but at the very least I’ll have spent time working for a saint, so this is an awesome opportunity. And whatever I get from this, I’ll be able to go back and do normal stuff with it.” But then the “normal” stuff never came along, because it seemed it wasn’t meant to be. But there was this very amusing piece of “illogical logic” that kept me going.

Q: That’s a great story. How did you meet your wife, Ishani, who works in film with you?

Aryavan: I was still in India, and the producers of The Answer, a film about Swami Kriyananda’s youthful search, and his meeting with Paramhansa Yogananda, were in India to work on the film. It was thought that Swamiji would be around, but he left his body a couple months before the filming started.

I had signed up to do behind-the-scenes on the film, and I’d spoken with Ishani several times at Ananda Village where she was living. I had asked her to film something for me because I had to go pick someone up, and then I was in the room when she got the call asking her to do makeup for the The Answer, because she’d been a professional makeup artist for fashion and photography in New York.

She didn’t really want to do it, because she felt she was on a different track, and that she was done with makeup, and she was enjoying not doing it.

I knew there weren’t going to be many Ananda people on the film, so I said, “You have to do it, because I won’t have anyone to talk to if you’re not there!” So I convinced her somehow, and she did do it.

It turned out to be a completely crazy process, with an Indian director and cinematographer and producer, and they were accustomed to a very different flow. The experience of making the film was total chaos, with lots of craziness and conflict. And because the crew were non-union they had a very different approach to the whole thing. It was one of the craziest professional experiences I’ve had, and through it all Ishani and I became closer and closer, just holding onto each other for a bit of sanity and positive magnetism.

In any film, because of the costs of renting a great deal of expensive gear, there are twelve-hour days, six days a week. So you’re working really hard, and then you take a break. All of the film guys I met on the movie about Ananda, Finding Happiness, would work really hard on a project and then spend two or three weeks at a beach resort relaxing because it was so intense, and they were able to make enough money on the first part so they could afford the second.

What with all the intensity, we built a deep friendship in a very compact amount of time. It was a very intense few months, and we learned a lot about each other, and we decided that this would be a good thing.

Q: How did you come back to the Living Wisdom schools as the primary focus of your work?

Aryavan: It happened in Swamiji’s final year, in 2012 and 2013, before he left his body. I was with him in Los Angeles, and it was the first year of my being at Ananda as a personal choice, as an adult. And then one night he suggested that I start a school in Los Angeles with my dad, Gary, who has taught at Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto for thirty years. And, again, I was caught completely off guard.

I had never thought of teaching, and there were no parents begging us to create a school, so there were lots of things to unpack from Swami’s request. And then the next night, while we were talking, he suggested that I help him launch a course that he’d been working on. So Narayan and Dharmadevi and I were helping him, and I felt that Swami was sort of testing certain things that I could do, because he knew that he would be leaving his body and he wanted me to stay on.

And then, toward the end of his life, he began saying repeatedly that I should work with kids, that I should be in education and I should work in Education for Life. And also, he began telling lots of people, including Asha and Jyotish and Devi and Dharmadas and Nirmala. And the upshot is that when he left the body, there was a clear direction that he had left for me.

As I look back over my life, it’s very interesting for me to see how I had the good karma to have my steps more or less planned out, and how there were very few choices I had to make on my own, with the possible exception of marrying Ishani. And, even then, Swamiji made that choice very easy.

So I didn’t have to think real hard about the decision to get involved with education, and my family were supportive, so you might say I had a cakewalk introduction to the spiritual path.

The upshot is that when Swami left his body there were lots of people who knew I should be working in education. And, in the meantime, I had committed a lot of energy to working on The Answer, and I was planning to go to India with Asha to help with her speaking tour.

But then it became known to Kumran, the director of the Living Wisdom School in Nevada City that Swamiji had said these things to me, and he was looking for teachers. So I suddenly found myself living at Ananda Village, where I’d never thought to be. But Ishani was living there, so it’s where I wanted to be, and then Kumran called and said, “Are you interested in teaching?” And I said, “I guess.”

I wasn’t not interested. I did find the idea somewhat interesting. But to finish the thought about the life choices that were made for me, a good example is when I applied to lots of high schools and I only got into one, even though I had good grades and glowing recommendations. And, again, I applied to thirteen colleges, and I had very good SAT scores and decent grades, but only one school accepted me.

As it turned out, the high school that was seemingly chosen for me was perfect for me in many ways, and better than my other choices. And Cal State Fullerton was where I was able to get my life pointed toward the spiritual path. And in my mind’s eye I see Babaji ripping up acceptance letters and telling people that they shouldn’t have someone like me in their school. [Laughs]

And then Swami is telling everybody that he sees that I need to be in education, and I’d never seen him tell anyone else what to do on such a scale, where he’s making sure everybody knows.

But until that point I didn’t have anything else in my life that I was truly passionate about. So when you asked if I loved film, well, I enjoyed it, but I never felt that it was the one big thing that would feed me. And it wasn’t until much later that I felt a certain shift, and I really began to feel a flow of enthusiasm and attunement with Education for Life and the vision of how it could very literally change the planet.

Q: When you began making films about Living Wisdom School, did that give you a clue? Was there a special energy that you felt you might want to have more of in your life? Because the first 6-minute film you made about the school is beautiful.

Aryavan: I feel it’s one of the best videos we’ve made. The content was so rich that it virtually made itself, and that made it much easier for us.

We had a really great time making that film, and when I remember the experience, it’s obvious that I would be getting into education, although I was the last person to know it. [Laughs]

I remember how I loved helping with the LWS summer camps, and how I was always looking for opportunities to come back and visit the school, and to be with the children in that environment.

After I came on the spiritual path, I landed in Pune, India. My plan at the time wasn’t to be with Ananda but to explore India. But I didn’t know anybody in India, and I found myself enjoying the company and the people of Ananda where living in Pune, and I thought, well, maybe I’ll sit here a little longer and sort of do this for a while. And the thought came to me that I had been really happy as a child, and that that level of happiness had faded over the time I was outside of the Living Wisdom School environment, and maybe it was something about the school, and the people I’d been around.

I believe that’s a big part of what makes Living Wisdom School so exceptional, the environment that is so uplifting and joyful on a deep vibrational level that it’s a kind of place you want to be. And when I think about learning, and how learning happens at LWS, and the original school motto, “Where Learning and Joy Come Together,” I realize it’s the best possible environment for kids to learn and just be in. It was such a pleasant, joyful, uplifting place to be, that when I look back at it now, it’s very clear why it would lead me to want to create an experience like that for other children.

After I graduated, I was focused on high school and then college, and I wasn’t connected with the school. I remember Helen offering me a job. “Do you want to become a teacher here? We’ll train you to become a teacher.” But it was so off thewall for me at the time that I didn’t see it happening. And yet it now seems so very obvious now, because everything about the Living Wisdom Schools in general is attractive to me, and I find it deeply inspiring.

Swamiji gave me just two directions. He asked me to help with his material success course, and to work with Education for Life. Both express Yogananda’s teachings in their most accessible, practical form – they don’t require blind belief, and you don’t even have to believe in God. You just have to believe in being happy and joyful, and in having more of that experience in your life. And for me, sharing that experience with others, especially children, has been incredibly fulfilling and gratifying. So, yes, when I look back, it makes total sense that I would end up here.

Q: Asha has said on many occasions that the schools are the most important thing we’re doing. It’s amazing that for six hours of the day for nine months of the year, there’s this intense environment where kids can thrive – it’s like a super cosmic happiness chicken coop for kids, and a wonderful spiritual incubator and nursery.

Aryavan: I totally agree. Of course I’m biased, but when you think of Paramhansa Yogananda being born to help change the planetary consciousness and to usher the world into a higher age of energy-awareness, what are the practical steps that can help a change like that happen in the real world? And the schools are a big part of that.

When you visit the school and you meet the kids, and you hear the stories of kids who’ve come from tough backgrounds or tough schooling experiences, and when you hear about the contrast between your everyday public school and what they experienced there, or in private schools, and you compare it with their experience at Living Wisdom School, the idea that you can create an environment where children can feel loved is a huge win already.

And then you add learning to the equation, and it’s brilliant. But even if we didn’t run a school, and if we just ran a place where children felt whole and safe and happy, that would actually be enough to guide them for the rest of their lives, and that we’re doing anything else is a bonus. But when a child has the opportunity to experience what that kind of pure happiness feels like, and to know that they can create it for themselves, and navigate the world based on that feeling, from the inside – who needs more than that, once they have that sense of themselves and who they are and what their abilities are, and the enthusiasm to do great things?

Q: If you look at Living Wisdom School from the perspective of Yogananda’s teachings and the book Education for Life, you realize that the elementary years are primarily about helping children during the Feeling Years of their development, from about age six to twelve. Swami has said that there’s a very good reason why the Feeling Years come immediately after the little toddlers have gained the basic skills to move their bodies around. After they’ve got the physical tools in place, it’s the feelings and the heart that need to be immediately developed and refined, because they are the generator that drives everything else that comes after. But if you can get the heart pointed in the right direction and energized in the right way, a child who has that enthusiasm and joy will have a powerful engine for their life. If they feel called to be a mathematician or a dancer, an artist, a filmmaker, a doctor, a businessman, a lawyer, or whatever they might feel to do, they’ll feel so squared away within themselves and so happy and confident that they will be able to pursue that. I’ve worked with the schools and observed them as a writer and photographer for over forty years, and it inspires me tremendously to visit the school, because I had the kind of education that you wouldn’t wish on anybody. I went to Stanford, and it was agony on a spiritual level, because there was no underlying sense of meaning. There was no education of the whole person, and it was entirely about the head.

Aryavan: I feel the same, particularly that our whole approach is about helping kids thrive in the Feeling Years, and helping them acquire a good mastery of feeling as a tool of maturity. And then also recognizing the highest, appropriate use of the intellect later on.

We deal with four tools of maturity in the years from birth to age twenty-four. You see examples all around, of people who have strong will power, for example, but it’s often directed in ways that aren’t going to give them the happiness and fulfillment they’re seeking. And that’s the true meaning of the intellect, which needs the inward process of uniting the feelings and mind in expansive and wise ways.

Feeling is the one that always seems to get left behind in our current educational system. And so the intellect becomes a purely outward thing, and the feelings become nothing, because we just shove them aside and bury and disparage them. And then we’re surprised when people have midlife crises, or they reach the pinnacle outwardly and realize there was nothing in it.

If you look at the graduates of Living Wisdom School, and the relationships they have with their work and their families and friends, that’s where you begin to see the potential for a revolution, because it’s offering the kids so much more. It’s telling them about life the way it was meant to be. This life was meant to be so much more fulfilling than people are giving it an opportunity to be. So, yes, we’re training people how to be happy.

 

2 thoughts on “Conversations With Ananda — Ch. 48, Aryavan McSweeney”

  1. remember so clearly that little boy,
    Bryan riding his tricycle down the sidewalk to LWS in the Palo Alto community.

    Reply
    • Jamuna, wow, that was a long time ago, it must have been circa 1990-1993 when the school and community were new. Aryavan is a wonderful man, so down to earth and helpful with advice for creating EFL videos – of course, he and Ishani are the EFL video meisters. Jai!

      Reply

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