Conversations With Ananda: Ch. 1 — Nayaswami Jyotish

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Nayaswami Jyotish (John Novak) met Swami Kriyananda in San Francisco in the mid‑1960s. After serving as Swamiji’s personal assistant for several years, he played a key role in starting the first Ananda community, Ananda Village, which was founded in 1968.

When the first residents moved to Ananda, they had few material resources – just high hopes and an ageless philosophy. No jobs awaited them, and few had the skills for a rustic life in the country. (Photo: 1976)

Building a community and filling their stomachs was their first challenge, but it was compensated by a joyful sense that they had found a life that was worth working hard for. As the community’s manager, Jyotish was directly involved in creating Ananda’s first businesses. He now serves with his wife, Devi, as co‑spiritual director of Ananda worldwide.

 

Q: Tell us about the early days of Ananda, and what it was like to start the community from scratch.

Jyotish: I’ll just tell the story of how it got started, and then kind of meander around.

At the end of the summer of 1969, there were maybe thirty people here, and it was obvious that we needed some kind of income. Swami Kriyananda was regularly going down to Sacramento to teach classes, and it brought in some income to make payments on the land, and so on. But we had all these people who wanted to live here and who didn’t have any personal support, so it was clear that we needed to get some businesses going.

Actually, two businesses had moved up here from San Francisco. One was the publications business, and when I say “business,” it wasn’t really all that big. We had two or three books that we published, and a couple of recordings of Swami Kriyananda’s songs. There was some printing work for outside clients, but the income and the jobs that came from that didn’t amount to much.

I was concerned about finding employment for people, and I knew that we had to get something going, so I started an incense business. I don’t know where the thought came from to start making incense. I think maybe somebody had told me that the Krishna people were selling lots of incense, and that it would make a good business. But I had no idea how you made incense. I had asked a couple of people, and nobody knew, but somebody had an idea that it was made with cow dung, so I started going out in the fields and collecting cow pies.

Q: Surely you’re joking.

Jyotish: No, and I put them in a blender. I knew that I had to get them to adhere on a stick, so I put them in a blender with flour and water to make a paste, and they kind of stuck on the stick for a little while, but then they fell off. So I tried a few things like that, then I went to the library and researched as much as I could, and there was a formula for incense in a book that I found, having to do with charcoal.

By this time, I was kind of commuting back and forth between Ananda and San Francisco because the suppliers were down there. So I went and got some charcoal and kept experimenting, and the key was to find something that had enough body to make it stay on the stick, but it had to be absorbent enough to hold the fragrant oils, unless you wanted to try to make a natural incense with herbs, and I didn’t want to try to do that.

So I experimented probably from November to February until I was able to produce a formula, and a method for dipping sticks. I got the sticks by going around and collecting old bamboo curtains and cutting them to the proper size. Then I had a little device for holding the sticks and dipping them in a mixture of charcoal and a couple of kinds of gum. I’d let the sticks dry, and then I’d dip them in a scenting agent.

By February I had a formula that worked, though there were still some bugs. The charcoal tended to crack as the sticks dried, and some of it was falling off. So I had to go through some refinements, but eventually we got a formula where we could actually produce incense.

The first big sales came in 1970 at a Whole Earth Fair that we attended in Davis. I sold several hundred dollars worth of incense and made some contacts, and that gave me confidence that it would be a viable business, so I started going around to stores and selling. I had developed some packaging, and I got enough of a business going to move the whole operation up to Ananda.

We had two or three people employed making incense. It was mainly myself, but at the same time I was the manager for the community, whatever that entailed, so I only had a little more than half time to devote to the business.

I felt it was a very good incense, because it was very clean burning and it had a good feel to it. But the people in the stores began asking for an incense that had more smoke to it. I guess they felt that unless they had a real smoky atmosphere, they weren’t truly burning incense. So I found a source for blanks from India that were of high quality.

We continued in that way, with three or four people, until I think the winter or spring of 1971, when someone sold me a very small business selling essential oils in little bottles. The combination of incense and oils was much stronger, and we went to the Renaissance Faire in 1971 and sold two or three thousand dollars worth of stock, which was a big boost.

We were rolling along pretty well by 1971 and ‘72, and we had a super salesman. I’ve often looked back and felt that this was the worst business decision I’ve ever made. It may have been a right spiritual decision, but it was a terrible business decision. Anyway, we had this super salesman, a girl named Kanta, who is still associated with Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings, and she was just a fireball. I think she was getting a 15% commission on her sales, and she was such a good salesman that she was selling $10‑12,000 a month worth of incense and oils.

Meanwhile, at Ananda Village, we were earning $200 to $400 a month, just whatever we needed to get by, while she was earning $1500 a month, and besides that I was paying some of her expenses. So the disparity in wages bothered me, and it also bothered the other workers who felt that they were working just as hard as she was, and why should she get so much money? So I cut her commissions down to where she was earning more than the rest of us, but not that much more, and she quit. So overnight our sales went from $10,000 a month to $2‑3000 a month. We eventually got another salesman, but I never found anyone who was as good as she was. And, as I say, it was probably the right spiritual decision, but it was a very poor business decision.

Q: Do you feel that way today? It seems tricky – rewarding initiative, versus artificially creating equality. How do you solve that?

Jyotish: Well, given the circumstances I think I’d make the same decision. Let’s say that we were running a business together, and we felt that it was a cooperative business, which it was. I was the founder and manager, and I was earning no more than anybody else, in fact less than some of the others, because if people had a family, I’d pay them more. But let’s say that today we were doing a cooperative business and there were five or six of us involved, and one person, through their talents, was a good salesman and was earning three or four times as much as we were. I think I would still feel that it was unfair for the salesman to make that much.

But I also learned that stifling initiative hurts in a business sense. So I think I’d talk with the person and suggest that they donate some of their income back. I wouldn’t stifle them; I’d let them make their own decision, but I’d suggest that they donate something back. I don’t know whether that would have worked in this case. It’s still a question that I ponder.

Q: Is it a question of living in a spiritual community and deciding how much you would want to get into monetary incentives?

Jyotish: Yes. It’s a debate that’s been carried on over the years at Ananda. Essentially what we’ve done is pay according to need in the community‑owned businesses, and let them make their own decisions in the privately owned businesses. This was, in fact, a privately owned business, but I didn’t think of it that way. I just thought of it as an Ananda business.

Anyway, incense and oils has continued to be a good business for twenty-five years. And then, around 1973, we started a business tying macrame plant hangers, and we found a couple of distributors who developed the sales end while we developed the manufacturing. We had maybe twenty to twenty-five styles of plant hangers that we tied. Some were very simple and sold for a dollar at retail, and some were quite complex and might go for eight or nine dollars.

My father is an architect, and I told him that I needed to build a building for this business, and that I wanted to borrow $500. He laughed and said, “Yes, I’ll loan you $500, but for $500 the only kind of building you’ll have is a hole in the ground with a blanket over it.”

I said, “Well, I think I can do better than that.”

So we poured a slab, which took most of the money, and we made arches of 1” x 4” material and we tied those “cathedral arches” together with a ridge beam and covered it with clear plastic. In the winter it was solar heated, so it was quite comfortable, and in the summer we would roll the plastic ten or twelve feet off the floor and put screening material over the beams, so it was fairly comfortable. Anyway, I got a $500 building that I was really happy with, and I took a picture and sent it to my dad, and he was actually quite impressed.

We carried on there for four or five years, and at the height of the operation we had twelve to fifteen people employed, so it was the major employer in the community, and it was extremely good because it provided a business that the mothers with children could do at home. People who were skilled were earning $6‑7 an hour, which would be the equivalent of $15‑20 today, so it was a very good business.

Unfortunately, the distributors were a little unscrupulous, and unbeknownst to us, they had taken these styles that we’d developed and had gone to the Philippines and found people who would work for a fraction of the cost. So that portion of our business disappeared overnight, and we carried on for awhile, but we were never able to revive the business.

In 1976 a forest fire burned twenty-one of the community’s twenty-three homes, and tremendous energy went into rebuilding, so I was no longer able to manage the community and carry on the business, and I sold it to a couple in the community, essentially for the cost of materials. I saw it as an Ananda business, and a primary means of employment, and I just wanted somebody to operate the business and keep people employed.

Q: Can you talk about your vision? Why would you be out in the country making incense, unless you felt that you were doing something worthwhile?

Jyotish: The vision was that we were here to start a spiritual community, but in order to do that, we had to develop some kind of employment for people. Incense was used for meditation, so it had a connection to our spiritual life. I wouldn’t say that I developed the business from purely spiritual motives, but it was to provide honest employment where devotees could work together.

From the beginning, it was as cooperative as possible, so that whoever worked there on a regular basis was like a partner. Pretty soon, there were two or three other businesses at Ananda Village that we cooperated with in our sales efforts. Some of the women started making candies, and two of the men started a jewelry business, so we could market those products together, and the businesses had a cooperative spirit from the beginning.

Q: Had you decided consciously to realize a better way of doing business?

Jyotish: It was done just to provide a chance for devotees to work together. While we worked together, we would often be chanting, and there was a sweet, simple, joyful feeling about it. It was nice work, in the sense that the people worked harmoniously and cooperatively. One person would be cutting the sticks, and the next person would be laying them out in this little device that held them together, and a third person would be dipping and drying them. It was just a nice sense of camaraderie.

Also, there was a sense of mission. We never worked just to do the business. We were doing the business as a means of surviving at Ananda. The driving force behind it was to provide ways for people to stay here in a spiritual atmosphere year round. I never had a profit motive. In fact, for years I sold the incense at too low a price. Looking back, I realized that someone with a better business sense would have set a higher price and would have marketed it differently. But my philosophy was to provide the best product I could at the lowest possible price, and to employ the maximum number of people I could. So, for some time, I purposely left things relatively inefficient, because more efficiency would have meant fewer jobs. But in retrospect, I think it would have been better to run an efficient operation and use the profits to create another efficient business, rather than have inefficiency built in.

Q: Was there a sense of direction for the business?

Jyotish: There was a sense of a flow of energy. From the time I went out and collected cow pies in the fields, I knew that all you had to do was put out enough energy and the solutions you needed would come. I knew it was foolish to be out there collecting cow pies, but I didn’t know anything better, and I knew that if you put out energy and kept your mind open, you would learn through your actions. All along, there was a sense of grace in the business, and the solutions to problems would always come quickly. If some part of the operation didn’t work, within a day we would come up with a little invention that would make it work.

I’d say there were three factors. One was an energy output without thinking in terms of obstacles, so that whenever a hitch came along your consciousness was always on how to solve it. There was never the thought that something was going to defeat us.

Second was creativity. We always had a sense that whatever came along, we could figure out a creative solution. We were constantly inventing little methods that nobody else had done before. Later, when I told people how we were making the incense, they would shake their heads, because it was totally unconventional. The same was true with the oils. It was fun, in the sense that there were always little problems that required a solution, and there was this wonderful creative flow, this feeling that you could do it, whatever it was.

And then, third, the sense of a higher purpose came into it, with the feeling that we were building Ananda, and that a community wasn’t just an idea, it was a full‑bodied life. You’ve got people who need houses and food and clothing, so you’ve got to have income.

Q: It’s said that the beginning sets the tone. Do you think that happened at Ananda?

Jyotish: I very much think that’s true. The hallmark of Ananda is high energy and high creativity. Swami Kriyananda and Paramhansa Yogananda set the example, and it was there in the roots of the community. I think it’s been an axis around which the community has developed. Unstoppable, energetic creativity.