Conversations With Ananda — Ch. 28, Nayaswami Arjuna

Arjuna, Sudarshan, and Jaya discuss the next step in construction of The Expanding Light guest retreat at Ananda Village, 1980.  At Ananda, the members play an active role with real responsibilities for helping spread the Master’s liberating teachings of Self-realization. Click photo for larger view.

 Arjuna played a key role in Ananda’s growth beginning in the early mid-1970s when he started Ananda Construction, a company that provided a living for many of the community’s families.

Q: Can you talk a little about how you got started in business?

Arjuna: I don’t really consider myself a businessman. I studied philosophy and literature in college, but I eventually realized that philosophy as it was taught in college wasn’t for me, because it was way too dry. I was interested in spiritual things, but it was a long time before I learned of Ananda, and I was pursuing other paths at the time.

After college I did some construction work and eventually went to construction school to get my contractor’s license. I thought, “As long as I’m here, I might as well try to get my electrical, painting, and plumbing licenses, too.” So I turned in the application, and a couple of weeks later the licenses came in the mail. The people at the school were saying, “It’s unbelievable. This has never happened before.” Because I hadn’t learned a thing about those trades, and it was obviously a bureaucratic mistake. But because I had the licenses, two men on our construction crew, Narada Agee and Muktan Knowles, were able to get their licenses as electricians and establish a successful electrical contracting business that provided a livelihood for a number of families at Ananda.

Q: How did you hear about Ananda?

Arjuna: I was living in Los Angeles. I was dissatisfied with the Catholic Church, and I was looking into Hare Krishna, early Christianity, and Buddhism. The brother of a high school friend of mine was working in the printing department of Ananda Publications – this was 1973. My friend said, “The Ananda community is building temples,” and I was immediately interested, because I think I was born with a desire to build temples.

I didn’t know anything about Swami Kriyananda, but I did know of Paramhansa Yogananda, because I’d taken Kriya Yoga initiation.

I visited Ananda Village and immediately felt at home, even though there were still broken-down cars sitting in front of the village market.

I moved to Ananda in 1974 and quickly realized that I wasn’t satisfied with the maintenance construction work I’d been doing. I realized that I wanted to build, and before long a group of us from Ananda began going out and building houses.

The first job I had was building my parents’ home, and I realized right away that this was a great way to work, as well as a wonderful way to provide the men in the community with employment. So I plunged in.

I wasn’t any great shakes as a businessman. I would make $10,000 on a job and lose it on the next one, but I always paid the bills, and I enjoyed building. We eventually built the first temple at The Expanding Light, as well as Swami Kriyananda’s home and lots of houses at Ananda. So it was a valuable service, at a time when the community was growing, in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Q: I seem to recall that you built twenty-three houses outside the Ananda community.

Arjuna: That’s probably about right. We did a lot of work at Sea Ranch, a development on the Mendocino Coast, and we worked at two subdivisions near Nevada City, Alta Sierra and Lake of the Pines.

We started the construction company in 1976, and we built houses for about eight years until Shivani and I moved to Italy in October, 1985. I’d gotten tired of doing construction, and I wanted to try something else. But the construction experience was valuable for me and for the fellows who needed jobs.

Q: How many people worked for Ananda Construction?

Arjuna in the late 1970s, when he founded Ananda Construction to help support the families at Ananda Village.

Arjuna: I think we had about eighteen at most. I wouldn’t say that any of us were great carpenters. [Laughs.] It was the usual Ananda experience – there’s something that needs doing, so you get out there and teach yourself to do it, and that’s how you get it done.

Q: You say none of you were great shakes as carpenters, but I remember that a distinguishing feature of the houses you built was that they were always of very high quality, and that you never skimped or cut corners.

Arjuna: Yes, we did it right. It’s not as if the houses would fall over. What I mean is that in the normal course of things you would go through a step-by-step process of learning a skill, but we didn’t have time for that, so we just threw ourselves into building. I had some skills, and many of the guys did, and we did a good job. Roy Gugliotta and Tim Kretzmann, our cabinetmakers, did very fine work. We started the cabinet shop as part of Ananda Construction so we could build the cabinets for our houses, then Roy and Tim took over and began subcontracting to other companies with great success.

Q: Another thing I remember hearing was that you had excellent relationships with your clients. I also remember hearing it was because the men on your crews had a good attitude.

Arjuna: Yes, if anything I think we probably devoted too much effort to making things beautiful. Our clients quickly realized that we weren’t just trying to get in and out as fast as possible. In fact, we would routinely give them more than the plans called for, and that’s probably one of the reasons we didn’t make lots of money. But I was able to pay the bills, and I even got to take a vacation in Hawaii. Looking back, I might be tempted to say “I should have done this and that.” But it was a joy to build really nice, good-looking houses.

Q: Did Swami Kriyananda offer the builders his advice? Did he talk to you about doing business?

Arjuna: Never. I think he was all in favor of getting the energy going, but I never asked him, “Gee, Swami, should I go out and do business?” I think he was certainly in favor of it, because we were employing lots of people in the community. At Ananda Village in the mid-1970s there were essentially just four ways to make a living: the garden, the publishing business, the retreat, or Ananda Construction. So there weren’t a lot of options.

I probably should have asked him about it. [Laughs.] But I have an impulsive nature, so I just threw myself into it. It was both a desire and a need. I enjoyed building, and I realized the community needed another business. After two or three years, Ananda received a donation of $100,000 to help build a temple at The Expanding Light, and the experience of building ten or twelve houses by that time had developed the skills we needed to do the job.

Q: I remember visiting several Ananda Construction sites and noticing that you would put down your tools and meditate before lunch.

Arjuna: We definitely tried to keep our sadhana alive, and we tried to be as spiritual as we could, balanced with trying not to lose money. I had realized that some people would take advantage of you if you were too easy, so I had to be down-to-earth, too.

Q: When you moved to Italy, what was the transition like?

Arjuna: I had a very interesting experience. I had started selling my tools, and I told Swami, “I’m tired of doing construction – what should I do?” He said, “Well, why don’t you go to Italy?” And I thought, “That’s a strange idea!” [Laughs.] But then I thought, “Well, we’ll give it a year.”

So I was selling my tools, and at one point I thought, “I guess I won’t be doing construction anymore.” And I immediately felt a powerful “No!” in my heart. It was a very strong intuition. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. There must be some more construction in my future.”

When we arrived in Italy, the Ananda center was located in Como. Later, we moved it to Assisi, but while we were still in Como we started a business selling meditation cushions, yoga mats, and meditation benches. Here at the Ananda center in Assisi, our company is still sending thousands of yoga mats and cushions all over Europe, so it’s been a very fine business for us. But when we began planning a new temple in Assisi, my experience with building came to the fore.

Ananda Construction built 27 homes in subdivisions in California’s Gold Country, including this one at Lake Wildwood just north of Auburn. The company developed a reputation for exceptional craftsmanship, honesty, and excellent attitude and behavior on the job (no beer, no swearing!). Click to enlarge.

Building the temple in Assisi was a huge challenge, because it required construction techniques that were unfamiliar to me, and there was no one who knew more than I did. So I had to teach myself all over again. But I would never have been able to build the temple if it hadn’t been for the experience of building homes in California

When I saw Rama’s beautiful design, I realized that it would be a truly stunning temple, and I was eager to do it, even though it would be hard. Like most things, it had its problems as well as its beauty. For one thing, I didn’t know anything about building with reinforced concrete, and I didn’t know how to make concrete walls. I also didn’t know how to read plans in Italian, so I had to spend lots of time studying at night.

I not only had to figure out the construction techniques, I had to keep the work going and teach the other fellows to build. Fortunately, we had good, willing fellows – like Steve Osborne, for example. He was a wonderful boy, although he didn’t know much about being on-level and straight in construction. But they gave their all.

I remember Matthew Sloan, who came over from England when he was nineteen. Matthew didn’t know left from right about construction, but in our devotee world things are a little different. Matthew loved God, and he meditated, and he really, really loved what was happening, so he threw himself into it. That’s the fun of construction, too – it’s learning together, and it all worked out. In fact, it was yet another Ananda success story, and a perfect illustration of our motto, which Swami Kriyananda expressed in a song he wrote, “Many Hands Make a Miracle.”

Q: Was the temple built with volunteer labor?

Arjuna: We had lots of volunteers. At one point we counted them and found that over twenty countries were represented. We had people from Russia, Croatia, Germany, Switzerland, England, France, and many Americans who came over and helped for a short while. When we built Swami’s house, another group of volunteers came over.

As I said earlier, I did as well as I could, but I certainly could have been a better businessman. I did it because it was the right thing to do, and in that respect, I had a similar experience when we began selling our products at crafts fairs.

We attended a wonderful fair in Bologna in 1993, where we found we were the only people selling “new age” products such as Swami Kriyananda’s music, and yoga mats and cushions. We did fairly well – we made around $9000. The Bologna fair has grown tremendously, and this year we made about $25-30,000 in four days. I think our success has been based on the principle of tuning into what’s “trying to happen.”

I’m reminded of the time when Swami Kriyananda began composing Irish music, and how it shortly thereafter became popular all over the world. What we’ve done with our businesses is similar – you do what’s trying to happen and what needs to be done, and you try to attune yourself to the best way of doing it. You tune into your pluses and minuses as a manager, and you fill the gaps with capable people.

I’ve always seen the businesses as a means of contributing to Paramhansa Yogananda’s work, whether by keeping our people fed, or by publishing Yogananda’s and Swami Kriyananda’s books and lectures and music, and letting people know they can come to Ananda to learn about this way of life.

Q: In your life at Ananda, you’ve always held positions of responsibility. Do you think meditation has helped you stay balanced?

Arjuna: I like doing construction because it’s very grounding – you have to be very focused. I’ve always used business, whether it was going to fairs or building houses, to focus my mind. Hitting the nail on the head, not letting your mind wander, concentrating in the moment. Even if I was just stuffing a meditation cushion, I realized I could use that as a tool to help me stay focused.

When I was studying Italian, I realized that if I focused my mind as well as I possibly could, I would have a better meditation afterward. I realized that if my mind was unfocused during the day, I wouldn’t be able to meditate as well at night, and I wouldn’t feel the inspiration to go ahead with my work. So I used outward activity as a tool to help me go inward.

I sometimes had clients who forced me to meditate deeply. I remember a client who was crying because she was so disappointed that a subcontractor had put the stones in the wrong place in the fireplace in her new home. People put everything they’ve saved up for decades into a new home, and it means a lot to them. I would sometimes find myself having to try to help them understand that not everything can be perfect.

Meditation and the spiritual life can also help by giving you discrimination. I would sometimes know with perfect clarity “This isn’t going to be a good client.” I would know it for a certainty – “I’d better not take this job.” Intuition is one of the best qualities you can have when you’re running a business.

Q: What’s your present role in the Ananda businesses in Italy?

Arjuna: I no longer do any business personally. I built the temple and Swami’s house, but those were really just Ananda projects, not businesses. My life has two main aspects now. One is Ananda Europa, our retreat center, which I guess you could look on as a business. There are about fifty people on the staff, and about forty of them work for the retreat. We’ve been very busy, because we’ve had more than a hundred guests continually from May through October.

Here in Italy, it’s easy to share Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings. I read recently that just one in three Italians is a practicing Catholic, and that the other two-thirds either aren’t Catholic or they’re looking for something else. Ananda is very well known and respected here in Italy. In fact, I read recently that Autobiography of a Yogi is the number-one book on the spiritual reading list in this country. Swami Kriyananda has said that Italy is a stepping-stone between India and the West. What I understood him to mean is that there’s a certain natural love for God in this culture.

I can be talking casually to someone here in Italy, and I can always feel free to say, “We meditate and we pray.” Whereas in America they would probably think you were trying to convert them. Here, you can talk about it – and they’ll shake their head and say, “Ma, si, it’s an important thing.” Because it’s closer to the heart of the culture. In fact, there’s a new wave in Italy, of people who are looking for a spiritual experience that will change their lives.

The Co-Op where we make the meditation cushions and other yoga products has about ten or twelve employees. It’s a very good business. We’re also selling natural oils, incense, jewelry, and Feng Shui products, such as fountains and lamps. The Co-Op provides employment, and money for our ministers to travel to countries where the local devotees can’t afford to pay our expenses, like Russia and Croatia.

The staff members have a choice of living in the community and receiving room and board plus about $125 a month for extras, or they can earn a wage and live on the outside. Many of the householders have decided to do that, because if they have a child it lets them earn a bit more money. The Co-Op is a bit like the construction company in the early days of Ananda Village, providing people with a more or less normal wage.

Some of the younger men have bought old houses and fixed them up. Tim Warnock came over here to help build the temple, and then he stayed on. He and Vanna got married and bought an old place, and he tore it down and rebuilt it, teaching himself to build in the process. It’s a very nice-looking house, and he and several other men are now doing remodeling jobs, and doing very well.

We were trying to figure out how to keep the energy as focused as possible within an ashram environment, while giving the best support we could to the families. And the thought came of having small groups of subsidiary housing units, individually owned and located near Ananda. Swami Kriyananda supported the idea. Tim is a good example of that. He owns about thirty acres together with two or three other people, and they’re planning to build five or six small houses. So you don’t always have to be thinking “How can we supply homes for the householders?” This way, it’s decentralized.

Q: Over the years you’ve had lots of irons in the fire.

Arjuna: I have the kind of personality that likes to be looking over the next hill. At the beginning of a work such as ours, I think it takes that kind of energy. In another ten years I can see where the Ananda center will be very different. It’s fun to be part of the creative process, but it takes all three types of energy to run a spiritual work. It takes Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva types – the creator, the maintainer, and the transformer.

Nayaswamis Shivani and Arjuna in India, 2015.

You need the kind of person who goes out and creates new projects, and then you need someone who can hold it together and run it. That’s Anand and Kirtani who run our retreat and have tons of common sense. If Shivani and I were to go on the road and start telling people “Go to Ananda,” but the energy wasn’t stable and strong when you arrived, you wouldn’t have a very good experience. So it takes good managers to keep the inspiration and energy strong.

You need all three types to make a community. Sometimes you need someone who can say “We don’t need this anymore. Let’s tear it down!” – the Shiva type who can say “Let’s get rid of it!” [Laughs.]

Q: Many people in business at Ananda have told me, as you have, that they don’t think of themselves as business people.

Arjuna: I suppose that being a “business person” doesn’t necessarily mean that you come out in the end with tons of money. I suppose it should mean that you grow. Is your character growing? Are you becoming a stronger person? Is it helping you become a better person? You don’t want to lose money, even if you’re just viewing business as a path to personal growth, so you still need common sense and discrimination. It’s not only all about love and compassion; it’s also about living in the physical world. But there are lots of inner principles that you can develop through your business experiences.

Q: Paramhansa Yogananda said that people who are successful in business can make rapid progress if they turn their attention to the spiritual path, because of the energy and concentration they’ve developed.

Arjuna: When you go through these experiences, you realize that it’s true in any line, if you can incorporate the same principles of achieving success. Whether you’re a housewife or you’re doing construction, it develops you. You use it the best way you can, and you struggle to overcome the difficulties, and it keeps you moving ahead spiritually.

Q: Has it been spiritually fulfilling for you?

Arjuna: Oh, absolutely. It isn’t as if construction was thrust upon me. I wasn’t happy doing maintenance and I wanted something more, and because I was living in a spiritual community, I tried to spiritualize it.

You can burn up your desires in meditation, or you can spiritualize them through expansive action. Whatever it is – having children, being a businessman, whatever your calling may be – if you go ahead and achieve it and spiritualize it, then, sure, you’re going to grow. And if you don’t spiritualize it, you may end up regretting the decisions you made. “Why didn’t I make a million dollars before I was forty?”

Looking back, I can see that at each step of the way, everything I did helped me to grow spiritually, even the mistakes. The mistakes helped me realize, “Okay, I need to be more balanced.” Because if I lost money, I’d have to build more houses before I was even again. So I realized I had to be very grounded.

For my personality, I think it was a very good experience. Of course, I like making beautiful things, and I particularly like construction because it’s making something that lasts. Building temples is inspiring, because people will meditate and pray there for many years.

Q: When your crew were putting in the floor joists for The Expanding Light temple, the word got around that you were building them to last at least four hundred years.

Arjuna: The buildings are very strong. I like building much stronger than the plans call for. I’ve come to appreciate the way the Europeans build. There are buildings in Italy that have been standing for two thousand years.

Q: You were talking earlier about Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva: the initiator, sustainer, and transformer. Can you talk a little more about that?

Arjuna: I said to Oliver, “The items that are selling well for us are fountains and mineral lamps, but in a year that fad will be over.” Shivani and I were staying in a hotel, and they were discussing Feng Shui on CNN. If it’s on CNN, you know it’s getting near the end of its cycle as a popular fad, but at least people are wanting to make their environment more peaceful.

There are lots of websites now that deal with simplicity, but it all comes back to having an inner life. If you’re surrounded by crystals but you don’t have any harmony inside, you’ve still got a lot of work to do. If you do the inner work first, then Feng Shui will help you. Shivani did some Feng Shui things in our home, and I like it a lot, but honestly, if you don’t have a good meditation in the morning, you could be surrounded by enlightened masters and you still wouldn’t feel very good.

Swami gave a talk on simplicity where he related it to inner harmony. Most people here in the West have too many options – we have palm readers, Feng Shui, and so many things you think you might need but that just eat up your time. How can you make your life simple? It comes down to inner principles. You need to know when the Shiva energy is coming along and be able to say “This is leaving.” And you need to learn to discriminate and realize “The startup Brahma energy of three years ago, and the sustaining Vishnu energy that followed, are over. It’s time for Shiva, time to intuit what’s appropriate for the next phase of the business.”

Q: People seem to be tiring of “success programs” that ask you to rearrange your mental furniture, instead of showing you how to go deep inside and discover peace and inspiration there.

The Ananda Tempio di Luce in its forest setting. Arjuna led construction, which included volunteer carpenters, craftsmen, and workers from around the world.

Arjuna: Well, there it is. They lack the soul aspect. When you’re running a business, there has to be a soul, because if there’s only a mind and a body, you get tired of it after a while.

Q: It can be hard to imagine that God, the sustainer of a billion galaxies, cares about our little lives. But if these conversations prove anything, it’s that He does. As Swami Kriyananda said in his book Out of the Labyrinth, God is infinite, but He’s also infinitesimal.

Arjuna: I can see very well how, in my business life, my strengths were the business’s strengths, and my weaknesses were the business’s weaknesses. If I had a good meditation, it affected the business. I’m sure that any manager at Ananda would say the same thing. A business reflects who the manager is, with all their strengths and weaknesses.

Q: The managers I’ve spoken with seem to be saying that if you put the soul in charge, it can take your human faculties, even if they’re deficient in some respects, and make the most of them, either by working around those weaknesses, or finding someone to help, or helping you to become stronger.

Arjuna: It’s true. The power of meditation is that you tend to have somewhat the attitude of a renunciate. You do as well as you can, but you’re able to take a step back from the results.

Twenty years ago here in Italy, we started a business selling little flowers embedded in resin. We laugh about it now because it was so simple, but it was taking the right step along the way. You really have to be able to step back and say, “We’re doing as well as we can.” And if you make money or you don’t make money, you have to be able to let it go in an outward sense. Inwardly, I think you’ll always be successful if you can have the soul quality, because you have to be slightly unattached, or what will happen? You’re a big success now, but if you fail you won’t be able to deal with it.

You need to cultivate an inner equilibrium, so that when some big triumph comes, you’re somewhat balanced. Of course you’re happy, but when failure comes, will you lose it all? If you go bankrupt, will you jump out of the window? Where is your balance point? Is it out there in the world? Is it out there in your business? Or is it within yourself? I think that as a business person, you need to ask, “What’s important for me? Where is my balance point?” If you have that inner equilibrium, then whether you win or lose, it will be somewhat secondary to how well you’ve played the game.

Not that you don’t want to win, or that you don’t want to make money, but if circumstances or your karma turn against you, how will you deal with it? Will you be able to deal with it appropriately? A lot of people can’t, because they don’t know how.

 

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