When I visited Ananda Village for the first time in 1976, one of the first things I heard Swami Kriyananda say was something I wasn’t really prepared for. He said, “Faith is the most practical thing of all.” (Photo: Hriman in 2019)
When I looked around Ananda Village, I saw a tiny community that had recently experienced a devastating forest fire that had burned twenty-one of its twenty-three dwellings, and I thought, “Well, it may be the only thing, because I’m not sure how practical it is.”
We had no jobs and fewer homes, so about forty of us ended up moving to nearby Nevada City. I asked my father for a loan, and we bought an old fixer-upper house and converted the hundred-year-old garage into a temple that became the first of what we fondly called “the Ananda Garages of the Eternal Religion.”
We began holding regular meditations and, in time, classes and Sunday services. And during that time we also started businesses. I remember walking with Swami Kriyananda around Nevada City, looking for a business that we might buy, and how I had to struggle to keep up with him, even though he was much older.
We ended up not buying a business, but we did start a health food store, and then a gift and clothing store, and we moved our printing press into town and ran a little printing business.
Those were difficult times. I remember talking with Swami Kriyananda about how large a space we should rent for our new café and health food store. Swami said, “I think we should rent three spaces.” Because there were three separate, connected office spaces available to rent. And when Padma and I looked at the budget and saw how little money we had, I said, “I don’t think we can afford three of these spaces.”
But he let it pass, and we went on our way, and we got the business going, but the first few years were a struggle. First we had a fire in the store, and some of our people had to work without wages for a time to keep the place going, flying on faith. And when we were finally able to rent a third space, it was only then that the store at last began to turn a profit.
We couldn’t always match the faith that Swamiji held out to us, but it has been a powerful transformation for us over the years to have nothing and give everything, and to realize that, in truth, it’s the most practical thing of all.
Years later, when Swami Kriyananda asked Padma and me if we would like to go to Seattle and serve there, we saw no reason to hesitate, because of a level of faith that had slowly grown within us.
At dinner last night, Surendra and Tushti Conti and I were talking about the time before they came to Ananda, when they had lived in a beautiful home in Seattle in a fashionable district overlooking the city and the bay. They had started coming to classes, and as an act of faith they had felt inspired to sell their house and move to the much less fashionable town of Lynnwood where the Ananda community is pretty much a fixer-upper, but very beautiful spiritually.
The time eventually came when Surendra and Tushti were invited to come down and manage the Ananda-owned East West Bookshop in Mountain View, California. And when I asked Surendra, “What was that decision like?” he replied, “I knew I’d say yes.” I said, “Would you go back?” He said, “No, because this has been a wonderful experience for my soul, and for me to learn.”
I was born in Monterey, California, and although I was raised Catholic, I always tell my Catholic friends that I’m not a “recovering Catholic.” Because I was very inspired by what I experienced in the church – I wasn’t interested in the theology, but I was touched deeply by the sacredness of communion, and I was blessed to have very devout parents.

The town of Monterey was a sleepy little fishing village at the time, and I was an altar boy at the old mission church of San Carlos with its red-tiled roof.
I went away to high school in Santa Cruz to study for the priesthood at the Oblates of St. Joseph. But as the song of the sixties said, “The times, they are a-changin’.” The school was located across the street from the famous surfing spot known as Steamer Lane, and the bikini-clad girls who came and knocked on our door to use the restroom made it a little difficult to maintain focus.
I ended up at Santa Clara University, where there was another red-tiled chapel. And although my two grown-up children like to think of me as a flower child, I felt more like Forrest Gump. Because, although I sat at the Monterey Pop Festival and listened to Jimmie Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Jefferson Airplane, and I walked down Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love, and I got tear-gassed in Berkeley, through all of it I felt like a spectator.
I was very inspired by the sense of change in the sixties, and the sense of wanting to transcend racial and religious and gender boundaries. But it also was not hard to see that there was a superficial, trivial aspect to all the ferment. Nevertheless, I could feel that there was something deeper in it, and the ferment of the times was bringing hundreds of us to places like Ananda Village.
When you live by faith, and by the whispers of your soul that urge you to give all to a part of yourself that’s greater than you think, the returns are infinitely rewarding. The friendships and all of these things “are added unto you.” And it takes such an act of faith, but we can do it one bit at a time.
I think of the great gift that my children have enjoyed in the Living Wisdom Schools. Surendra and I were comparing notes, and we agreed that when we were children, adults were very distant from us, whether it was the finger-shaking nuns or the Irish priest who was ready to turn us over his knee. And for good reason, I might add, because I was a troublemaker.
Nonetheless, adults were not part of our lives, and one of the great blessings for the children of the Living Wisdom Schools is to have soul-guided adult friendships. I know for a fact that those friendships have played an important role in helping our children become, each in his or her own way, a creative, energetic, courageous human being.
At Ananda Village, years ago, we didn’t have a high school, so the teenagers attended public school in Grass Valley. I remember the year my daughter graduated, and how, of the twenty or thirty students who were honored as valedictorians or received other awards, something like twelve were from Ananda Village, out of more than 2000 children at the school.

Surendra and Tushti were good friends with a couple who’d taken meditation classes at Ananda Seattle together. And, like them, Cliff and Willow had a beautiful home on Puget Sound, but had been touched by the whispers of faith to expand their sense of who they were into something greater for God. So they also made the move across the water to the humble Ananda community in Lynnwood.
They had originally moved to Seattle because Cliff and a good friend were engineers, and they wanted to devise a way for people with severe disabilities to communicate more efficiently by tapping on some kind of device. Cell phones had just been invented and were spreading like wildfire, and the invention that Cliff and his partner came up with has swept the world.

As a result of that invention, which was driven not by money but by creativity and a desire to help others, the Seattle Ananda Sangha will soon be able to start building a meditation temple that will be modeled after the Ananda Europa Temple of Light in Assisi, Italy.
Many years ago as a young man, I traveled overland from Europe to India in search of myself and that greater reality. But I thought I could have my cake and eat it, too, so I had my Porsches, and I would come home and meditate, but that life couldn’t satisfy me. And I thank God that I eventually sold it all and went off to India. But I realized that I couldn’t find there what I couldn’t find in my own heart. And it was upon my return that I had a conviction, and an intuitive knowing and acceptance, that I would have to enter a sangha, a spiritual family, and give myself to something greater than I was, not just inwardly but outwardly. And that’s when the transformation came. I found Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, and I was introduced to that book by Padma, who would become my wife.
It was all “added unto me,” and I, along with thousands of others, have made those little steps, following acts of faith. I cannot think of a more sensible – practical! – creative and joy-filled way of life.