Q: In Finding Happiness, the movie about Ananda, you described your work as manager of the original Ananda community, and your concern for stewarding the earth’s resources from a spiritual perspective. Can you talk about that, starting with your background? (Photo: 2005)
Atman: I grew up on the East Coast and attended Princeton University where I got a degree in civil engineering. I was interested in energy and environmental issues, and after graduation I worked for a consulting firm in Washington, DC on projects related to energy, sustainability, air pollution, and so on.
At one point, I decided to do something different for a while, and I managed to get a scholarship for graduate study in France, researching environmental energy planning. We happened to be in Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps, so I also spent lots of time skiing and mountain climbing. [Laughs]
I took a year off to travel and then I came back to the US to continue graduate school at UC Berkeley, in an interdisciplinary program on energy and environmental issues.
I was interested in spirituality, and while I was in Europe I had started meditating. A friend in Berkeley introduced me to a Sivananda ashram there, and I got heavily involved in yoga while I finished my master’s and worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on energy demand analysis.
A visitor to our department, Helena Norberg-Hodge, had started the Ladakh Project. Ladakh is a region of India on the Tibetan Plateau, on the far side of the Himalayas. It’s very isolated, and in the early 1960s China invaded, and China and India fought a border war.
The Indians managed to push the Chinese back, and at that point the Indian government decided they should make a stronger claim on Ladakh, so they built a road over the Himalayas through Kashmir. In the seventies they opened it to outsiders, and Helena went there with a National Geographic film crew.
They quickly realized how isolated the people had been, and how rapidly their world was changing, due to the government development projects, the introduction of a western-style school curriculum, and tourism.
Helena learned the Ladakhi language and founded a project to help the people handle all the changes. She recognized that it was an amazingly intact culture with a very strong sense of community, and a strong sense of its spiritual roots in Tibetan Buddhism. It had been a thriving, self-sufficient culture until the outside world came in, and now it was being turned upside down, as people were saying, “You aren’t modern enough. We need to get your kids educated.”
The culture was being broken up, primarily by the government programs. They would do things like try to introduce “green revolution” hybrid seeds and pesticides, even though there weren’t really any pests and the seeds weren’t adapted for growing barley at 12,000 feet elevation. The Ladakhis knew what they were doing for the harsh environment they were in.
After Helena started the project, I went over and tried to help the people understand that everything wasn’t as hunky-dory in the West as they were being led to believe – that baking bread on sheets of asbestos wasn’t all that great an improvement, for example, and that what their kids were learning in the new schools was disruptive to their culture. The kids weren’t even being taught their own language; instead, they were taught three other languages in three different alphabets.
We tried to let people know about the problems in the West: the alienation, the lack of community, and the lack of sustainable ways of doing things. Which isn’t to say that the Ladakhi culture couldn’t be helped, since there was certainly room for material improvements.
I worked on the project for a number of years, and it was from that experience that my wife Bhaktimarg and I became interested in communities. We had seen the benefits of a close-knit community and we’d observed the remarkable joie de vivre of the Ladakhi people.
At one point we thought about starting a community with the directors of the Ladakh project. We even looked for land in Spain, and we visited various communities, but then we found Ananda.
Bhaktimarg had been involved with a Sivananda group in Spain, and we moved to the organization’s ashram in Grass Valley. I discovered Ananda rather serendipitously, at a Whole Life Expo where I’d gone to hear Timothy Leary talk. I missed Leary’s talk, but I found an Ananda brochure lying on the floor, and I said, “We should visit here.” [Laughs] We felt an immediate connection with Ananda, and we started visiting regularly.
I was in a PhD program at the time, writing a dissertation on my experiences in Ladakh, and the contradictions in the sustainable development debate. I felt we needed to challenge certain key assumptions – for example, that the world should follow a western materialistic model for development, without questioning that those materialistic values were causing some of the un‑sustainability in the first place.
I had gotten a grant to write my dissertation, but then I moved to Ananda Village and never finished my thesis.
I initially worked at the meditation retreat and The Expanding Light guest retreat, and then I was asked to serve as village manager, the position I’ve held for twelve years.
Q: Has living at Ananda helped you integrate your interests in sustainability, communities, and the spiritual life?
Atman: Yes. The most important thing, for me, was the search for “ultimate verities,” as Yogananda calls it in Autobiography of a Yogi.
I felt it was a defect of the sustainability movement that it failed to address why people have insatiable desires for material things in the first place. It was assumed that happiness comes from material things, and that we just needed to supply people with these things in ways that wouldn’t damage the planet.
The problem with that view is that, as the spiritual teachings tell us, human desires are insatiable. And at some point, if you’re really going to create sustainability, you have to address that.
Even if you’re driving hybrid cars, there are only a certain number of cars the planet can support. In Finding Happiness Swami Kriyananda remarks that what will help the world is a change in consciousness. We need to start by thinking about what truly makes us happy, what we really need, and the blessings of simple living.
We obviously need to find better ways to live on the planet, and we need to do it quickly. We can’t wait for everybody’s consciousness to change. But it’s important to recognize that we’re living in a society that endlessly promotes the idea that happiness comes from what we own. I believe one of the big contributions Ananda can make to the sustainability debate is that we should ask ourselves, “Where does my happiness really come from?”
Yes, you want to have a life that’s comfortable, and you want to have enough to eat. But do you really need all the things the billboards are pushing at you?
Frankly, our economy depends on people buying a ton of stuff to hold it together. So, obviously, there’s no easy solution.
Ananda Village is not self-sufficient by any stretch of the imagination. We live in the country, but we’re still dependent on the larger economy.
We’re living and working in a small area, so we have less impact, and we’re moving toward growing food and producing energy, but we’re by no means self-sufficient at this point.
I think the real contribution that people can take from Ananda is that you need to question what’s driving your life. The main message of the movie is that happiness comes through your relationships with people, your relationship with God, and by simplifying your life – and that these things will serendipitously do a lot for the planet. In fact, I believe it will do more than simply putting up solar panels, though we need both.
I came to Ananda with a sense of how to create a sustainable community, but when you’re living it on the ground, and not simply spinning pretty theories, the reality begins to hit you.
You discover, for example, that it’s a lot more expensive to build in certain environmentally friendly ways. I ran the solar system and generator at the meditation retreat for a number of years, and it made PG&E look like a bargain. It was expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. We had very low energy consumption, but the energy was very high-priced. It took a lot of effort to keep the solar system going, and we finally ended up using generators and propane. In fact, the environmental impact wasn’t any lower than getting some of our power from the grid. If somebody had proposed to extend PG&E power to the meditation retreat, I’d have jumped at it in a second.
The economics will change in time, to where it will be more economical for people to grow their food and produce more of their power. But for now, we’re living 30 or 40 miles from some of the richest farmland in the country, where the farmers are using cheap labor and industrialized machinery, and it’s hard to compete on price when you’re growing small amounts of organic food.
So we’re trying to find a balance, and we’re trying to prepare for any future changes in the economic system.
Q: Have you found spiritual values that make your life more meaningful?
Atman: That’s an element that I think was missing for me. In Ladakh, the basis of the society is liberation, and the Buddhist beliefs of the culture affect everything. It’s not that everybody is a seeker, but the monasteries play a very active role in the society. For example, the second, third, and fourth sons would go into the monastery, to avoid dividing the family land.
It helped me realize that there’s something missing in the debate about sustainability. The search for sustainability is driven by the consciousness of a society that operates in a materialistic mode, and it keeps recreating itself, so you end up in a vicious circle.
I think we need to get beyond that cycle, and ask what’s important for the individual. Do I want to sit in traffic for two hours a day and commute to a high-rise office where I get paid lots of money and have lots of prestige? What’s the benefit of that? If I have all this money, I can buy houses and cars, but is it making me happy? Lots of people are feeling they’re in a rat race, getting their egos stroked, but it’s not fulfilling.
So I decided to live out here and not make much money, but live in the only way that makes sense to me. For me, the only thing that ultimately makes sense is the search for God, for Self-realization, because when you meditate you discover that the source of happiness is inside, and that the joy we feel in material things is only a reflection.
I can’t say it’s easy, and I can’t say I’m making lots of progress. But if you engage the search for happiness at a deep level, you discover that it’s the only answer. I can’t say the answer is creating a crusade to stop global warming, because there’s as much anger and lack of “sustainable consciousness,” you might say, as in the people they’re fighting.
The connections that life in a community offers can go a long way toward fulfilling people. Living simply in a spiritual community can help people get beyond the material desires that are making them unhappy and pulling the planet apart.
If people aren’t living for higher values, and expanding their awareness, it makes it harder to live in community, even if you’re doing it for all the right reasons, like creating a more sustainable way of life.
In the film, Swami Kriyananda remarks that it’s much more difficult to create a community when God isn’t part of it. You don’t have to call it God – perhaps it’s enough to share an awareness that it’s important to get beyond personal desires and ego.
Every community comes up against the need to deal with interpersonal issues. And if you aren’t cooperating for something higher, if your desires are all about greenhouses and organic gardening but you aren’t transcending your personal attachment to your desires, you’re probably going to clash with other people’s desires, and it will be harder to create harmony.
When I was traveling, I visited North Africa and China, and I realized, “There are no answers here.” Wherever I went, my mind came with me, and I realized it was creating the same patterns of unhappiness and worry wherever I happened to be.
So I learned to meditate, and I learned that happiness isn’t about having lots of outward experiences and going to different places.
I worked in the circles of power in Washington, DC, and I realized, my gosh, these people are full of problems. This senator’s an alcoholic, and so on. And when I considered that these were the people running the country, it was a bit disillusioning. I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had received a very good education, and I could serve the nation in high-powered positions. But I thought, this isn’t going to do it for me. Then I found Ananda and I realized, this is a lot more promising. This is what’s going to change me, and what’s ultimately going to change the world.