It’s been over five years since I moved to Ananda Village. In 2001, when my wife and I had decided to move here, we also had to figure out our job situation.

She was a nurse back then and it wasn’t hard for her to find a similar job in Grass Valley. I was (and still am) a Software Engineer and I knew that there weren’t too many high-tech companies in the area. But, I knew that I could telecommute as long as I managed to get a decent connection to the Internet. When I talked to my boss about six years ago and told her that I was going to move to Northern California, I also told her that I would have understood if the company didn’t want to keep me if it thought the remote arrangement would not work. I told her I wouldn’t have any hard feelings if they had to let me go. Lucky for me, she was very supportive, especially when I mentioned that I was moving into a yogic community. She also told me that she has been meditating for 20 years, which she had not mentioned before.

A few months before our move to Ananda Village, I started exchanging some emails with Kent Williams about my options for connecting to the Internet. Dial-up and satellite were the only two. I knew that the dial-up link would not be sufficient to be able to effectively perform my duties. It would have worked perhaps as a backup if the other link went down. So, I started investigating the satellite option. That wasn’t ideal either, because it wouldn’t have allowed me for a “real-time” connection due to delays of satellite links.

During one of my visits to Expanding Light in late 2001, Kent introduced me to Ric, who runs Ananda Bell. During that visit I found out that Ananda Village operated its own phone company. Apparently, many years ago Ananda Village had purchased a phone switch, much like one that might be used by a large corporation for their office buildings. With the purchase of this switch along with some business arrangements with the phone company, the phone lines within the village boundary had also became the property of Ananda Village. I don’t think anybody (except Master) probably knew that this was a major milestone in Ananda’s broadband Internet history. Without the existence of this switch and the ownership of these landlines, it would not have been possible for us to have DSL service.

During my discussions with Kent and Ric, I realized that the very products that my company sells could also be used to bring DSL service to this community. There were many details to iron out but suffice it to say that in April 2002, with an additional T1 line that was brought to Ananda Village by SBC/PacBell (now AT&T), we were able to start a pilot DSL service to a handful of “beta” customers. During the past five years, that number has grown to over a hundred DSL connections serving not only the entire community of over 200 people, but also some of our neighbors who are able to receive Internet service through Ananda Bell with the use of line-of-sight radios and antennae.

It is not common for a rural community to have this sort of fortune, as high-speed internet access is typically not possible without expensive investment (satellite links and such) for individual homes. Ananda Village residents, however, can enjoy decent Internet access for as little as $15/month.

Looking back and reflecting on the sequence of events that led to this fortune, I can’t help but think that Master must have influenced the minds of the decision makers in the village at the time to steer them toward the direction of purchasing this phone switch knowing that one day the DSL technology would become available and would enable us to provide DSL service through our ownership of the copper lines. I am grateful to Master for giving me the opportunity to serve in this manner and for giving me the ability to play some role in these sequence of events.

I have to say that one of the greatest blessings of my life has been working with Treasures Along the Path talk-of-the- month club, featuring a collection of archival talks by Swami Kriyananda.

It was originally founded in 1998 by Daya Taylor, an Ananda member who since moved to India to help our work there, as a way to make vast amount of archived spiritual material available to our Ananda family.

Literally thousands of hours of recordings from the early years of Ananda – classes, Sunday Services, stories of Swamiji’s life with Paramhansa Yogananda, radio programs, and a great deal of other material, was sitting in storage, with very few people having access to it.

Treasures Along the Path became a way to open those archives and distribute the precious “gems” to many souls. This has proven to be an invaluable resource for many devotees, especially those who don’t live in or near an Ananda community. It has also been extremely beneficial for those who do live in an Ananda community, since it brings to life Yogananda’s teachings.

When I first started at Treasures, I had absolutely no experience with sound recording or digital world. It has been a great learning experience in so many ways and on so many levels: physically, emotionally and spiritually! I learned to accept my limitations and more importantly, to push past them.

Treasures produces cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s. I send the cassettes out to be made elsewhere, but the CDs, MP3s, and all graphic material are made here, by me.

Over the years, Treasures has evolved to include 400 members in U.S. and 14 other countries. All proceeds from it go to fund Ananda’s growing work in India. We were able to send $10,000 in 2004 - 05 each, and in 2006, we sent $14,000.

Basically, my “job” is to listen to tapes of Swamiji’s and decide which one to make into a Treasure. How do I decide? Partly by adding variety to what has been produced so far, and partly by tuning into what’s happening in the world at the time.

I am always amazed that when I listen to the talks, I somehow just know “this is the one.”

One of the recently sent out talks was “Building Spiritual Power in Troubled Times.” It was a lecture given by Swami Kriyananda in 1979, and it is still amazingly relevant to what’s happening in the world today.

He describes how the fear and anxiety prevalent in the world come from people not abiding by the laws of the universe. He then gives valuable counsel on how to live more from our inner center and as a result, naturally radiate love and joy to our troubled planet.

Probably the most challenging parts of my job is writing the description about that month’s talk. And yet, the process of really going deep into the talk in order to do that, has been life-changing for me. I have to really understand what Swamiji is saying in order to describe it to others.

When I am trying to come up with what to write about a particular talk, it seems like Divine Mother always tests me in some way, giving me the opportunity to put these teachings into actual practice. It truly has been a great blessing!

I feel I have grown closer to my true Self, discovering who I really am, through the guidance and inspiration I receive through these talks. As one Treasures member put it, “Treasures has been my salvation.”

Somehow just listening to Swamiji’s voice is comforting and reassuring. There is a powerful vibration that is conveyed through his voice that awakens the higher self and a desire to act more from that place.

It is a joy and great blessing for me to share these “treasures” with anyone who wants them. Please feel free to contact me for more information on these life-changing “gems.”

In Divine Friendship and Love,

Melody Veenhof

Cecilia Patitucci

I would like to tell you something of the businesses we are establishing in India. This is an interview with Cecilia Patitucci, an Ananda member of many years from our center in Assisi, Italy.

She came to India as part of the first wave of Westerners with Swami Kriyananda in 2003-04, and has been part of Ananda India community ever since.

Cecilia is a person of great warmth, sophisticated sense of fashion, and a marvelous Italian charm, difficult to convey in print. Her story is fascinating.

Jaya:
You have started a clothing business in India. How did this come about?

Cecilia:
Swami Kriyananda asked me if I would start a business with “khadi,” a fabric handwoven with the “charkha,” the spinning wheel.

When you see a flag of India, in the center you see the charkha, a great symbol of Indian independence, and one of the tools of revolution used by Gandhi. It was through the silent revolution of the charkha that Gandhi was able to call the people of India back to their historic roots of hand-weaving fabrics rather than having them imported from England.

Cecilia’s Boutique

Khadi holds a big symbol in the hearts of Indians, but it is something that has been forgotten because khadi is now considered a poor fabric, reminding people of past times of poverty.

Swamiji had the idea of using khadi because he has good friends involved in the khadi movement.
I met these people and through them, I began to study.

The word “khadi” has the same roots as “kare,” which means “making.” Khadi is about making — “handmade.” I started studying these fabrics, especially cottons, but also silks, and was inspired to create a line of clothing called the “Ananda India Yoga Line.”

These would be very simple clothes inspired by the Indian dress you see on the street: a simple kurta, which is a shirt with very few buttons and simple trousers, westernized to be more easily worn. I created a line for men and for women, both in cotton and in silk, and started to promote these in Italy through our cooperative at Ananda Assisi where it was well received. Soon after, I began to learn about organic cotton.

When you enter into the khadi world, you not only meet people interested in helping weavers and spinners in the villages but also people interested in the environment.

Organic cottons are those that are grown without the use of pesticides and without the use of chemical fertilizers. I started to meet these kinds of people, and a new world opened up for me. I wanted to work with organic cottons in order to create a yoga collection that would be extremely contemporary.

Organic cotton is grown and dyed without chemicals. The white fabrics are the result of soaking in water, soaps and other natural elements and then exposing them to the sun. The cotton is grown in Madhya Pradesh, in central India, and the fabric is dyed in Gujarat, the land of Gandhi.

I wanted to use vegetable dyes, and learned how to use these in the organic cottons, but found that not every dye is good. Some colors burn the organic cotton, so I am still in the process of learning about this. We have presented these fabrics in Italy and they have been very well received.

Then another world popped up into my life. This was the world of “ahimsa” silk. Ahimsa silk is obtained without killing the worms inside the cocoons so that they can become butterflies. It is a silk traditionally grown for yogis because yogis use silk for its vibration, and ahimsa silk, meaning “non-violence,” is a pure vibration fabric.

Many Jains (a religious sect) cultivate ahimsa silk in India. I met a Jain man who produces this ahimsa silk in a very poor region of India called Jarkhand, a place in Bihar. It is called Jarkhand because 60% of their land is covered with forest and “jarkhand” means “land of the forest.” This land of Jarkhand has many, many trees where this friend of mine started a social work 15 years ago to gather poor women together to harvest silk cocoons.

If you help the village women, you help the trees, because the trees are needed by these women to make their living out of the silk cocoons. They are not boiled, these cocoons, or suffocated by a heating process. They allow the worm to develop naturally into a butterfly. This means you cannot reel a thread out of the cocoon as is normally done in silk production to produce a perfect, unbroken thread. You have to keep the cocoon intact so the thread will be a little thicker, not perfect, but it will have the vibrations of ahimsa.

This story or helping women, helping the trees, and helping the environment, inspired me to make a new product — ahimsa silk-covered cushions for meditation and ahimsa silk-covered cushions for the neck. These two products were marketed successfully in Italy.

I developed a fabric without color, using the color of the silk as it comes out of the cocoon, and for another product I used the blue color of indigo, discovered in India thousands of years ago. Indigo is called this in the West because it was coming from India and it became the first widely used blue dye in the world.

In yoga, blue is symbolic because it is the color of the sky and the color of Krishna, making it perfect for the meditation and yoga. Ananda India now has a business called “Anjali Khadi Clothing.” I gave the company the name“Anjali” because in Sanskrit anjali is the act of offering something to the altar, and this company is an offering to God. “Anjali Khadi Clothing of Ananda Sangha India” develops the different lines of products.

Ananda India Yoga Line is the khadi clothing made of silk and cotton. Lotus Bio is the product line made from organic cotton. The products for meditation using ahimsa silk are called Ahimsa.

Each of these products comes with a beautifully designed tag showing an open lotus and the symbol of Ananda Sangha. We include the story of the product, a history of the fabric and where it is from. Customers see that there are people from several religions working together — Jain people, Muslim people, Hindus all working together.

I also include with each product quotations from Gandhi and Yogananda, because Gandhi saw khadi as a symbol of simplicity, purity, sincerity, calmness, and of love. He wanted to create a symbol of these qualities for everybody through khadi. This is a fabric bridge of love and peace between East and West. A bridge of qualities, the essence of India, passes through the fabric and comes to the West.

Jaya:
It sounds like a great adventure. What have been your obstacles?

Cecilia:
It has been an adventure begun with enormous obstacles, continued with enormous obstacles, and still faces obstacles every hour.

The big thing has been the transformation of my person into the symbolism of these fabrics. The obstacles were many but they showed me how to expand my heart to face them.

I’ve had to do business with people who have a very different way of dealing with other people, a different way of dealing with work, different way of dealing with loyalty, sincerity, commitment, punctuality, and honesty.

All these things made my journey extremely difficult, but I discovered there was only one thing which could be transformed, and that was myself. I realized that just as it was so immensely difficult to have this fabric cleaned, cut the way I wanted, stitched as I wanted, or altered when it had been cut wrong, I understood that it was all just a symbol of what God is doing with each one of us.

I wanted my clothes to fit perfectly, so God wants us to perfectly fit our true nature. He has to cut us many times because we are never perfect the first time. Then He has to stitch us to make the perfect dress out of us. And the stitching is painful and it has to be done many times before becoming a perfect cloth. Then He has to clean us one, two, three times because this perfect fabric, cut and stitched, is full of spots. Then He has to iron us.

The process of making clothes out of fabric is simply a symbol of how we have to become something beautiful for God. Clean but simple, sincere, peaceful.

Jaya:
What have you learned that you didn’t anticipate?

Cecilia:
First of all, you learn about your own mind.

You learn how you thought you were in peace, but discover you were not. I thought I had reached a point of joy and inner peace because I was coming to India every year for two months, going to all the spots of pilgrimage with a big inner joy, doing my sadhana (spiritual practices) and meditation, and loving India to the tips of my fingers

And then one day I began to see how my mind was agitated, how calmness was not there at all, how upset I could become with other people.

Before, I thought I was the biggest lover of people in the world. I had always been able to get through any experience just with love. Now I began to see how peace was not in my heart, how I was attached to events happening in a certain way, and how I was completely dependent on external situations in order to be happy, peaceful, and joyful.

I was completely dependent on how other people behaved in order for me to love them.

I came to see that there was a big work to do in expanding my heart and calming my mind.

Jaya:
So, what did you do?

Cecilia:
I went deeper into meditation, especially becoming regular in the Aum Technique in order to hear the true sound of everything. I had to go back to Aum to get beyond the noise I was hearing every day in those noisy, burning factories with 47C, 50C degrees temperature, no fans working, all kinds of people coming, going, shouting.

I deepened my meditations because I realized that I was many times on the edge of madness, both from the craziness of the situation, of everyday fighting to have things done, and because of the incredible environment of heat.

The heat was impossible. The first time I came was in summer and it was 47 C (117 F) degrees. The external environment was extremely difficult and the internal environment began to burn my mind and my heart. I realized through this experience that I had a big job to do inside.

Jaya:
You mention the Aum Technique. What else did you do?

Cecilia:
Meditation, Kriya Yoga, the Aum technique, prayer, and never giving up.

At the beginning, when I came to India, around Swamiji there was an enormous flow of energy poring out of him. Enormous! There was a wave of Master (Paramhansa Yogananda) coming through him needed to break the ice, or maybe I should say “fire” in such a country as this.

Being with him meant having all this karma coming up for each of us and we couldn’t be indulgent. We could not take care of only ourselves because we had a job to do every day. I could not say “No.” Without affirmations and prayers I couldn’t make it. Everyday was a fight.

It was difficult just getting out of the door. Taxis were constantly late, one hour to an hour and a half, or not coming at all, with drivers not understanding English, and us not speaking their language and getting lost. So many tears and feelings of desperation! You can only make it if it occurs to you that there is only one thing worth it, to liberate yourself. There is only one purpose for which we are here — to get free.

I have given my life to the Kriya Yoga path and I have been able to contribute with money, so this path has been my only purpose and I never gave up. Through the money that has come through this business, we have been able to publish Swamiji’s Essence of the Bhagavad Gita. We were able to do this entirely from India without other money from elsewhere. We paid for all the printing. But it has not been easy.

I learned a big lesson. It was not me that worked. That was a lesson that Swamiji helped me to understand. “Cecilia, here there is a big lesson for you. Ego! You have to learn that it is not you who is doing all this. Master will take it all from you until you understand that it is not you who is doing. God is the Doer.”

My second lesson was when I was extremely, intensely challenged by the people I was meeting every day. It was a world of men, naturally. Not only were they thinking that women are inferior, but a blond, young, single foreigner woman is something completely strange to them. I was constantly alone. I learned that if I wanted to survive, I could not try to transform anyone. The only thing I could do was to transform myself.

But how?

By expanding my heart, so that I could love more. That doesn’t mean being stupid or naive, but loving more with wisdom, so I would not be affected by so many arrogant men, so very proud.

Jaya:
You feel that you had these troubles because you are a woman. Would it have been the same if you were a man?

Even Men Like Shopping With Cecilia!

Cecilia:
It is the same with foreign men, but being a woman is worse. There is a different way in India of dealing with precision, commitment, client service, and time: the crucial things when you produce something. I found myself with a mind extremely agitated, and a heart becoming dryer and dryer.

Jaya:
How did you deal with that?

Cecilia:
I have been praying. I have a very strong faith and I am a very stubborn person. It doesn’t occur to me to stop. Never. If Guru gave me something through Swamiji, I have to do it. Indeed, this has been my biggest blessing. No question.

Here you must learn to be detached. In the end, you understand that it is not those outward things that are important, but rather how your mind reacts to them. When Master throws to you, every day for three years, fifteen examples of non-punctuality or non-precision, maybe there is a lesson in that. It is my daily work to not identify with what I do. It is a high challenge, and I am still praying every day that my life can become sweeter and softer, more peaceful in my mind, and more loving in my heart.

Jaya:
What do you see as the future of the business?

Cecilia:
It is expanding. I want to reach more markets. Now I have one employee where before I was alone. I want to have even more people. I think it is worth it because I see that the organic world is waiting, especially in America where there is a huge, enormous market. I want to explore the production of more organic things.

I would like to start a line of organic cotton bedsheets, cotton bathrobes and towels. I see a beautiful future for the business, with a team.

Jaya:
How would you sum up your experience?

Cecilia:
My experience has been about making a connection with the deep reality of India. It is a reality of 750 million people living in 750 thousand villages, a reality where 75% of the population lives in an environment opposite of the big cities where we live. It is a reality of doing something connected with the soil of India, a soil being destroyed by pesticides and fertilizers, and a reality of farmers forced to take out loans they cannot repay. We have put our finger into the villages with khadi, organic cotton and silk. We are helping poor women have something sustainable by allowing them to harvest cocoons.

Ananda Ladies Beautiful In Cecilia’s Fashions

Ananda Sangha has a connection with the country of India through working with the fabrics produced by these three different realities: khadi from villages, organics without pesticides and fertilizers, and ahimsa silk, helping both the environment and the women of Jarkand.

Click here to purchase Ahimsa Silk products

Ananda Solar Technologies is a start-up company by the members of Ananda India.

Swami Kriyananda is the inspiration behind the company. He tells a story of when he was a youth, and happened to lay on the pavement one night after he and some friends lost their way in the dark countryside of upstate New York.

Ananda Solar Technologies Team

He noticed that the pavement was still warm from absorbing the sun’s energy during the day. The memory of this experience later gave birth to the idea of solar thermal storage.

Using solar thermal storage to produce electricity is not unique. People make electricity all over the world using this technology. Usually it is done on a big, industrial scale. However, a few of our members researched this concept to produce small, individual units that can be put on rooftops of residential homes, or commercial buildings.

Engineers

There are major daily rolling blackouts all over India to keep the integrity of the power grid intact. Simply put, there is not enough power to meet all of the country’s power needs. This was seen in California during summer of 2000, when the state first de-regulated the power industry.

Right now we are in the development stage of finding a way to store the sun’s energy and turn it into electrical power. It is looking as though it has the potential to work within our parameters, which are:

• low cost
• portable to be used by individuals
• simple to operate

Solar Dish

Our units are hybrid, and use a combination of wind power and solar PV (photo voltaic) panels. The hybrid system has the advantage over a purely solar power system in that it uses wind, so when the sun is not shining you can still produce power.

Harvesting the Solar Energy

Another advantage of the hybrid system is that it comes with a lower price tag. Wind power technology is much cheaper to produce than the silicone-based PV panels. Thus, by combining the two, you can bring down the total cost of an “off–the-grid” system, while producing the same amount of power.

These hybrid units could be taken to Indian villages to give the people there, for the first time, electrical power to help improve their quality of life. To that end, Ananda Solar Technologies has teamed up with the Government of India.

Nuts and Bolts

Statistics show that whenever electrical power is brought to Indian villages, their economy improves. Electrical light gives the villagers additional time not just during the day, but after sunset, for cottage industries.

It also gives them power to run a fan. This can make a big difference in the Indian village on a hot day!

When we visited villages that received government funds for solar power systems, we noticed that they would have a TV set. That TV was the only means of communication with the outside world for a village with no way of transportation other than walking. News of state, country and the world could now reach the villagers, who before would be only aware of a nearby area they could reach by walking. New ideas and ways of doing things come from such expanded knowledge.

The night is lit up by the solar thermal storage unit!

We are also working on bringing these hybrid systems to other clients: a Girls’ School in Varanasi, an organic dairy near Faridabad, and the Ananda Sangha Ashram in Gurgaon.

The Varanasi Girls’ School was started by a trust fund that recognized the limited options girls had in Indian villages. They would marry young and spend their lives taking care of husband and children. An opportunity for good education is changing that, and the hybrid power is an essential part of the change.

The dairy outside Faridabad is a small operation that makes organic milk products, and hosts what is called agro tourism. Agro tourism gives people an experience of what it is like to live on an organic farm.

Swamiji and the engineers

The owners of the farm noticed that the laborers from the local village would bring their children with them to work. The families found this easier than to make the trip to the far-off school.

The owners of the farm then took it upon themselves to start a trade school for the children. They are now taught how to sew, plus carpentry and electrical skills. Ananda Solar Technologies is working with the farm owners on bringing hybrid electrical power to this school, as there is no reliable electrical power there.

Ananda Ashram in Gurgaon is a 3- story building with a large basement. The upstairs houses the staff, and the basement has the Ashram’s temple.

On the Roof of the Ashram in Gurgaon

Ananda Solar Technologies recently turned the basement into a “green” area. We installed a wind turbine and solar panels on the roof, and are using this power to run the temple lights and fans. This also gives us a convenient place to try out new techniques!

One of the funding ideas for our fledgling company is to sell the “green” hybrid systems to affluent people in India, in hopes of reducing the widespread use of diesel power generators during the daily power outages.

Let there be Light!

In Gurgaon alone, for example, the power goes out 8 - 10 hours a day. To cope with this problem, every residential, industrial, and commercial customer uses diesel generators. This creates huge air and noise pollution.

If we can replace these generators with clean and quiet hybrid systems, it would go a lo-o-ong way in reducing the area pollution, as well as the green house effect that is responsible for global warming.