by Dharmādhyakṣa dāsa
by Dharmadhyaksa dasa
If air and noise pollution, commuting, traffic jams, inflation, crime, overcrowding, and speed mania make you hunger for a saner lifestyle, then you're not alone. Already, a growing number of concerned citizens (including intellectuals and scientists) are asking serious questions about where modern society is going.
In the thought-provoking book Small Is Beautiful (which government officials around the world are reading carefully), E.F. Schumacher airs some of this new movement's views. As he sees it, today's society is based on "greed and envy." Thus, cities and nations have developed an almost exclusive eye for material (mostly economic) gain and have tragically neglected humanity's personal and spiritual needs. In other words, money-not mankind-matters. The remedy, Schumacher says, is to return to a simpler, smaller-scale, and more spiritual lifestyle.
In 1965, before these ideas were popular, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada traveled from India to the West and appealed for "simple living and high thinking"-the motto of the ancient Vedic culture. In general, people responded sympathetically, and many wanted to learn about the Vedic cultural experience, more than five thousand years of natural, spiritual living.
William Ehrlichman was one of the studious ones. While earning his Bachelor of Science degree at the State University of New York (Buffalo), he took a course in Krsna consciousness and read some of Srila Prabhupada's English renderings of the Vedic literature. Before long, Ehrlichman asked Srila Prabhupada for formal initiation. He received the Sanskrit name Bhagavan dasa, which means "one who serves the all-opulent Supreme Lord," and his clear-sightedness and devotion quickly earned him a role of leadership in the Krsna consciousness movement.
"Success brought its problems," Bhagavan dasa says. "People felt attracted to the Vedic lifestyle, but the big-city atmosphere made things difficult. Of course, we'd been educating people with Prabhupada's books. But still, I was feeling that the time had come to demonstrate the practicality of Krsna consciousness by setting up a model Vedic community."
After months of searching, Bhagavan dasa found an ideal location in the Loire Valley-two hundred acres of gently rolling hills, with forests, fields, a large chateau, and five other buildings. The owner, a World War II resistance hero now engaged in philanthropic work, sympathized with the Krsna community's goals. So he sold the property for a low down-payment and financed the rest at excellent terms.
The farm project's name is New Mayapur (after the birth site of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, who five hundred years ago revived Krsna consciousness for the modern age). The project's thirty-three-year-old coordinator, Visnuma dasa, graduated from Middlebury College, in Vermont, and taught school in Ontario, Canada. He says, "New Mayapur has had instant appeal, both for our members and for our guests. In big cities, when we talk about spiritual life it's hard for people to get more than an intellectual grasp of it. But here the atmosphere is so peaceful and alive that spiritual living comes naturally. At a place like this, people can feel themselves becoming spiritually transformed."
"There are no special qualifications for living at New Mayapur," says Bhagavan dasa. "Anybody with any kind of skill is welcome. And anybody can work the fields and provide his family with a good, wholesome life. Most people are looking for a really peaceful community, so it's important for us to supply what they want." He adds, "People are tired of struggling for the privilege of living in a pressure cooker. We see smaller, spiritual communities as the trend of the future, and we want to accommodate anyone who feels interested in this kind of living."
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