One Girl in Afghanistan
In August of 2021, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, halting all secondary education for girls.
In September of 2021, secondary schools reopened for boys, but girls past the age of 12 were left out.
The anguish these girls have experienced is beyond comprehension.
Then, three years ago, the Living Wisdom International online High School received an inquiry from an Afghanistan girl wanting to attend their school.
Afghanistan is the only country in the world where women and girls are denied education.
She was the first Afghanistan girl to reach out to the Living Wisdom School. The person who answered her inquiry happened to be Nitai Deranja, founder of the first school at Ananda Village, and at that time the Director of the Living Wisdom International High School. The high school accepted her and gave her a full scholarship.
Her story is one of courage and hope. Afghan women and girls live under what is considered to be the world’s most repressive set of restrictions. They are prohibited employment and educational opportunities, and ordered to hide their faces and voices in public.
This young woman, went on to graduate from high school, pursue a bachelor’s degree in Health Science, and Law & Political Science. Today, she is one of the teachers in a new Yoga Institute program working in partnership with Ananda College of Living Wisdom.
The program begins this September, 2026 and has already accepted 24 Afghan young women.
These young women have no money for education or for devices like laptops.
They have severe restrictions on their movement, many not being allowed to leave their homes without accompaniment by a male relative.
Through donations, our program is able to offer tuition-free college courses this fall. To continue offering tuition free schooling for four more years requires your help. These young women will become Education for Life (EFL) teachers, life coaches, business entrepreneurs and more. They are shaping a future for Afghanistan.
It takes $2,000 per year to support one Afghan student. Hundreds of Afghan young women want to go to college. If you would like to support our teachers to help these Afghan students, or if you know of foundations that would help our efforts, please contact us at admissions@anandacollege.org or donate here https://anandacollege.org/donate/
At Ananda College, education is more than earning a degree—it is an education that prepares students for a life of purpose and service. Our curriculum integrates ancient wisdom, critical thinking, and applied learning to equip graduates with the skills and character needed to thrive in today’s evolving world.
Besides academics, the core values we teach all our students is based on the Education for Life philosophy.
Education for Life in Dwapara Yuga
When asked why his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, felt so alive and conveyed a new state of awareness, Yogananda simply stated, “that’s because it has my vibrations in it.”
Transmission of knowledge from teacher to student can happen in the very atoms of presence, much in the same way Yogananda described the energy in his book.
In Dwapara Yuga, the age of energy that we are in today, the need for copious books and information will begin to fall away.
Learning becomes more individualized.
Have you ever attended a talk by someone that was so uplifting and inspiring that afterwards you couldn’t really remember what was said? That’s because you were tuning into their energy. They weren’t just telling you how to get rid of your anxiety, they were transmitting a quality of love, peace or happiness that goes much deeper.
The concepts in Education for Life, a book written by Swami Kriyananda in 1986, propose that education do more than fill students with information—it should awaken what’s already within them. This is the philosophy of the Ananda College of Living Wisdom
Modern education often measures success by grades, degrees received, income and prestige.
This is a concept perpetuated by Kali Yuga, the old philosophy where material consciousness is prevalent.
Education for Life measures success in terms of energy. Qualities like inner peace, kindness, courage, meaningful relationships, service to others, happiness and steadfastness are not easily defined in the old Kali Yuga manner.
According to Swami Sri Yukteswar, as we evolve upwards in the yuga cycle of time, each age expands human consciousness. Our capacity to perceive subtler realities greatly increases.
For instance, the very term Education for Life will eventually disappear as the qualities it evokes gives way to the energy it extols. This is because in Dwapara Yuga concepts like magnetism, subtle energies and the invisible laws governing creation will become more apparent.
Advanced yogis often describe communication as intuition, telepathy, direct knowing, silent transmission, even the spiritual communication between guru and disciple.
The chapter “Years in My Master’s Hermitage” in Autobiography of a Yogi is full of Dwapara Yuga methods for subtle energy transmission. Yogananda describes how Yukteswar always affected him.
“If I entered the hermitage in a worried or indifferent frame of mind, my attitude imperceptibly changed. A healing calm descended at mere sight of my guru. Every day with him was a new experience in joy, peace and wisdom. Never did I find him deluded or intoxicated with greed or emotion or anger or any human attachment.”
Here is something to think about. How can we help a person to learn the concepts of Education for Life in Dwapara Yuga?
As humanity gradually develops greater intuitive awareness, education will undergo profound changes. Instead of primarily transferring information, education will increasingly seek to cultivate consciousness.
Concepts like intuition, creativity, self-mastery and discernment will become more valued.
Instructors will become “conduits of consciousness”.
Language, long viewed as how well a person speaks or writes, will change.
Instead of giving students a treatise on “Tools of Maturity” the instructor’s very life, their magnetism and their consciousness will become the transmission.
The Role of Environment in Learning
I recently had the opportunity to witness the creation of a “Vedic Chanting Cottage” which my husband Nakula, our son Rama, and several other builders worked on at a facility nearby.
Traditional Vedic Chanting is the science of sound. When it is done in a protected acoustic environment, it relies on precise resonance, intonations, pronunciation, rhythms and meters, along with breath control.
A quiet, sattvic, uncluttered and acoustically balanced environment allows students to hear every syllable perfectly. This is what this Vedic Chanting Cottage endeavored to create.
A friend of mine, who had taught elementary grades at a public school once visited our Ananda Village Living Wisdom School first grade class. She was astounded that the classroom and the children were all quiet. “How do you get them to be so quiet?” she asked the teacher, who responded. “They like it when it’s quiet.”
The great rishis of India have held that the Vedas were “heard” in states of profound meditation and preserved through exact recitation rather than written in the ordinary, book sense.
In the higher ages of Greece and India for instance, oral traditions offered songs, poetry and spoken word as a way to transmit knowledge.
Along with meditation, disciplined chanting can increase concentration, memory, breath regulation and attentiveness. It also helps to refine our listening.
Mantras can transmit spiritual power. They can uplift the soul and inspire us. Sustained practice can awaken a student’s insight and provide states of awareness that go beyond intellectual understanding.
Mantra training encourages memorization with precise recitation, refines awareness through the actual mantra and offers realization through vibration and meditation.
Imagine then, a Vedic Chanting Cottage of the future where students of all ages sit to absorb the knowledge of the Vedas through mantra and sound.
The Mahamriyunjaya Mantra is a mantra used for spiritual liberation, healing physical illness and from untimely death. According to Sri Yukteswar, it originated from the Rig Veda, more than 10,000 years ago, during Satya Yuga, the age of highest consciousness on our planet.
The Power of Service
Today, Education for Life learning is experiential, student-centered, works to develop the whole person, refines awareness through right action and seeks realization through joyful, balanced living.
Service to others is another component of Education for Life. Service helps the student step out of their own head and into the reality of others. In this way, students become observers. They watch and feel, learn and grow.
A group of young teens who had never left the state of California traveled to an orphanage in Mexico to partake in a service project. They lived alongside the orphaned teens and children for two weeks. They cooked and served rice, beans and tortillas day in and out. They learned to talk to the orphans in Spanish not English. They played the games they played and shared new games.
At the end of their visit a transmission of consciousness had occurred. When the teens returned to their own families in California, they shared their experiences of personal transformation. Many of them communicated through tears and heart-opening stories. They realized how fortunate they were to have parents and families. They had become observers through the power of service to others.
In India, Ananda College students learn that serving poor children can bring many unexpected lessons of the heart.
When the Ananda College students travelled to India we always did service projects with a Free School that served the children of poor migrants whose jobs were to carry heavy rocks up from the banks of the Ganges River to waiting trucks.
The parents and their children lived in tents or simple dwellings.
Yet the act of being with children who had little to eat or few clothes to wear became a profound experience the college students always remembered.
Temples that Transmit Consciousness
In Dwapara Yuga, temples will be constructed in such a way as to transmit consciousness much in the same way the Vedic Chanting Cottage transmits knowledge through sound.
How do they do this?
The Temple of Light at Ananda Village is one example. Its enduring purpose is the same: to help people become quieter, more centered, and more receptive to higher ideals.
At Ananda Village there are 10 temples, from the tiny Lahiri Mandir to the huge Temple of Light. Each temple offers a unique vibration and transmission of consciousness. Perhaps this is why a visiting Swami from India called Ananda a true Vedic Community.
More importantly, each home in the village has a small meditation temple. This serves as an example for others to create their own portable paradise. Whether that temple is an entire room, a closet, or a chair where one can sit undisturbed, it becomes sacred.
Night and day, day and night, the atoms in a meditation space become filled with peaceful vibrations from the meditator. Eventually, just sitting on the floor or in a chair in the same spot used for meditation, one begins to experience the cultivation of consciousness.
I think of the young woman, far away in Afghanistan.
Will she need to hide under her burqua to meditate today?
The realization that we are all just manifestations of one huge universal consciousness brings awareness to our roles as human beings.
We serve others to help ourselves become happier, more expansive human beings.
And when we help our sisters in Afghanistan are we not also helping ourselves?
Wishing you a day, a month and a lifetime of happiness.