http://youtu.be/RHmyKq1FWPE
Nobody seems interested in this subject, but the hell with it, I’m putting down my thoughts on Ashram Etiquette, and here it is, like it or not, interested or not, and keep in mind that I do NOT admin the Institute, not at all. It is run by the Cloister & Board with advisors. I make NONE of the day to day operating decisions, and none of this stuff is up to me; I insisted that it be set up that way, so I have no voting or actual power and, thanks to Daniel Ennis, Esq., it was set up that way.
What is Ashram Etiquette? It’s good manners expressed in the Ashram context, and that includes personal interactions and all the usages one makes of the Ashram, both Virtual and Brick & Mortar.
I ask all members of the Prosperity Virtual Ashram to help support it to whatever extent they are willing and able. This is an important part of being in any Ashram, even one that seems to be “free”, because it’s on the internet, but I assure you that the Prosperity Virtual Ashram is anything BUT free. It costs us on an average of $3,000 a month to run it, and that’s when everything goes right, and it seldom does.
It costs much, much more to run a physical Brick & Mortar ashram, much more than you’d think, because it’s not a single family, and planning for multiple dwellers tends to be far more expensive and difficult than you’d think.
So we’re looking at the land we have available at the moment, and we’re trying to work out the numbers here, to help folks determine how much obligation it takes to stay here as a staff member.
Right now, there are no jobs available in town, and few opportunities to make money online because of a slowdown in online sales that always happens between now and the day after Thanksgiving, the so-called “Black Friday”.
Amy and I will come up with some fun Christmas Tattoo Marketing for that day, I’m hoping (hint, hint), and I’m trying to work out some dances for our Holiday Retreats, which will be limited this year due to travel restrictions for some of our folks.
I have several folks arriving here from other countries, some of whom must stay with us because they have no other alternative. Unfortunately, we don’t actually have a large enough piece of property to be properly called an “ashram”.
We have some rooms for rent in some of the houses owned by our group members.
Those are private residences. They charge whatever they have to in order to pay for the space that guests use, the electric and food, if included in the donation price.
Okay, so how much should someone pay to stay in an Ashram?
It all depends on the Ashram.
I suggest calculating how much it costs for food, clothing, medical, travel, dental care, personal items and such, and NO ashram can legally provide those things, particularly in the U.S., because those constitute “income” and must therefore be taxed by the state and federal governments as income.
Also counted as income is housing. This is taxable TO THE PROVIDER of the housing as well as to the person or persons receiving the “free” housing. Nothing is free, not even lunch. Someone must pay, and I refuse to get stuck for the drinks, so in our ashram, everyone pays — both because we can’t and because I won’t permit it.
It’s for your own good. Anytime you accept a free lunch, you MUST PAY, and the cost to you increases as time passes and you haven’t yet discharged that extra karmic obligation.
I put my money where my mouth is. I get a standard and very modest paycheck every month for my services to IDHHB, out of which I PAY MY OWN RENT. It’s a matter of federal and state law that I do so, and that I pay for all goods and services rendered me by the Institute, and pay I do, mostly because it’s just good magic to do so.
I also pay my income taxes, every penny that the bastards deserve. I don’t like it, and I don’t like the unfair taxation of the poor and non-taxation of the very rich, but I pay every dollar to which they are entitled. Not a friggin’ cent more, though.
I pay my way all the way, and I expect my students to follow my example, as this is my method of teaching, that is, by example. I never ask you to do what I myself would not do, and pay my way is my primary rule.
At the Institute Ashram, we have no room for anything but occasional visitors. It would be nice to build an ashram, but that takes time, especially when you’re starting from nothing.
For instance, I warned Prosperity North that they only had one year to use SpaceBuddhaa to get their financial and social media act together. We’ve been supporting Prosperity North toward their expenses every month, but our support fund has run out, but we’re still doing it, as agreed, through January — that’s four more months of additional financial burden and hardship on us, after which, they’re financially on their own, according to our written agreement.
This means that the Prosperity North folks will have to get their act together, but it’s not too late to act, if action is taken swiftly. Too many months have gone by where publicity and promotions just didn’t happen, and that’s what costs an ashram money.
We here at the Institute are trying to promote our physical ashram by marketing our retreats, trainings and other activities and events, and that’s what Prosperity North needs to do, too, and we’re doing it knowing NOTHING about social media, having to learn it from scratch, as it were, with no one to teach it to us. No worries, mate, we’ll get it done.
I’ve proposed that we make a study of the actual costs involved before we settle on a donation schedule for staying at the ashram, but the primary rule is that everybody pays their fair share, which works out to … what? We don’t yet know, but it’s not a trivial number.
No ashram should ever pay for anything that the ashram resident or guest uses; the ashram has limited resources and no other way to pay for them than to be covered by the users themselves, meaning everyone pays for what they use as they use it, not later.
Oh, by the way; I suppose it’s worth mentioning that in addition to my contribution to the mortgage payments, animal care expenses and other Institute expenses, all my dental, medical, personal items, clothing and ALL other personal expenses incurred by me are paid by me from my own personal funds. I expect every other member of any spiritual community to do the same.
Good Karma Starts with Good Karma.
Bad Karma just tends to pile up, like old debts. I really don’t want to walk out the door and see a field-full of trailer-trash playing me for a sucker; we had enough of that back in the 1970s, and I’m not inclined to repeat the experiment. I’ve never been part of a Hippie Commune and I don’t intend to get sucked into one now.
That’s why I charge for workshops, charge for art classes, for guitar classes, for everything that someone gets from me — do I give a shit about the money? It’s just local gold, folks, worthless where I come from and where I live. It’s about your karma, and I’m not about to contribute to the delinquency of a minor by allowing someone to, as I said, stick me for the drinks.
So, like it or not, I’m charging folks to stay at the ashram, as soon as we can get it built and make it legal for occupancy, which is a long, long way from where we are today, and probably even longer away for Prosperity North, which needs funding before it can even build or open.
That may mean doing what I’m doing, going out among the people, selling the product, getting out there with the message. Prosperity North is blessed with youngsters who understand the social media, the language of the young, and maybe through the internet they can raise the funds necessary to gain the financial support that Prosperity North will need before it can open for business.
I’m allowing three years for development here at the Institute. It would be less, but we still have a very, very large financial obligation from the legal defense we made last year against immigration. We’ll be paying that off for the next three years, I’m told, which gives me some hint of the timing — I won’t be able to do much beyond what we’re doing now until that’s all paid off.
In the forseeable future, we won’t have extra money for promotion, so we’re counting on the social media geniuses in our ranks to come up with some serious fund-raising and promotions. Without those in place, people on an ashram become a burden rather than an asset.
Most ashrams have sources of income outside the ashram. Almost all our income is derived from efforts outside the spiritual community, and Prosperity North, to my best knowledge, does not yet have this in place, although in my opinion, there was plenty of time to establish something, but I do know that Prosperity North has been plagued with the shittiest internet connection on the face of the planet.
But frankly, it also looks to me as if there is no plan — didn’t anyone discuss what to do?
I suggest Prosperity North folks get together and have a powwow — by all means, use the Prosperity Virtual Ashram to accomplish this task, and talk about and try to come up with a plan for, Prosperity North.
You need to decide what to do, how to run it, how much to charge folks to use the little bungalows — and right now, it looks dismal for an early start, as I’d hoped. All that bad luck with the internet connections obviously took their toll, or there would have been much more done in the space of seven months during which little else was happening.
I hope that here at the Institute we can keep the cost of our workshops and retreats at an absolute minimum, but remember that we are a public not-for-profit corporation responsible to the community at large, and by our charter, cannot by law operate at a loss.
Consequently, we cannot afford to take in boarders.
Oh, yes, we’ve been asked, as lately as at breakfast this morning. There’s no room, but even if there were, I wouldn’t agree to any such thing.
I had 75 people living under my roof for ten years, and frankly, it sucked as much for me as it must have for them.
We got a job done — the founding of the Institute — but it was painful and expensive and in that case, folks were tree-planting to pay their own way, and that’s about what it takes.
We went out selling candy bars door to door for three years to pay for our own way, our own food, our own toilet paper, our own aspirin. Yeah, pain. Gladly I would pay it again to create what we have now.
I strongly recommend that Prosperity North start out with the simple premise, given to me by my Grampa Herman: Never operate at a loss.
Why?
Because your income and assets are profoundly limited, and you need to take stock of this and remedy the situation by getting out there more and raising money for the project now, not later, when the wolf is at the door. Sustainability.
I’m hoping that the monthly donation for housing here at the Institute will be around $300 per person, but that of course would not include food or any other personal expense, and that goes double for my large hungry sons. I put money in the kitchen donation box whenever they come over. It’s only fair.
The whole point is to keep the community SUSTAINABLE. If sustainability is important in growing coffee beans and chocolate, it’s profoundly more important in a spiritual community.
Sustainability is only achieved when everyone pays their fair share of everything used, because everything costs, everything.
Frankly, I take up some of the slack wherever I can, and I figure that if I, the Holy Guru, can shake loose with a couple of bucks to make up for what I’ve used, so can you. Food budgets are hard to calculate — you’ve only to listen to the tapes of Linda Corriveau describing her experience in the Great White North, when they had to fly and boat their supplies into their camp once a month, a distance of some 600 miles.
I haven’t heard from Prosperity North on this issue yet, but I’ve been thinking about it of late, and I haven’t been able to come up with a number yet for the ashram support, mostly because I don’t know how cheap or expensive it is to feed someone. So for the moment, I can break it down like this, as a rough example, but you’ll have to adjust it according to your actual expenses.
First of all, you can’t put your own money out for anyone else. That’s a magical rule that I’m sure everyone will agree is true and fair. Pay to Play.
I thought maybe $300 a month for housing, considering it’s hand-built, but on the other hand, you’ll need more buildings, and I don’t know how much they cost to build. Possibly each occupant or couple could purchase the lumber and help to build it?
That’s my plan, and we’re looking into properties here that we can lease for 99 years. That might be a good way to tackle this whole idea.
Dunno what I can offer in the way of suggestions beyond this, but I’d keep track of food costs, your own medical and dental costs, all that sort of thing, to add into the cost of running the ashram.
As for those personal expenses, as I said, by law we can’t pay for them, the money has to come out of a private account, and all my expenses and the expenses of all Cloister members and Institute Officers do the same; it’s good magic, and it’s the law.
Anyhow, I hope that we can all figure out what to ask when folks stay on our ashrams — I’m planning on finding out what other ashrams ask from their permanent residents and from their guests. I’m sure guests pay more, but how much more, I don’t yet know.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby