Short Summary

Hi - Namaste - my name is Swami Anantananda Giri, or Brandon Ballentine if you prefer.  I am a Swami of the Giri monastic oder, a Permaculture educator and consultant, a husband, and father of three.  http://www.swamiananta.com

This campaign has the unique and fortunate challenge of having so much to offer the contributor that I run the risk of exceeding the reader's attention span  in attempting to do the subject justice.  Although, to me, everything is quite interconnected, I will try to discuss the project associated with this fundraising campaign in two distinct parts: Namely the Ananta Shanti spiritual ashram and the Permaculture demonstration/education center.  

Ananta Shanti Ashram

• For some of us, the question, "Who am I?" is a prominent feature of this life.  For people like this, an ashram like the one I intend to establish here is a potentially invaluable asset on the path to enlightenment.  To those who tread this path, I welcome you with great love and great respect. 
• What is an enlightened person?  An enlightened person is someone who has delved deep inside to find that their true Self is the Self of all.  The enlightened person returns to the world from this realization to find that this Self is seen in every other being they encounter.  Let's not think small:  Imagine a world where everybody loves his or her neighbor as they love themselves because their reality is that both are fundamentally one and the same.  Doesn't that sound better than a world that prizes narcissism and materialism alone?  Contributing to create this ashram is one step you can take toward a more enlightened world family.  Once the ashram has materialized, you can come here and become further engaged in co-creating a better NOW!

Permaculture Demonstration/Education Center

• Whether you find yourself drawn to the above-mentioned line of enquiry or not, we all have to share this limited world of finite resources that is currently being mined of its very life-blood for short-sighted corporate profit as if there were no limit to how much we can take from the Earth.  Permaculture is a set of ethics combined with a set of technologies that has the potential to reverse this trend.  These principles and ethics MUST be applied if this species is to have any chance at harmonious existence with our environment.  Our very survival as a species could depend on it.  The system is proven, we simply need more people learning and applying it. 

• Earth care, People care, Limitation of consumption, and Return of surplus are the ethics of Permaculture.  Adhering to these, the Permaculturist uses appropriate design and biological elements that mimic nature but are simultaneously useful to the humans who inhabit the system.  The result of appropriate design is that, instead of devastating the Earth's biology to (usually barely) meet his needs, Man assembles and arranges complex biological systems around himself.  He works cooperatively instead of competitively; constructively instead of destructively; promoting life instead of denying it.  These living systems that he arranges around himself intercept and buffer him from the raw power of the cosmic forces that shape the earth: pacifying them and simultaneously converting them into something useful to himself.  Because in Permaculture, "The problem is the solution", because, "Waste is a mis-identified resource", and because Permaculture trains us to turn our disadvantages to our advantage, this approach results in abundance in a measure that most people don't dare imagine!  

• With your help, I will demonstrate the assembly of landscape, structures, and biology in such a way that the needs of those onsite are met more abundantly and with less labor than most would guess possible.  In the process of meeting these needs, these same assemblies will turn torrential monsoons into long-term potable water, irrigation, and recharged water tables.  They will turn gale-force winds into usable energy and a soil-building element.  Eventually they will moderate the weather patterns themselves.  I will show that a different perspective can change the paradigm of humans subsisting on scarcity while scarring the earth in the process, to one of sheer, unprecedented abundance while simultaneously healing the earth.  With momentum of the interest and conviction that this example is going to create, I will be educating others to follow suit and apply and teach these principles far and wide. 

What We Need & What You Get

What we are trying to accomplish with phase 1 (for my part; others are working on and funding other projects in tandem) is to bring hot water showers and electricity to community areas and cover the remaining expense of getting this swami's cob/strawbale home/greenhouse erected.  There are things I intend to incorporate into the home eventually but my present goal for these funds is pretty modest: four walls, a roof, and hot running water.

Already Completed: 

• Outbuilding for shower & composting toilet
• Trench/rubble foundations for first two cob homes (one is a cob/strawbale hybrid)
• Acquisition of 1/3-1/2 of the straw for my family's cob/strawbale home (not cheap it turns out)

Will Complete Without Funding: 

• Hostel/Guest bunkhouse
• Stone stemwall of house
• 3 cob walls of house: Aside from straw already purchased, cob is merely sand and clay.  Our soil is good for this. 
• Window install.  Windows were already donated.
• Roof timbers.  As residents, we are allowed a forestry permit to harvest the necessary wood rounds.  

Funding will go to these items, in this order:

• $1,400:  1,200 Watt solar generator.  For providing guest facilities with ability to charge phones and power laptops.
• $1,200:  52 Gallon solar hot water heater.  This will provide hot water for guest facilities.  
• $1,200: 52 Gallon solar hot water heater for house.
• $1,100: 2,500 Gallon cistern for rain catchment
• $1,500: Anodized steel sheeting for rain catchment
• Remainder: Unforseen costs and items that can't be priced yet (doors, rain gutters, cost of berming cistern, plumbing, additional straw, etc.

The Impact

Be the change you want to see

• I put it to you that raising your level of consciousness through spiritual discipline is a boon to the entire world
• Traditionally, in Eastern and Western culture alike, there has always been the monastery or the ashram; a place where the world-weary individual can retreat; that will facilitate contemplation and introspection.  Today in the West this phase of life is neglected to our own detriment as a society.  The effects are multi-faceted and far-reaching.  Helping to manifest projects like this one can help temper the over zealous industriousness of the modern world and encourage a better balance that benefits all life.
• If you don't go in for all that spiritual mumbo-jumbo, come learn Permaculture.  Have your effect on the world in that way.
  
• Do your part to leave a better world for your children
• By simply helping us to exist, you help to spread the knowledge of how to raise water tables, attract rainfall, build soil, increase biodiversity, reverse desertification, build food forests, plan for fire and erosion control, and heal the earth by simply being responsible about how one meet's one's own basic needs of living

Other Ways You Can Help

Don't have the dollars to donate?  Here are some other ways to support the cause:

• Share this campaign on facebook and any other social media that you use: twitter, pinterest, reddit, blogs, email lists, etc.  
• Use the Indiegogo share tools!
• Know someone who would love this idea?  Tell us how to reach them.
• Show up and help!  Cob is fun and many hands make light work!