Digital Dharma in the Desert

Borrego Springs, CA, February 03, 2006 --(PR.com)-- In the midst of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, two hours east of San Diego, is the small desert town of Borrego Springs. And on the outskirts of this isolated community of three thousand people is a small, traditional Hindu monastery. One surprising thing about this monastery is that it has virtually a thousand visitors a day. They browse through an extensive library of books and articles on meditation, spiritual life, and the inner spiritual traditions of the world's great religions. They look through dozens of photo albums of holy places and people in India. They even look at videos of holy pilgrimage places in India. And they listen to satsangs and spiritual discourses by the Ashram's abbot, Swami Nirmalananda Giri. And the remarkable thing about  these virtually one thousand visitors is that they are just that... virtual, for what they are visiting is the monastery's website. The monastery is Atma Jyoti Ashram, and the website is www.atmajyoti.org.

The ashram is one of a growing number of spiritual organizations that are making entire libraries of religious texts and articles freely available on the World Wide Web. For instance, many books and texts by the great Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh are accessible at The Divine Life Society's site, www.dlshq.org. A remarkable amount of Theravada Buddhist texts can be seen at www.accesstoinsight.org. Texts from many of the world's religious traditions, known and obscure, may be found at www.sacred-texts.com. And a search on the web's open source encyclopedia, www.wikipedia.org, will yield access to dozens of translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the New Testament, and other world scriptures. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg as to what is available. Patient use of Google or other search engines will yeild copious amounts of profitable spiritual reading  to the discerning surfer for transcendant subjects.

Though two-thirds of the visitors to the ashram's site are from the U.S., surfers from all around the world visit. India, the U.K., Canada, Germany, and Singapore lead the long list of visitors, which also include a surprising amount of traffic from the Middle East, as well as less expected traffic from places such as Iceland and Mauritius.

Meanwhile, in the real, non-virtual world, things are much more tranquil. Visits to the remote ashram are mostly limited to the occasional delivery from UPS or FedEX. So at the ashram the desert solitude and silence remain just that–truly an oasis of monastic meditation.

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