Hi Andrew:
Great question -- very relevant to where we are all going with this. Here are a few perspectives, and where I'd like to head with it over the next few years.
I may have corresponded with 500 people over the last two years (maybe more - haven't counted), but never all in one day! There is always a rotation going on with who is writing, which determines who I am corresponding with. These days I usually have only a few correspondences going on at any one time, occasionally spiking to half a dozen or so. Last year, before the lessons reached critical mass, it was more like a dozen rotating correspondences going on all the time, and spiking to 20 or so every now and then. Pretty crazy back then.
As the lessons have become more complete the emails have become much less, even as the lesson readership and website volumes have gone way up. That is what I have been hoping for -- a body of written knowledge that can eventually stand on its own. With the forums coming up now and beginning to fill in many of the questions that used to come to me (thank you!), there is the opportunity for AYP to evolve into a self-propelled worldwide community of practitioners using an open source integrated system, according to each person's needs. That is my wish for what AYP will become, and we are making progress.
Before aypsite.org was launched in June 2005, the Geocities site was running 10,000 page visits per month -- about 300/day. aypsite.org (including the forums launched in July) went almost straight to 50,000+ page visits per month -- averaging about 2,000/day now, with about
2/3 of that in the forums, so you are getting a lot of unregistered readers over here for sure. The Geocities site has dropped about in half since aypsite.org came out. Also, there are still folks who prefer the Yahoo groups for reading the lessons, but I have no way to measure that activity.
Here is an amazing statisitic: Since opening in June, aypsite.org has seen 18,000 visitors (individual readers) from 90 countries. The breakdown on readers is:
USA - 73%
Canada - 6%
UK - 4%
India - 4%
Australia - 2%
Germany - 1%
...with the remaining 10% spread out among 85 other countries.
The numbers indicate that the West will be carrying the ball on the expansion of applied spiritual practices in the years to come, though these are AYP numbers only and do not necessarily represent what is happening in all systems of spiritual practice. An interesting data point though, isn't it?
As for what I will be doing from here on, I am beginning what will likely be a fairly long list of small books, each on a single practice, or same-in-class group of practices. There could be a dozen or more of these small books coming out over the next couple of years, starting with the first few in late 2005 or early 2006. They will be "entry level" and aimed at the average person who may have a glimmer of an interest in any practice like deep meditation, pranayama, tantra, mudras/bandhas, asanas, etc. The idea will be to create multiple entry points into AYP in the book market for many people with diverse interests.
I'd also like to continue filling in the remaining knowledge gaps in the AYP online lessons, as was mentioned in the last lesson #275. In the end, the additional lessons since the first book, along with a lot of unpublished Q&As piling up here, can be put together into a "Volume 2" AYP Easy Lessons book.
If I can get all that done, then maybe take a break for a while?
The guru is in you.
Yogani