I'm working on a master plan or thinking about a master plan for Crestone Mountain Zen Center. Master plan in English means a view of a situation in the present and which includes its potential future. So, and that applies to us too. So we're trying to work out some kind of retirement plan for me in Crestone.

[01:10]

So the question is, what happens to that sort of seat-like ledge we have from the huge valley up to the rather high mountains? Seat-like. Oh, seat-like. It's a ledge, a seat-like. What should we leave space for in the next 30 years? That's more or less Christian and the Sangha's lifetime. And then what should we leave space for for the next 200 years? Now, if we look at tradition, there should be a Buddha hall, a Dharma hall, a Zendo hall, And a kitchen hall.

[02:22]

We have to eat. And a dorm hall. We have to sleep. Not guest house. Dorm is a sleeping. Dormitory is to sleep. Anybody know a different word for it? Sleeping? What do you call it? We call it a Gästehaus. Where college students sleep in a building? Schlafsaal, vielleicht. Schlafsaal. Schlafsaal. It's just one big room. Well, it's not. It's a whole building of just rooms for students. Ja, Schlafsaal would be just one big room. Oh, okay. All right. You have different sleeping habits in Germany. Unterkünfte halt. Ja. Unterkünfte. Ja. And some kind of Sangha hall or community hall. So six buildings.

[03:29]

And usually they're separate buildings and they're usually traditionally connected by walkways. And separate buildings sort of allows a feeling of concentration in each building. It's not just like an apartment building where you eat on the third floor and you sleep on the fourth floor. And we have some of that feeling here with different buildings and walking in the... walking between them in the morning and during the day. But the question always comes up at Creston when we discuss this. Yes, we need a place to sit Zazen. We need a place to have lectures. Do we really need a whole building for the Buddha?

[04:52]

We can use the Dharna Hall. We don't need a Buddha Hall. And practically speaking, that's the way we are doing it. In Crestone, the Buddha Hall is the Dharma Hall and the Zendo is the Buddha Hall and the Dharma Hall. And the same is how we're using this room. But maybe within 200 years we might want a Buddha hall. And, you know, two people, Buddha halls where you would do obviously ceremonies, ordinations, chanting, so forth.

[05:56]

And my experience of... Buddha halls in Japanese mandalic monastic context. The Buddha hall has a kind of rarefied feeling, a higher feeling. And then some people really like ceremonies and chanting and so forth. So I don't know how to make the decision about how much space to leave. And then also, I think in the West, we're going to need a kind of two-part area, two areas in a practice center.

[07:21]

Which one I stated and implied in the recent Sangha letter. Here in Europe. And I've already had a translation of one person's letter in response. Well, she said, well, nothing's going to keep me away from practicing it. But if you have a bunch of people who don't really know what we're doing and they wander around and they sit in the, I don't know, smoking and talking on their cell phones, it changes the atmosphere. She didn't say that, but basically she said, I think we're going to need some kind of retreatant space.

[08:42]

It's going to be the way we support ourselves. Since we don't have imperial and don't want imperial support which is the way most of the of Chinese and Japanese monasteries were built. Yeah. So, and it's the way we're, osmotically, as I put in this letter, osmotically Buddhism becomes part of a society. Und das ist die Art und Weise, wie osmotisch Buddhisten Teil der Gesellschaft werden.

[09:42]

So here we have this, if we can manage it, that will become the Zendo, and this will be the Dharma Hall and Buddha Hall. So we have sort of two buildings, but they're joined together. Okay. Anyway, I just wanted to bring that up because, one, it's something the Sangha in the States is pretty engaged in. And it is, of course, in fact what's happening here and how we discover how to use these buildings and have others use them with us. Und tatsächlich ist es auch das, was hier geschieht in der Art und Weise, wie wir entdecken, wie wir die Gebäude hier benutzen können und wie andere sie mit uns benutzen.

[10:54]

Ja, okay. On Tuesday, a couple of days ago, I went to the opening of the United World College in Freiburg. It's something Adenauer wanted to bring to Germany and didn't succeed. And it's an educational concept born out of the shock of Nazi Germany. And Kurt Hahn started the Salem School, where Sophia goes to school. And he was so horrified by what Hitler was doing And I won't even mention the gross details that led him to say, we have to choose between Salem and Hitler.

[12:14]

That was a very dangerous and courageous thing to say in 1931 or 1932. And he... I mean, the Salem School was partly started out of... a reaction against the First World War and the Prussian educational system. And which has led to what are called round square schools, Salem was the first, 140 of them across the world. Round square schools. They're called round square schools. I can explain why.

[13:16]

My daughter, by chance, teaches at one in California. Sally. He didn't found all of them, but he founded the first, I don't know, ten or so. And then after the result of Nazism, he started the United World Colleges. His concept is simple but powerful, which is you need a college where people from different countries are educated together simultaneously. So you break the tribal connection of nationality. So you break the tribal national identity.

[14:19]

Okay, that's okay. Yeah, so they just opened and they have, I don't know, 100 or 10 or so students. From 70 different countries. And... And Marie Louise helped screen about 10 of the students, whether they get scholarships or not, by doing research on their backgrounds in these different countries.

[15:45]

So that's why we were invited to go to the opening. And Kurt Hahn was a friend of Marie-Louise's family, and she'd met him. So anyway, he started, no, I guess there's 30 or 40 United World, no, 15 United World colleges in the world. And this is the first one in Germany. And there's 140 committees in various... There's committees in 140 countries which choose students to go to the colleges.

[16:47]

So it's quite an interesting concept. And these hundred or so kids were so enthusiastic to be with each other. Wearing different national costumes and so forth. And some of them are just street kids who happen to be smart. with no education, no money, anything. And why I'm mentioning it partly is because Kurt Hahn was also a friend of Hugo Kugelhaus, who was behind this group of buildings.

[18:04]

And... Kurt Hahn also started Outward Bound. You know what that is. Which emphasizes physical, bodily health, etc. And being able to survive in the wilderness, etc. And these were interests of Kugelhaus, too. And his concept of buildings is not only, as I've mentioned the other day, you learn from the building how it's put together. But how bodily spaces as buildings and as the human body relate to each other. My life has been defined by a certain sensitivity to resonant mutuality.

[19:18]

But even so, I'm surprised and amazed even at the fact that we somehow, as Zen practitioners, are heir to both Kurt Hahn and Hugo Kugelhaus' interests. And I also already mentioned Charlotte Selver, who was an important teacher for me. And I gave you her phrase, come up to standing. I've always been aware in my own experience and my observation that we're heirs of a European tradition as well as an Asian tradition.

[20:34]

But that we're so institutionally and conceptually heirs in our very sight here is amazing to me. And Japanese sense of building space as bodily space is also very similar. And somebody gave me a quotation of Hugo Kugelhaus where he made a several sentence statement about Zen in a Deutsch which is almost untranslatable.

[22:14]

Isn't that true? Yes. I gave it to her and she says, I can't translate this. I couldn't even read it. She says, I'm clearer than he was. Well, that's good. This is my job. So that's all to sort of give you a sense of the location I feel institutionally and historically in our practice. Historically. And I find myself always in the midst of giving you or discovering with you specific practices. And also, at the same time, trying to find a way to speak about things that I don't... that are outside my own ability to speak about.

[23:33]

And one is this sense that there's no outside. But Leibniz, Gottfried Leibniz, he's a fellow countryman, And Leibniz, also ein Landesgenosse. He emphasized appearances as what is real. And one of the appearances is space itself. Because space itself is one of the appearances, there's no outside. That's what he would say, I think.

[24:55]

I didn't discuss it with him. But it's also similar to Cezanne again, sorry to belabor the point, that there's no line between things, there's just color points. If there's no line between things, there's no place for an outside to exist. It's all one interactive content. Seen one way by a dragonfly, as I say, and one way by us. And in different ways by each of us. So if we take the phrase, come up to standing again. That means there's only in between this. But that's the same as walking across the Zendo.

[26:17]

Or walking to Johanneshof. The endpoints here in Johanneshof offer us direction but not experience. We can aim toward the kitchen. But each moment by moment step is a new location. The in-betweenness is the experience. Okay. Now, I don't know if it means anything for me to say that, and I feel it's a slippery idea, so I'm going to belabor it. I don't know if that means anything when I say it like that, and I can feel that it's a glitchy idea somehow, so I'll just keep picking it up.

[27:29]

Okay. I'll just keep coming back to it. So here there's, you know, twelve of us. And there's our breathing. And our individual moods. And the walls and the ceiling. And most of it we're not conscious of. We have a degree of awareness of it, but not consciousness of it. There might be a humming outside by some engine or something that we don't notice until it's turned off. So we were noticing it, but we don't notice it until, consciously, until there's a contrast. So how to enter the field of actuality where there's no contrast?

[28:40]

And to notice outside the fence of self. Okay. Yeah, if you're a cook and you see a bunch of vegetables, you see their causal aspect. They came from a farm or from a mother, I mean a mutter. Yeah, and then they're present, they're present. carrots or turnips or whatever. And they're fresh or they're not fresh. So they have a present aspect, fresh or not, etc., what they are, and a past aspect, where they came from.

[29:59]

Causal aspect. And if you're the cook, they suddenly look like a soup. So they have a potential aspect. So at each momentary unit, Unit isn't, I don't like the word unit, because it suggests unity, but at each momentary indeterminacy. At each not yet unit. Unit. there's the causal aspect, there's the present aspect, and there's the potential aspect.

[31:24]

And the more you're in the midst of these causal, present and potential aspects, outside the fence of self, the more the world penetrates you and you penetrate the world. So maybe you can take some place out in the garden or somewhere. And decide to go from point A to point B with like 40 steps. And take each step and find yourself in a new location. Forty times. If you're a gardener or you're Atmar, on the third step you'll see some dirt.

[32:28]

Yeah, and its location. Yeah, that's its causal aspect. The present aspect that we can look at. And the sun. Maybe the sun in the season and its present aspect. The season as in winter and autumn and so forth. Season is like the winter in autumn. The time of year. And then the height of the flower that could be planted there would be the potential aspect. So at each moment, any one of us we'll see that particular Dharma differently, that particular momentary unit.

[33:40]

I've told you, mentioned occasionally to some of you, I was sitting on a train, an ECA train, eating in the dining car, The man sitting across from me was reading a German newspaper. And I was reading an English book and talking to the waiter the best I could. And suddenly he said to me in English, your glasses are crooked. So I took them off. I said, okay, straighten them. Then I gave him my glasses. And he straightened them.

[34:41]

Because he was an optometrist. Yes. And what he saw was not vegetables or a place to plant something. He saw glasses that were crooked. And it was Herr Nosch of the German Optical Society, head of the German Optical Society. So now he makes all my glasses. So, at each moment we bring ourselves, whether we're a dragonfly or an optometrist, to the situation. And there's no outside-inside distinction.

[35:44]

There's just the boundaries you supply as an optometrist or a gardener. And going back to Cezanne again. There's no lines, there's just color planes. And he says, in each basically dharma, he says, in each momentary unit, experienceable unit. In each noticeable unit. And each noticeable unit is determined by our basal metabolism or basal pace. We can talk about the physical world as if we were astronomers or physicists, etc.

[37:03]

We can talk about the physical world as if we were astronomers or physicists or biologists. But as a living human being, the wisdom of Buddhism is know the world through your own mind. noticeable appearances it relates to the pulse of the world itself but it's your pulse not a dragonfly's pulse and so each appearance happens through you And Cezanne would say, each appearance that he decides to paint, when he paints it, each appearance

[38:27]

has a culminating point. And he discovers the culminating point of each appearance through painting his way to the culminating point. And that is a very subtle way to talk about what in Buddhism would be a Dharma. If you move in the world through in the field of in-betweenness, even though the concept may give you directions, your experience is the culminating point of each momentary unit. So it's a kind of practice of mindful attention.

[39:50]

Or mindful appearance. Or a kind of extended, heightened, deepening mindfulness. And you educate that extended, deepened, heightened mindfulness By the fullness of your engagement with the world. For the fullness of your non-conceptual engagement with phenomena. And that is a statement the same as or very close to anything that Kurt Hahn or Hugo Kugelhaus might say.

[41:10]

So I think we are continuing the tradition of this European tradition and this Buddhist Dharma tradition. And maybe you're tired of me talking about this. So I promise never to speak about appearance again. At least until it appears. Thank you very much. Satsang with Mooji

[42:14]

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