Let me apologize a little bit for not participating more with you in the Sendo and during this work week. But I'm sort of pretending I'm not here. Yeah, because we're trying to buy Crestone about 150 acres as a protective zone between us and the mountain above us. Yeah, it looks like above that it will become a national park and wilderness area. Maybe you don't have much wilderness in Germany.

[01:14]

You don't have the word. Yeah, so there's a kind of strip of land between us and what will be this wilderness area. Which I think for the centuries to come is the best way to protect Crestone. And to continue, it's supported as a sanctuary and practice place. and to support it as a sanctuary.

[02:27]

So it means I have to find, I don't know, 10 or 20 friends to give us $150,000. Actually $200,000. And that has to be done in the next few weeks. So the next payment's the end of October. Yeah. So I'm trying to write some letters explaining what we're doing here actually and in Crestone. I have to really concentrate on that to be able to do it.

[03:29]

As in Berlin, a number of people have asked me to speak about this World Trade Center disaster in New York and in Washington. Yeah, and it's obviously not very easy to talk about. Yeah, and I described Apache talk the other day. And what that did. Most of you weren't here, but what that is, is supposedly the Apache Indians.

[04:53]

Think of some conversations as a series of images. which then continue silently in each individual. So the conversation only initiates a process in the participants. So the point of the images is not to say something, complete something. But to start a process that works in the participants. And over weeks or months or years even, begins to make a communal solution.

[06:11]

So that's actually very close to what Zen lectures are supposed to be like, too. Koans are assumed to be like that. They're composed that way. Sie sind so komponiert. Not to be complete on the page, but to start a process that might find completion in you. Sie sind nicht vollständig auf der Seite, sondern Sie starten einen Prozess in euch, um dort eine Vollständigkeit hervorzubringen. In the Blue Cliff Records, Yuan Wu makes a statement in case number two, I think.

[07:12]

It says in spring it sprouts. In summer it matures. In fall it is harvested. In winter it is stored. With equanimity, all things disappear. What does a statement like that mean? It's quite obvious. So what? But anyway, it's a turning phrase in this koan. And I hope in what I'm speaking about this morning.

[08:16]

Yeah, and of course a lot of people are asking me how I feel as an American about this. But even though my family has been in the United States for eight or nine generations, From its beginning, I actually don't feel like an American. I feel about as much like an American as the Turkish grocer feels like a German. He might even feel more German than I feel American. Anyway, I certainly don't politically identify with Americans.

[09:18]

Yeah, geographically I do. And I feel, you know, if I drive a car, I'm responsible for people being killed. Because it's the institution of driving which kills. If you have a certain percentage of people driving and cars, some people are going to get killed. Do I accept that? Well, no, but in fact, every time I drive, I accept it. I mean, I felt that as a young man.

[10:39]

I actually didn't get a driver's license until I was, I don't know, 20 or something. And I didn't own a car or drive a car very often until I was 26 or 27. And in a similar way, I didn't put money in a bank. I've never owned a stock or anything. Because I didn't want to participate in the system. But at some point, actually, with Zen practice and Suzuki Roshi, made me start participating.

[11:39]

He said, you should vote. I'd never voted. Even if your vote counts or doesn't count, you still should participate. Even if you're a vegetarian, if your friend eats meat, you should eat meat with your friend. So, anyway, that kind of what is actually a bodhisattva view of being in the world. So this event has occurred. And I acknowledge a lot of responsibility of America in it. America turned Afghanistan into a battlefield, Cold War battlefield.

[13:07]

Yeah. And much of what happened with the USSR at that time and the United States is... We're reaping the harvest of that now. And I take the horrible so-called Cambodia killing fields to be a lot of the cause of it is America intervention. Cambodia killing fields? Where some millions of people were killed in Cambodia. It's called the Cambodian killing fields. Cambodia is that? Sorry. Cambodia.

[14:10]

I don't know how to translate. Killing fields in Cambodia. Yeah, so... But does that allow this? Does that say, okay, we should do nothing? I mean, a lot of America's intention in the arms race was really not to compete in arms, but to bankrupt the Soviet Union. I was part of a Soviet-American exchange in the late 70s and early 80s. And I saw State Department documents just saying that this is to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

[15:24]

And the war in Afghanistan was seen the same thing. It was a way of trying to bankrupt the Soviet Union. And it basically did. It was the final blow to the system. So the war in Afghanistan led to the Berlin Wall coming down. And the reunification of Germany. Is it worth it? What I'm trying to say is that causation year is very complicated.

[16:32]

And some of you may have noticed or read that the date September 11th was the date that the British signed the mandate forming Israel. And in 1948, it's when the UN participated in forming Israel. But what if the British had decided to give Scotland to the Jews? Or the Germans had decided, oh, we'll give Bavaria to the Jews.

[17:39]

Instead of giving Arab lands. You'd have a lot of very angry Bavarians and Scottish people fighting right now. It's outrageous that European countries think they can give away Arab lands? England and Ireland can't even solve the Protestant-Catholic conflict. How can we expect the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be solved? I don't mean to take sides here.

[18:42]

We're in a mess. But what is a proportionate framework of causation? proportionate, in proportion. or acceptable framework of causation. If someone comes up and threatens to kill Sophia, because perhaps her great-uncle was a Nazi, I don't care. I'm going to protect Sophia. I'm not going to say you have a right to kill her then.

[19:47]

So I can't say we have a right to kill. Anyone has a right to do what happened in New York and Washington. Whatever the causal framework. But you know, a few people can change the world. The few passengers who seem to have wrestled the hijackers And crashed the plane in Pennsylvania. I think without question changed the world. More than what happened in the World Trade Center changed the world. Because that plane seems to have been headed for the Capitol or the White House.

[21:00]

If that plane had hit either of those targets... we'd be in a world war, right? America would not have been able, psychologically, to leave space for decisions. So if there's another big terrorist act in America or Europe, I mean, I think it's possible that Afghanistan would be a big hole after that. So we actually have some space right now. To try to decide what should be done. Mm-hmm. And I think each of us have to make that decision.

[22:14]

I don't think you can expect the so-called leaders to rethink our world. If each of us is not willing to rethink our world. Yeah. And that's one of the, again, a kind of bodhisattva view. That what happens in you can happen to anyone. Or if it can't happen in you, it may not be able to happen in someone else.

[23:19]

So if you can come to a solution yourself, it makes it more possible that someone else can come to a solution. If you can't come to a solution, it makes it less likely that someone else can. So I don't think it's helpful for us to Think in cliches. Helpful for us to think in cliches. Like I hear quite often. America is such and such a place and they're going to do such and such now. It's those same kind of cliches which justify crashing those planes into the World Trade Center. Which, by the way, I was just at a Buddhist conference there. beginning of July.

[24:37]

The World Trade Center towers are here, and right between them is the Marriott Hotel. And this Tresco magazine Buddhist conference was there. And I was one of the speakers. So Marie-Louise and I and Sophia were all staying in that hotel. Marie-Louise and I and Sophia, we all lived in this hotel. And we always had breakfast there. We had breakfast together and the towers were very close to each other. They looked very solid and very big. The shirt I was wearing yesterday was bought in the store across the street.

[25:47]

That building's gone now. The shirt I was wearing yesterday I bought in the store across the street and that building's gone now. So I think we really need to rethink our world. What is international? What is a proportionate sense of causation? Part of it is there's a huge disproportion between Western Europe and America and the rest of the world economically. And that disproportion can't be hidden. How do we change that proportion? Until we change that proportion, we're going to have these problems. We can see what a few people with small knives can do.

[27:07]

Yeah. But it doesn't mean everything has to be equal. We've had a lot of experiments in that direction and they didn't work. I remember a friend of mine writing me and saying that somebody took him out to dinner in Paris. And he felt very guilty. Because afterwards he went to India. And the meal cost two or three months wages in India. Yeah, but Not eating the meal doesn't make that much difference, or any difference.

[28:19]

Might make a difference to you personally. But the table the meal was served on was a year's wages. The rug under the table is another proportionately huge amount of money. The salary of the waiter would support ten families. You can't take a whole system and move it to another place. So I think we have to accept there's going to be a difference. But the differences somehow have to be in proportion.

[29:28]

And in Japan I saw an example of that proportion. Not that in any way Japan is a... is an ideal country. One of the things that struck me was how the culture at the bottom of the culture and the top is the same. Which, for example, isn't true in China. And the ordinary farmer had the same level of carpentry and same kind of clothes and so forth as the very top of society. There's a big difference in quantity, but not a difference in quality.

[30:34]

And that seems to be healthier. It's more acceptable if there's only a quantity difference and not a quality difference. When you see a Chinese painting, for instance. I'm thinking of one. And there's a man sitting in a chair. There's a little hut and a window. And around the hut there's a garden. And around the garden there's big trees and then big mountains in the back. What's the subject of this painting? The subject is proportion.

[31:42]

Actually, the chair is in some ways a mediator of proportion. It was a big decision of the Chinese culture to adopt Buddhist ceremonial furniture for their domestic houses. It was a big decision for Chinese culture to adopt Buddhist ceremonial furniture for domestic use. Japan didn't do that, for instance. They stayed sitting on the floor. But the chair still was thought it's a mediation between standing and sitting. And the chair should help you be in a healthy posture. Where you hold your back upright.

[33:05]

So Chinese furniture, if you look, it always has straight backs and hard to sit on wooden... you know, seats. And none of this comfortable furniture that I believe Europe learned from the Dutch. My point is you can see it quite a lot in small things. I mean, the Japanese made a decision to design their clothes and houses to keep people, ordinary people, in a meditative posture. The Seiza posture I said yesterday.

[34:07]

It was thought that just as you have to have a bedroom because people need to sleep, You have to have a living room that's disguised as Zendo. And I'm not saying we should adopt that. But I'm saying it comes out of a sense of proportion. But I say it comes from an understanding of proportionality. I talked about this some years ago. Oh, speed, the idea of speed is something that comes with trains.

[35:11]

Before trains, there was no concept of speed. If you said you were coming to visit by horse, they'd know how long that took. If you're walking, that was another proportion. I think the question is, how do we bring the world into proportion? So you feel a relationship between the chair, the garden, the window, the mountain. And other people. And this proportion is way off right now. I think at least what we can do is try to establish that proportion in our own lives.

[36:24]

Ivan Illich said that each of us and must become a model of the way we want the world to be. Each of us and every group we participate in And every place we work should become a model of how we want people to be. How we want the world to be. And how we want our era, our period to be. This is basically the vision of the Sangha, Bodhisattva practice.

[37:44]

Sangha is, how do you live proportionately? And how to extend that proportion to the other groups we live in. How do we find proportion here with our sitting and working and using this garden and so forth? The Sangha means Maybe the world can live together if a small group can live together. One of the most frustrating things for me is when we have here in this house disputes, some people can't get along with others, etc.

[38:51]

In some ways we have an ideal situation here. What's the big problem? We just... The roof doesn't leak too often. We have a lot of people helping with the cooking. cleaning and so forth. If we can't get along, how can we expect the world to get along? So the basic sense of proportion and of practice And the ideal of the Sangha and the Bodhisattva practice is to solve these problems in your immediate situation and in yourself.

[39:56]

And only then we can imagine extending that kind of solution to others. Yeah, back in the early 60s, Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring. Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson. Yeah, Rachel Carson. A silent spring. She noticed that the birds were, less birds were around, and she discovered it was because of DDT. Sie hat bemerkt, dass es weniger Vögel gab und sie hat entdeckt, dass es am DDT lag.

[40:59]

Und ihr Buch hat diese weltweite ökologische Bewegung in Gang gesetzt. Virtually everyone in the world at least pays lip service to. It's a revolution. When I read Silent Spring, I reviewed it actually for a publication. I couldn't believe in my lifetime it would be world policy. And we've outlawed, for the most part, slavery. Maybe we can outlaw war. Or maybe we can have some

[42:01]

human ecology, proportionate human ecology. This may be an opportunity. There's still fluidity in the positions people are taking. Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, he says to discover yourself to know yourself in the midst of things to discover your true self in the midst of things is the highest form of wisdom in spring it sprouts In summer it matures.

[43:14]

In autumn it is harvested. In winter it is stored. This means all things are in proportion. When there is this proportion, all things disappear, take care of themselves. We're not there yet. But we can have some vision like this in ourselves. Find proportion in our own lives and workplaces and with our friends. And perhaps eventually in the world. Thank you very much.

[44:09]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_69.15