Crestone, CO

Now, I'm blogging in lag-time. This entry is about our adventures in Crestone which ended a couple weeks ago. Since then I've been to a conference in Tucson, AZ, Long Beach, and spent a weekend at Tassajara in California. Right now, I'm writing at Esalen retreat center in Big Sur, CA. I'll write about all these places when I get the time! For now, Crestone . . .

Crestone was a magnificent place a haven for serious spiritual practicioners and spiritually curious retirees. The current manifestation of Crestone begins with the unlikely story of a wealthy entrepeneur, some ambassador or UN official who moved into Crestone later in life with the intention of tapping its vast water reservoirs and perhaps mining. Long story short, his wife went with him. One day at their house somebody knocked on their door, she answered, and her visitor said, “It’s about time you arrived; I’ve been waiting for you.” He explained that he was a hermit living in the mountains. He had visions that she would come, buy up the land, and use it to support the construction of spiritual centers from the world’s religious traditions. It would become a place of inter-cultural and inter-religious solidarity, a haven for spiritual practioners in the U.S. Over the next twenty or thirty years the Strongs discounted or completely funded the building of spiritual centers. We visitied Tibetan and Bhutanese Buddhist centers, two Zen centers, a secular Japanese spiritual-environmental group (Shumei), an ashram, a Sri Aurobindo center, and a hermitage for Catholic Carmelite monks. Other smaller groups get together to do Sufi zikrs, taichi, and yoga. The alternative healing scene is also very big in Crestone; Crestone hosts some of the countries foremost alternative healers.

Crestone was also scattered with various Tibetan Buddhist stupas. In the town there was a couple cafes and hotels, a bar, and a natural foods grocery. There couldn’t have been more than a few thousand people living there. The elevation was 8,000 ft.

Olivia has a complete schedule of what we did while we there, but we visited almost all of the known centers and stupas that were open to the public. A few Tibetan centers were closed for retreats. The local monthly paper published a lot of the events open to the publicc and we also called ahead. We joined a woman with a couple other people at her house for a Sufi Zikr. We visited the stupas, circumambulated, chanted, and made offerings like good devotees. We joined the people at the Lakshmi ashram for their morning puja (just two other people) and the revealing of their gorgeous but syncretic Laskhmi (+other deities) statue. At their facilities they had an Earthship and a lot more sustainable projects going on.

(Now I'm writing on 6/24/09 at Tassajara Zen Center.)

The Sri Aurobindo center visit was disappointing; it was simply an open invite to sit in their dome and meditate. We visited a vacant Bhutanese place, but were just in time to catch a retreatant who was coming down to the temple for his occasional shower; he let us in and showed us around. The last night we also visited a smaller Tibetan place called Vajra Vidya, where we participated in a Medicine Buddha practice in a small shrine room.

The other Tibetan Buddhist place we visited was the Dharma Ocean center. The teacher there is a former Naropa professor: Dr. Reginald Ray, whose stuff I’ve read, namely excerpts from a book called Indestructible Truth. Dr. Ray was a student of Trungpa, and he has a rather large sangha of Vajrayana practioners, Katherine, our Boulder host, being one of them. His primary emphasis is unleashing the wisdom of the body. The simplest meditation they do is one that I have taken up because it has really helped me get in touch with my back pain, and general bodily energy. You lay on your back with your feet face down on the ground and knees up like you are going to give birth. After calming your mind, you focus your energy at different points of the body, from the feet to the head, breathing into each part and relaxing any tension. It’s a particularly good exercise for contacting, inhabiting, and moving stuck energy. It’s a very good substitute for zazen (Zen sitting meditation) when the pain is too excruciating. I am going to ask my teachers at Great Vow if I can do it on days were my back pain is bad.

Another morning we sat at the Dragon Mountain Zen Temple, then stayed for a dharma talk. The structure of the place was a really interesting use of straw bale adobe. The zendo was circular, and two or three rows were a few feet below each other. The head teacher used to sit with the San Francisco Zen people for a long time. I was told that one point, he also followed Richard Baker Roshi (mentioned later) out to Crestone Zen Center to become his student, but I guess that didn’t work out. He apparently got formal transmission from a Japanese teacher and built his own temple/zendo/complex in the valley of the Crestone mountains. Apparently his wife, and student, is rather wealthy and was a big funder behind the project. After sitting zazen with him and some others in the circular zendo, we joined them for a dharma (Buddhist teaching) talk, tea, and conversation on the second floor of their very new, but well-decorated (zen meets southwest adobe) home.

His talk was impromptu, abstract, and surprisingly intellectual. He was able to express his own non-dual experience with a lot of wit and insight. He made an explicit effort to tie Zen with a range of other traditions and to make sense of it in a Western context, even by frequently alluding to Western literature. As he expressed it, his personal position was not to form strict hierarchical relations, particularly guru/disciple, and claimed that that model wasn’t right for our cultural context. He had a good sense of humor, was extremely intelligent, and clever with words. His impromptu talk was roughly centered on Jean Gebser’s theory on worldviews. He made the point that we operate in multiple worldviews, multiple logics, and that some tasks or enterprises are specific to certain worldviews. He gave the example of people going to astrologers or I Ching anagram readers (mythological) to make specific decisions in their life (rational). Using the wrong tool for a particular outcome simply doesn’t work. It was refreshing to see a Zen teacher take such a post-modern, integral, and, frankly, intellectual, approach to his path. If I return to Crestone I would certainly like to visit the temple again.

I also visited the Crestone Zen Center, the senior of the two Zen centers. Crestone Zen is a more formal training monastery, started by Richard Baker Roshi. I did not enjoy my visit there. Perhaps primed by ideas of it as highly formal and unwelcoming, as well as recent pain in my back. I arrived at 5:45 am for a 6:30 am sit, but was given a seat as soon as I got to the zendo, so I sat for almost two hours straight. Those who spoke to me were very terse, straightforward, and otherwise unwelcoming. The zendo, however, was exquisite. The most beautiful and authentically Japanese zendo I’ve ever come across. It has everything from the sliding doors, dim lights, and elevated platforms to the drawers beneath the platforms for monks to cram all their possessions. Crestone Zen is also known for their sizable dome which they inherited with the property. It’s apparently pretty magical and acoustically prime for musical events.

On another note, while at Dharma Ocean, Olivia accidentally stepped on a wasp, which stung her and kept her from really walking for the next 24 hours. The people at Dharma Ocean were really helpful, and it was someone there, Wayne, who let us stay at his house (or rather the house he house-sits) for a night. The first night we slept at a bed and breakfast with a character named JoAnn, maybe I’ll talk about her later. The second night we camped at the “closed for renovation” campground in North Crestone. The third, the campground spots were taken so we drove about 20-30 miles outside of Crestone to find a campground. The last night (after Wayne) we stayed at a clothing optional hot springs which we accidentally came across in our search for camping.

Wayne has been here and there since the 1960s. He has worked on farms, Zen centers, and who knows what else for decades. His home is his van, but when he found us he had been house-sitting in a rich family’s summer house for 6 months and would continue to for another year. He had practiced at Crestone Zen full-time for awhile. He’s also been into other stuff, particularly skiing and tai chi. He’d been practicing tai chi for 30 years and had studied under some people in California. He’s also read a lot. We talked about Ken Wilber (an author) quite a bit. His personality was extremely chill and refreshing. He talked about spiritual matters with such casualness and open-mindedness,

“Yep, zazen, yeah. It’s all about the posture. Sit straight, like a hollow tube, I say. Sit like that for days on end and you’re good to go. It’ll hurt real bad, but you’ll see something while you’re at it. A sesshin will squeeze you until you pop . . . My first sesshin, a couple friends and I drive up to the Zen center for the weekend. We thought we’d be sitting around relaxing. We were in for a real surprise. Changed my life; I wasn’t the same after that.”

He saw the positive side to everything, but not in a cheap way.

He gave me my first longer tai chi lesson. I learned a ton just in 30 or 40 minutes. It’s a good practice for sinking my butt down and lengthening my spine, getting in touch with my chi and the energy out of my tanden (energy center in the lower belly), rooting my feet into the ground and taking the work out of my upper body. Frankly, a month of straight tai chi would do me a lot of good. This practice might just be what I’m looking for in order to work with and balance out my bodily energy.

That was Crestone. It’d be a great place for retreat; I don’t know about living there though or how one would make money there. It could certainly become a major spiritual hub in the U.S and a pilgrimage site. It’s also rife with New Age vibes and conversation. There’s a real consensus amongst almost everyone we met there that NOW is the time of crucial transformation across the globe. The abbott from Dragon Mountain, idealistically put Crestone in its place. He talked about how religious exploration is perhaps the deepest American tradition. A, if not THE, major motivation for the early pilgrims was religious freedom, a place to practice various forms of Christianity outside of the church (although this complicated by the indigenous American spiritual traditions that have been gradually wiped out in the process). It has also been a place of (relative) religious tolerance and pluralism, separation of church and state.

“We’re shipwrecked on the shore of nirvana,” Steve said. New spiritual realization and potential is background for our fragmented, experimental, spiritual expeditions. Steve might be right in situating Crestone as a place for fruitful experimentation in “a world gone mad.”

Next, the IONS conference in Tucson . . .

Thanks for reading.