Sep 17, 2024 – Visit to LA Jungto Retreat Center, Weekly Dharma Meeting Online
Hello. Today is the day we visit the LA Jungto Retreat Center located in Cuyama Valley.
Sunim had to leave early due to the long distance. He had breakfast at 3:30 AM and departed for San Jose Airport at 3:50 AM.
Yesterday was Chuseok in Korea, but due to the 16-hour time difference, it’s Chuseok today here in the United States. The full moon of Chuseok was shining brightly in the predawn sky of America.
Upon arriving at San Jose Airport, Sunim expressed gratitude to Kim Jae-myung and Park Il-hwan for driving, then headed to the boarding gate.
The plane that departed from San Jose Airport at 6:20 AM arrived at LA Airport at 7:30 AM after a 1 hour and 10 minutes flight.
Upon exiting the airport, Lee Kyung-taek, a member of LA Jungto Society, warmly greeted Sunim. They immediately got in the car and headed for the LA Jungto Retreat Center.
After an hour’s drive from the airport, Cuyama Valley came into view. Cuyama Valley is a valley that stretches along the Cuyama River in central California, surrounded by mountain ranges, boasting beautiful scenery.
As they entered the winding mountain road, they could see mountains where most of the trees had burned in a large wildfire in California 16 years ago.
They arrived at the LA Jungto Retreat Center just before 11 AM. After parking the car, they carried their lunch boxes and crossed a wide sandy field to reach the retreat center.
After not being able to visit for four years since the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunim visited once last year and today again to inspect the condition of the retreat center.
The LA Jungto Retreat Center was established through the efforts of local Jungto Society members who actively searched for a good site and raised funds to acquire the land and buildings. Many retreats were held here, but it has not been used since the COVID-19 pandemic.
As soon as they arrived at the retreat center, Sunim paid respects at the Dharma hall and looked around the interior. He inspected the office, restrooms, dining area, and other places to check if the electricity and water were working properly. Thanks to the monthly visits and management by the overseas branch, the retreat center was clean. After looking around the interior and having lunch, they also examined the surroundings of the retreat center. Sunim discussed with Lee Kyung-taek about how to renovate, where to rent equipment, and who should do the construction work.
The jujube trees planted after the center opened in 2002 were laden with jujubes. Although the jujubes were smaller than before due to lack of watering, they were sweet and delicious. Sunim and Lee Kyung-taek picked jujubes while standing on the sloping ground.
In a short time, they harvested enough jujubes to fill a basket.
“This should be enough to share with people at the lodging.”
After transferring the jujubes to a bag, they left the LA Jungto Retreat Center again at 1:30 PM. Golden mountains and fields stretched out beyond the car window. Due to the dry climate and prolonged drought, all the grass had withered, turning the mountains yellow.
After driving on the highway for three hours, Sunim arrived at Ko Bon-hwa’s house in Orange County at 4:30 PM.
After a brief rest, they started the live broadcast of the Weekly Dharma Meeting at 6 PM. It was 10 AM in Korea. As Jungto Society members entered the video conference room, Sunim greeted them for Chuseok.
“Everyone, did you have a good Chuseok? I believe you had a good time celebrating our traditional holiday, visiting your hometown and meeting family after a long time. However, some people couldn’t rest during the Chuseok holiday and were even busier than usual. Let’s be grateful to those who worked hard so that we could have a comfortable and safe holiday, such as hospital staff guarding emergency rooms, drivers and transportation workers helping many people travel during the holiday, police officers maintaining public safety, soldiers protecting our country, and sanitation workers cleaning up more garbage than usual.
Today, my companions and I also became busier people on Chuseok. While yesterday was Chuseok in Korea, it’s Chuseok today where I am in the United States. Despite it being Chuseok, our group left our lodging at 4 AM, took a plane from San Francisco to LA. There’s a Jungto Retreat Center in LA. After driving for a long time to visit and inspect the retreat center, we’re now sitting in front of the camera just in time for the Weekly Dharma Assembly.
Last week, I visited East Timor and then came to Seattle in the U.S. From Seattle, I traveled through Vancouver and San Francisco, and now I’ve arrived in LA. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be giving five more lectures in Las Vegas, San Diego, LA twice, and Orange County. After that, I’ll take a plane back to Korea.
I just watched a video about the activities of Jungto practitioners over the past week. Jungto practitioners are providing a lot of service for the public at the main temples and various other places. Jungto Society is being maintained and developed by many such volunteers. While the video mainly showed offline activities, there are far more people volunteering online. There are those who run and assist with the Jungto Dharma School, Jungto Sutra Course, and Happiness School, those who conduct and assist with the Awakening Retreat at Mungyeong Jungto Retreat Center, and many volunteers at Jungto Publishing, Sunim’s Daily Life team, and the Video Media team who are taking charge of Jungto Society’s work. In the international branches, there are people doing translation work and creating content, and JTS activists dispatched overseas are working for human welfare around the world. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Jungto practitioners who are working without proper rest even during Chuseok.
After leaving Bhutan, I went to Oceania and conducted Dharma Q&As for six days, moving through major cities in Australia and New Zealand. Then I went to East Timor and met with Mr. Eugenio Lemos, who received the 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Award, to discuss sustainable eco-friendly agriculture. It was my first visit to Oceania for Dharma Q&As in five years since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lectures were successfully held thanks to the service and dedication of many volunteers. Now, I’ll share a video of the Oceania lectures and the visit to East Timor.”
Then we watched a video of Sunim’s tour of Oceania and visit to East Timor last week.
After the video ended, Sunim continued:
“How was the video? In East Timor, they were working hard on a movement to revive springs. They had dug holes all over the mountains to get a single stream of water, so that when it rains, water collects in these holes and seeps into the ground. If left alone, rainwater would flow away along the surface of the land in just a day, but by digging holes, the rainwater collects and seeps into the ground, causing water to come out from springs below. In the past, when the forests were dense, water flowed well from the springs, and people lived together in small groups in the mountains using this spring water. But as the forests became barren and the climate changed, the springs dried up.
The field workers were overjoyed to see even a trickle of water, not even as much as a single faucet would produce. Seeing this, I could feel how scarce water really is in East Timor.
Thinking of Those Who Strive for a Single Stream of Water
Today, we use water abundantly, so we don’t know its preciousness, nor do we understand the feelings of people living in places where water is scarce. We eat food plentifully, so we don’t know the feelings of hungry people, nor do we understand the preciousness of food. We wear clothes abundantly, so we don’t fully appreciate the gratitude and preciousness of clothing. Human desires are endless. So it seems we live without knowing how to be satisfied. However, if we save just a little of what we have and share it, we can give new hope to many people. If we provide even a small amount of money for food to those people who are trying so hard to get a single stream of water, they will happily dig more holes in the mountains to revive springs. If we provide just a little material, they can draw water to their homes to drink and grow vegetables. With the revival of a small spring, schools and health centers can also be established in the surrounding area. In our country too, in the past, when building a fortress or a temple, they would look for a place where even a small spring was flowing. Water is that precious.
Right now, due to climate change, various changes are occurring all over the world. Sometimes a huge amount of water pours down at once causing terrible floods, sometimes there’s no rain causing severe droughts, and as temperatures rise and it becomes drier, forest fires are becoming more frequent. Even now, we’re crying out about abnormal weather, but this is just the beginning. As we move forward, disasters caused by climate change will only grow larger. Therefore, knowing how to be satisfied with less, consuming less, and having the capacity to help others so that poor people can live happily – this is the path that practitioners should take. I hope you will think about this point once again as we celebrate Chuseok.”
Next, Sunim had a conversation with those who had submitted questions in advance. Three people asked Sunim questions. One of them was considering divorce from her husband and sought Sunim’s advice on how to manage her feelings.
I’ve Already Divorced in My Heart, but I’m Worried About My Child
“What aspect of your husband is the most difficult to endure?”
“It’s his way of speaking.”
“How does he speak?”
“He speaks very directly. When I prepare a meal, he asks if this is all I could manage. Even though I prepare it with care, it doesn’t seem that way to him, and that’s what’s difficult.”
“Then you can just say ‘I’m sorry.'”
“That’s right. I should be able to just say ‘I’m sorry,’ but I can’t do it at all. After hearing such words, my emotions get involved even with our child, and that’s also very painful.”
“You’ve done your best, but from his perspective, it’s not enough. So you’re apologizing to him. You’re not apologizing because you’ve done something wrong or are lacking, but because you couldn’t meet his standards. You can say you’re sorry because your standards are different.
A boss wants employees to work proactively. But employees just do as much work as they can. If the boss keeps wanting employees to work wholeheartedly, dissatisfaction arises when they don’t. Similarly, you’ve done your best, but because your husband’s standards are high, you’re not meeting them. As a husband, he might be like that. So if you just say ‘I’m sorry,’ it’s not a big deal.”
“That’s not easy for me to do.”
“The fact that you can’t do that is your problem. Does your husband also want to divorce you? Is he in a position where he absolutely can’t live with you? Or is that not the case?”
“A few days ago, after a big argument, such words were exchanged between us.”
“It seems your husband said that impulsively because he was upset when you mentioned divorce? Or is he, like you, in a position where he feels he can’t live with you no matter what?”
“It seemed impulsive.”
“If that’s the case, it would be good if you could make a bit more effort. But hearing about your husband, he seems to have a lot in common with me. It seems like you’re in a state where you feel you ‘can’t live even with Pomnyun Sunim.’ (Laughs)”
“That’s why my older sister has urged me several times to attend the Awakening Retreat, and I finally signed up after a big fight recently. What should I focus on during the retreat?”
“The Awakening Retreat doesn’t require any preparation at all. You don’t need to know anything in advance. Just go and enjoy yourself for five days. It’s not a program where you need to make any effort. You don’t need any prior knowledge, practice, determination, or resolution. As long as you don’t quit in the middle saying you don’t want to do it anymore, or refuse to participate in the training saying ‘I don’t want to listen,’ it’s designed for you to naturally achieve enlightenment. That’s why it’s called the ‘Awakening Retreat.’
However, enlightenment and the divorce issue are separate matters. After enlightenment, you might conclude that divorce is the right choice, or you might conclude that not divorcing is better. You might even have a major realization about something completely different from the divorce issue. So the Awakening Retreat and the divorce issue are not directly related. Whether to divorce or not is not the task of the Awakening Retreat. Compared to enlightenment, the divorce issue is a minor problem. Who you live with or don’t live with is not an important issue in your life. In the Awakening Retreat, we focus on more fundamental issues like how we should live our lives and how we should view the world. So you shouldn’t go to the Awakening Retreat seeking help with your divorce issue. That would be like going to a place that offers something big and only trying to get something small. With such an attitude, you’ll gain very little.
The Awakening Retreat deals with the big question of ‘How should we live our lives?’ You’re married, so whether to continue living together or divorce seems like a big issue, but compared to enlightenment, it’s not a significant problem at all. So, set aside the divorce issue and comfortably follow the guidance during the retreat. There are no correct answers. If there were correct answers, it wouldn’t be the Awakening Retreat. The Awakening Retreat is about realizing your own foolishness. That’s why no preparation is needed, you just need to go.
Whether to divorce or not is your freedom. When you work hard to prepare a meal and your husband says, ‘Is this all you can do?’, that’s not necessarily patriarchal. It’s not authoritarian either. He’s just speaking from his own standards. If your husband could set aside his standards and say, ‘Honey, thank you for working hard to prepare the meal’ regardless of how the food tastes, he would be at the level of a practitioner. Ordinary people who are not practitioners all speak from their own perspective. So your husband is not a bad person. He’s just expressing thoughts from his own standards, like ‘The food is bland’ or ‘There’s too much food.’ There’s no need to argue about this. You can just accept it as ‘That’s his perspective.’
“Such differences in opinion are not significant enough to make living together impossible. It seems that the questioner is fixated on this issue. Let’s discuss this after you attend the Awakening Retreat.”
“Yes, I will attend and return.”
The questions continued to come in.
Often, employees don’t work as hard as expected. What perspective and attitude should I have while running a company?
I’ve never achieved 100% completion of the 100-day prayer in the past ten years, which makes me feel discouraged. How can I, someone with a lot of inferiority complexes, become happy?
After finishing the live broadcast, it was 7:30 PM. Sunim had dinner, then worked on some tasks before concluding the day’s activities.
Tomorrow, Sunim will depart from Orange County Airport in the morning and travel to Las Vegas Airport. In the afternoon, he will have a meeting with Jungto Society members in Las Vegas, and in the evening, the fourth lecture of the North American West Coast tour series will be held in Las Vegas.
