Protecting Life
Supporting a Three-Year Religious Meditation Retreat for World Peace
The religious practitioner studies and follows comprehensive scriptural instructions in the classical ideas of ancient spirituality and languages taught through an authentic lineage for the last thousand years. It has been the traditional practice to secure a remote retreat facility with the simplest features, such as caves and mud huts.
This facility will be used to sustainably supply water, food and shelter, to support the minimal physical needs, of religious practitioners as they embark on daily meditation, prayer and yoga practices over a three-year period or less. The structure and operation of the facility itself will remove needs for food deliveries and trash removal, thereby facilitating a traffic-free solitary environment during the meditation program.
To insure the least amount of distractions and infiltrating vibrations from man made materials and toxic activities, these simple buildings are designed with the intention to avoid products and materials dependent on new consumption of fossil fuels, first time purchases, and contributors of toxic waste in their manufacturing, distribution and disposal around the world. If a new product demands that life be harmed or killed during any of these three phases of a product’s life, it cannot be used due to moral and conscientious objections. This is to also help maintain vows that practitioners have taken to protect life and environment as a part of this religious practice.
The same criterion applies to food and water. Religious activities facilities will offer infrastructure that provides all water and nutritional needs of the religious practitioner on site. This eliminates 
further fossil fuel consumption and expensive car wear and tear by caregivers in purchasing food items in stores from hundreds of miles away, which is the current practice. This also eliminates the fuel used to get the food products to that store in the first place. (Did you know the average American lunch has traveled 
over 22,000 miles to get to your table?) This then keeps tons of packaging materials out of landfills, which is an escalating problem worldwide due to the increasingly high volume demands of American consumers. Instead of fuel intensive and toxic food and garbage, caregivers will deliver food starter plants and seeds for each to grow their own, within the turnkey food and storage facilities that are an integral built-in part of the 
facility. And this is primary function of the first of two buildings: a green house for the food.
The religious activities facilities will also locally catch and store water needed for religious practitioners. This eliminates dependence on a fossil fuel based water supply, which is the current water source.
Abiquiu Sikh Mosque,
New Mexico
The second building is an adobe dome that functions as one pod of a decentralized library. Religious practitioners will serve the housing of a section of religious books as they also catalogue, translate and write commentaries. Decentralizing rediscovered collections into fire resistant adobe structures, will serve to reduce vulnerability of these religious books for the benefit of future generations.
The materials used for these structures will be stone, adobe, recycled glass, locally wild harvested timbers, locally hand crafted components and local ingenuity.
The building methods implemented will be those used by indigenous peoples living in arid deserts on over 35% of the earth’s land mass, who’ve lived in simplicity, comfort and beauty, engineered, tested and proven throughout millennia. The adobe and stone greenhouse and domed library will have adobe sculpted benches, counters, niches, and vessels with water gravity fed from cisterns catching rainwater from the roofs of the two buildings.
It is the intention of this design to provide a sustainable, economic and non-toxic religious activities facility for religious practitioners who have moral objections to toxic building methods or materials, or with financial limitations.
Kat Ehrhorn
katehrhorn@gmail.com
To insure the least amount of distractions and infiltrating vibrations from man made materials and toxic activities, these simple buildings are designed with the intention to avoid products and materials dependent on new consumption of fossil fuels, first time purchases, and contributors of toxic waste in their manufacturing, distribution and disposal around the world. If a new product demands that life be harmed or killed during any of these three phases of a product’s life, it cannot be used due to moral and conscientious objections. This is to also help maintain vows that practitioners have taken to protect life and environment as a part of this religious practice.
The same criterion applies to food and water. Religious activities facilities will offer infrastructure that provides all water and nutritional needs of the religious practitioner on site. This eliminates further fossil fuel consumption and expensive car wear and tear by caregivers in purchasing food items in stores from hundreds of miles away, which is the current practice. This also eliminates the fuel used to get the food products to that store in the first place. (Did you know the average American lunch has traveled over 22,000 miles to get to your table?) This then keeps tons of packaging materials out of landfills, which is an escalating problem worldwide due to the increasingly high volume demands of American consumers. Instead of fuel intensive and toxic food and garbage, caregivers will deliver food starter plants and seeds for each to grow their own, within the turnkey food and storage facilities that are an integral built-in part of the facility. And this is primary function of the first of two buildings: a green house for the food.
The religious activities facilities will also locally catch and store water needed for religious practitioners. This eliminates dependence on a fossil fuel based water supply, which is the current water source.
Abiquiu Sikh Mosque,
New Mexico
The second building is an adobe dome that functions as one pod of a decentralized library. Religious practitioners will serve the housing of a section of religious books as they also catalogue, translate and write commentaries. Decentralizing rediscovered collections into fire resistant adobe structures, will serve to reduce vulnerability of these religious books for the benefit of future generations.
The materials used for these structures will be stone, adobe, recycled glass, locally wild harvested timbers, locally hand crafted components and local ingenuity.
The building methods implemented will be those used by indigenous peoples living in arid deserts on over 35% of the earth’s land mass, who’ve lived in simplicity, comfort and beauty, engineered, tested and proven throughout millennia. The adobe and stone greenhouse and domed library will have adobe sculpted benches, counters, niches, and vessels with water gravity fed from cisterns catching rainwater from the roofs of the two buildings.
It is the intention of this design to provide a sustainable, economic and non-toxic religious activities facility for religious practitioners who have moral objections to toxic building methods or materials, or with financial limitations.
Kat Ehrhorn
katehrhorn@gmail.com
