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Our lives are influenced and guided by our sense of “self.” When we refer to our self – I believe, I think, I feel – it is important to ask what self, what “I,” are we referring to. Is it our customary, personal day-to-day self, or our natural, inner self? Which “self” have we placed at the center of our life?
What we place at the center will define how we experience the world. When our small personal self is at the center – past history, ideas, perceptual patterns, and learned identities – will determine the character of our relationships, reactions, and life. It is quite different when we place our natural true self at the center of our life. Wh1at is your center - small or large self.
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We have all had moments when the tumult of life stops and clear and truthful insights arise from the depth of our being. We call them “aha” experiences. These moments of understanding are neither planned nor organized. They come unexpectedly and spontaneously. They are brief and carry with them a sense of truth, authenticity, and authority. We don’t know how or where they come from. We might not be able to explain these insights to others, but without question we know them to be our truth. They have a clear and decisive impact on our lives.
These spontaneous insights may be about concerns we’ve been struggling to understand or they may offer a glimpse into the great questions of life. Suddenly there is clarity. But what would it be like if we were able to have a decisive experience that fully and permanently resolved the essential questions of every human life
Join me in this discussion and practice.Support the show
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On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
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A child is born with a clear, pure awareness. Not an awareness of this or that or an awareness accompanied by interpretations, commentary, judgments, or preferences. A simple clear awareness is experienced without labels and filled with a natural wonder, awe and curiosity. And that miracle of beingness is experienced, but at the time unknown to the infant.
We use the same terms – empty awareness, pure awareness, choiceless awareness, and timeless awareness – for both this natural foundational awareness of childhood and the re-discovered beingness touched later in life, if fortunate, by the spiritual seeker.
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We have all experienced glimpses of a larger consciousness that lies beyond our personal identity and day-to-day life. These glimpses are characterized by a sense of flow, ease, wholeness, peace, delight, and freedom. They are a welcome release from the day-to-day struggles of our usual self and life. We would, of course like, to know what causes these glimpses so that we can re-experience them at will. Join me in exploring how our glimpses of the great mystery can become our life.
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www.elliottdacher.org
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Consciousness is not a “thing.” It has no form, shape, color, texture, weight, mass, contour, or location. These qualities refer to tangible objects with tangible characteristics that can be described and communicated through language. That is not so with consciousness. Although it is the central aspect of human life, in its full scope it defies the limited capacities of the spoken word.
Join me as we explore in discussion and practice the three aspects of consciousness: awareness, absence of fixed content, and clarity.Support the show
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There are five increasingly complex and dysfunctional levels of ego development, the development of our personal "I." These are: the Mere "I," the Reified "I," the Self-cherishing "I," the Protective and Defensive "I," and the Social "I."
As adults we attempt to function with this complex and afflictive sense of self. Long forgotten is the simple, easeful, and innocent “mere I,” which was once sufficient to navigate worldly life and enjoy it.
Instead of upgrading the “mere “I” as needed to respond to a more demanding adult experience, we manufacture a multi-level, complex, seemingly solid and self-sustaining ego structure. Join me in this discussion and practice to better understand the complexities of our personal "I" and the relevance and simplicity of the "mere "I."Support the show
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On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
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www.elliottdacher.org
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While meditating we’ve all had the experience of a blissful moment of serenity, clarity, or realization, only to be pulled back into the stresses and strains of daily life. That can feel quite frustrating and even disempowering. We touch the glory of the sacred and are thrown back into the mundane. We think that our experience and insights will change our life, but too often they don’t. Know that you are not alone.
Consider the words of St. Francis of Assisi: Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly.” We are instructed to take our worldly experience and personal identity lightly, neither attaching to nor identifying with it.
Join me in this discussion and practice.Support the show
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The transcendent state of consciousness is a non-sensory experience. It is a non-ordinary experience. It can neither be experienced or known through our senses, nor through our usual intellectual capacities. It is an inner, personal, “invisible” experience. Words that point towards it include: transpersonal, timeless, infinite, wholeness, natural, all-embracing, essential being, pure perception, final truth, sacred, and divine. Although these words point towards a transcendent consciousness, they are not themselves the experience. So how do we move towards this pinnacle of human consciousness? Join in me in this discussion, and practice.
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www.elliottdacher.org
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For a young child, prior to psychological development, the world is experienced through an innocent present moment awareness. As adults, our world is experienced through memory, concepts, interpretations, and perceptual patterns. We no longer experience what is as is.
We seek to re-experience this lost self in the transient and perishable objects of mind. The personal mind jumps from object to object, which is familiar to us as the busy non-stop mind. That is our usual life. What happens when the mind stops its relationship with mental objects, even for a moment? What happens when the mind becomes still? What happens when there is neither a subject or object, an I or an It.
Join me in exploring the dance of subject, object, and the mystery that reveals itself when both fade into consciousness.
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Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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Born with a mind and body, we are destined to develop a personal identity as a vehicle for living human life. It can be no other way. It’s an acquired mental structure that assists us in navigating daily life. As we gain greater consciousness, we recognize the limitations and pitfalls of identifying exclusively with our acquired self.
We are not born with a personal self. We are born into presence, a simple awareness and presence. We never forget this essence of our being and we increasingly desire its great treasures of life – inner serenity, delight, wisdom, selfless love and compassion, and freedom from the known. Please join me in this discussion and practice of shifting from Person to Presence.
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Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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I first heard Francis Thompson poem, Hound of Heaven, years ago. His words touched me deeply and have since taken residence in my mind. I sense it’s because they touch a very basic human. That call to truth is likely familiar to you as well
I now realize that Thompson’s hound is a poetic metaphor for the irrepressible urge that quickens soul and spirit toward a recognition and reunion with our true self, our divine essence. It has taken time, detours, misplaced pursuits, personal dramas, and subtle resistance for the ripening to occur, a ripening that allowed that inner heaven to subtly reveal itself only in brief glimpses, at first. Please join me in this discussion and practice.
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Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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What more noble experience can there be than walking each other home to the center of our being – to peace, happiness, and freedom. The journey home has never been solely an individual journey. Even the most solitary monk, nun, or seminarian takes their journey in the context of a community, teacher, and spiritual friends. It's only the ego that perceives this journey as a solitary hero’s quest. That’s the dilemma of modern times. Join me in this discussion and practice.
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Welcome to my Podcasts
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“Humankind can not bear very much reality.” These words, words of the poet T.S. Eliot, have echoed in my mind for many years like a persistent Zen Koan. What is this fundamental reality he speaks of? Why can’t humans bear it? If we cannot base our life on a realistic understanding, how can we live an authentic and meaningful life.
It is not easy, convenient, or socially rewarding to pursue a realistic understanding of life. At any moment I can feel my mind turning away from it as quickly as possible, towards other more palatable experiences. In order to avoid a realistic view, we spend our days immersed in distractions, amusements, and transient pleasures. By anesthetizing our self to the essential truths of life, we gain a certain transient illusory comfort, putting off the inevitable confrontation with truth.
Join me in discussion and meditation as we seek to touch the true realities of life.Support the show
Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
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www.elliottdacher.org
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The primary aim of meditation is to go beyond the narrow confines of our ordinary self and experience the immensity of life’s possibilities. We aim to free ourself from the tenacious grip of individualism and to awaken to our full humanity.
Individualism, with its accompanying habitual and limiting patterns of perception, and perpetual mind traffice imprisons us in a narrow and contracted life. Our personal psychology, chained to the past traps us in tenacious conditioning, denying us access to our essential humanity and its full possibilities.
We are born as humans, not as individuals. We are born without distinctive names, personalities, patterns of thought and action. That is all acquired, learned. It is who we become, not who we truly are. And try as we do, utilizing an endless array of self-development strategies the personal self - including the improved version - cannot bring us to an authentic and natural serenity, freedom, wholeness, and compassion that paradoxically is already and always available as our fundamental humanity. We know there is more to life than what appears on the surface. We know this by heart.
Join me in this discussion and practice.Support the show
Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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In the East they speak of the early stages of meditation as a raging waterfall. We have finally stopped long enough to actually hear the cacophony we live with every day. With practice we experience our innerness as a rushing stream, quieter but still active. Then we come to the heart of meditation which is experienced as a gentle and still river flowing through the flat plains. Finally, at the conclusion the river drops into the sea and is one with the source, the vast ocean of being. The formula is letting go, letting go, letting be. And then, an indescribable oneness naturally and spontaneously arises, revealing to us the great mystery and truth of life. Join me in this discussion and practice.
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On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
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www.elliottdacher.org
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What is a knowable? It’s any experience, outer or inner, that can be observed and known through our sensory organs or mental capacity. Our sensory system is oriented to “physical” experiences that appear as outer events. Our inner capacity for observation is oriented towards thoughts, feelings, and images that appear as mental events. In contrast, there are also unknowables. What is an unknowable? These are experiences that cannot be observed or comprehended through our sensory system or mental awareness. They can only be known to the individual through direct experience. Examples of unknowables include soul, spirit, pure awareness, love, God, and reality itself.
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On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
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There are two ways that we gain knowledge of our self and world. As adults, our default approach is “memory knowledge.” From childhood on we accumulate experiences, learning from parents, schooling, and culture. We store all this knowledge in our mental file called memory. We draw upon this acquired memory-based knowledge, bounded by the reach and character of our life experience, to understand and navigate the inner and outer day-to-day world.
The second path to knowledge is “being knowledge.” Being knowledge refers to the insights and understandings that naturally arise from a still state of being and presence. The knower is a natural and unconditioned awareness absent any previously stored information. It is a unique and precious state-of-being that allows us access to full and clear knowledge and actions that lie beyond the grasp of our acquired memory-based knowledge.Support the show
Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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The phrase “effortless meditation” may sound to you like an oxymoron or perhaps a clever marketing tease, but it’s neither. This immediate reaction arises from the experience many beginners have when they approach meditation as a process of subduing the mind. That certainly feels like effort, and it is.
Let me share with you a natural and effortless way to experience your true inner self – a meditative state that self-reveals itself, when the mind has been stilled through a natural presence. It is then that we will find what we seek - what already and always has been within - revealed without methods, techniques, or struggle, a simple serenity, awareness, and freedom at the center of our being. Join me in discussion and practice.Support the show
Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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The pediatrician and psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott coined the expression a “good enough mother” or perhaps one might say “good enough parenting.” It refers to the manner in which a mother responds to her infant child with age-related sensitivity and care, allowing the infant to successfully transition to an autonomous and well-functioning adult. But is this accomplishment all we can hope to achieve? Is there more?
It can be said that healthy development is an important preparation for the experience of a larger spiritual life. A “good enough” childhood increases the probability that we will experience life’s larger possibilities. So, we can say that good enough parenting supports healthy development, but it may not be good enough to go beyond to the depths of our being and the fullness of our humanity, the second and fundamental aim of meditation. Join me in exploring the upgraded "good enough" parenting for human flourishing.Support the show
Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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Awareness is the essence of our meditation practice. It can neither be perceived by the senses nor known by thought. It is not a “thing” in the usual sense. It has no identifiable location, shape, form, texture, color, or weight. In a sense it is nothing. However, that nothing is the ever-present basis of all we experience. It is everything.
Without awareness we would not know we exist. We would not know our mental or sensory experiences. The emptiness of unconditioned, pure awareness is our fundamental nature, already and always. It is our true self. Awareness can only be known by direct experience, and that is why we practice, to know it first-hand. Experiencing a natural, unaltered, and simple awareness is experiencing precisely who you are and have always been. That awareness has no purpose, intention, expectation, or attachment. It just is.Support the show
Welcome to my Podcasts
On my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
www.elliottdacher.org
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