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This podcast explores the distinction between two aspects of self: the essential self, characterized by unconditioned awareness present from birth, and the personal (ego) self, a constructed identity shaped by experiences and societal conditioning. The ego self narrows our expansive consciousness into patterns and beliefs, obscuring our natural state of openness and wonder.
Despite this conditioning, moments of connection to the essential self can arise, such as during experiences of flow, presence, or deep connection with nature, art, or others. These moments reveal our innate wholeness but are often fleeting and overlooked, as the ego quickly reasserts itself. Understanding and stabilizing these glimpses into the true self can lead to a more fulfilling and centered life. Join me in discussing and practing the "gap."
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Simply stated, virtual reality is an experience that on first glance appears real but on further examination is found not to be real. The experience seems real, looks real, and sounds real, but it is isn’t. It doesn't appear in the manner in which it appears.
In addition to dreams and mirages onsider our ordinary day-to-day life and activities – the usual experience of people, places, things, and mental activity. From the perspective of ordinary consciousness, it’s all very real to us, but can it be just another example of virtual reality? Let’s look at this startling possibility.
Join me in this discussion and practice.Support the show
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"Zooming In – Zooming Out" explores the practice of reconnecting with our fundamental, unconditioned awareness, which we are born with but often lose touch with as our ego and personal identity develop. This is called "Zooming-In." When we need to navigate day-to-day life, we simply "Zoom-Out" by reaching into our vast unconditioned consciousness and manifesting those aspects of memory, cognition, intellect, creativity, imagination, and relational skills that are required in the moment. We create a temporary “mere I” that is needed to navigate our daily life and we let it drop back into consciousness when no longer needed. By "zooming in" to this core awareness and "zooming out" to navigate daily life, we can, in time, harmonize our deeper essence with practical, worldly existence.
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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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We can begin by agreeing that there are two fundamental kinds of love – personal love and essence love.
Although the first, personal love, may take many forms, it is characterized by the love of one person for another within the scope of our usual mind/body life. That love will vary in character and quality following the psychological development of the individuals involved.
The second kind of love is what I have called essence love. It exists outside of the realm of personal identity, outside of conventional consciousness. it cannot be known through our usual sensory or mental capacities. It can only be known through direct experience, by being one with it. It then knows itself.
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A desert mirage, an echo, train tracks appearing to meet in the distance, and magic tricks are among those experiences that we can see or hear, but they are not actually real. These are sensory-based illusions that we initially think are real, but later learn that they are not real.
Love, kindness, patience, and spirit cannot be directly seen. They have no form, shape, texture, color, weight, or location. We cannot touch, feel, see or smell them. However, we would all agree that they are real.
In both instances things don't exist in the manner in which they appear.Support the show
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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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www.elliottdacher.org
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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
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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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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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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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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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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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.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
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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Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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“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
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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.
Your support by subscribing is appreciated ...
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
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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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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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