Meditation and Beyond

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.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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 wellI 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.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

“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 showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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 showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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. Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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 showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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 showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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 showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

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 showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

Looking back, the first "self" that I lost was in medical training. It  was the loss of a healthy personal self.  Entangled  in the mechanics and pressures of my medical education, I forgot my most basic human needs. I forgot to take time for the simple joys of life and the basics of self-care.  I was to discover years later that, unknown to me at the time, my deeper true self was lost even earlier in life. That self, I was to discover, was my essential self. Over time, I slowly realized that I could not live a full life without living from that foundational center of my being That’s what propelled me toward the study and practice of meditation – a yearning to reclaim , with stability, the unchanging essence of my life, this more primary and vital lost self. Join me in this sharing and practice.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

Early in practice I realized the limitations of a medical model that reduces health and disease solely to biological factors. It seems quite obvious that we are not mere physical bodies. We are inter-connect beings – our biology, psychology, social relations, and spiritual essence are inseparable. It is the mind that remains the most undervalued and unexplored frontier in health and healing. That is why our focus is on fully developing and expanding our understanding of the mind and its resources, tapping into its rich resources through self-remembering and living in our whole self.Join me in this teaching and meditation Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

There are two paths to an awakened and vital life. Each are based on a different premise. The first, the direct path, asserts that the awakened state, is already and always within us. We don’t see our true nature because it’s obscured by our acquired personal self with its opaque mental activity and personal dramas. Now let’s consider the second, the gradual path. It is based on evolutionary or developmental theory. It asserts that by improving the quality of day-to-day life we incrementally develop or evolve the awakened state. By progressively loosening the grip of the personal self, we grow closer and closer to the essence of life. That’s the gradual path.Explore with me how they work together.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

The clarity we will speak of here is not the clarity that results from mentally studying a particular issue until there is a conclusive sense of understanding. That is intellectual clarity. And it is important in its place. However, here we are speaking about a very different type of clarity – the clarity which spontaneously arises from a spacious, pure, and unconditioned awareness. It doesn’t aim at resolving or understanding anything. It merely allows you to see the truth of what is as is – the true nature of self, life, and reality free from the influence and judgment of past experience. And that we will call “knowing” rather than “understanding.”Join me in this discussion and practice.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

 For those who are only familiar with their ordinary self the phrase “self-remembering” may be a bit confusing. However, for others, who have explored further, it is apparent that there are two distinct “selves.” The first is our ordinary day-to-day self and the second is our natural, fundamental, and essential Self.We are not born with our personal self. This day-to day self is acquired over many years. Early in life we are given a name, which over time becomes the repository of our day-to-day experiences. These experiences are strung together by memory into what appears to be a continuous personal self. From that accumulated history we form our beliefs, likes and dislikes, and reactive habits, all of which we know as our personal self.Now let’s look at the other self. Our natural self, from the onset of life, resides at the center of our being. Although in adulthood it’s obscured by the personal self and its restless mind, it is always present and available if we turn towards it. This essential self is spacious, unconditioned, ever-present, easeful, and spontaneously present. We can say it self-reveals when the veils of our personal self fall away.Like the flower that spontaneously gives forth its perfume, our true self has its own perfume – it exudes a natural and profound serenity, easeful delight, keen wisdom, and selfless heart. There is nothing we need to do to experience these gems of life except to self-remember who we truly are and align ourself with our true nature. Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

There is an underlying and troublesome hollowness in the Western psyche. That’s the result of an inability to access our fundamental, natural, and unchanging well-being, an ever-present wholeness in each of us. In response to this loss of our essential self and its well-being, we are mistakenly taught by an ill-informed culture to seek from the outer world that which is missing in our inner world. We seek possessions, fame, fortune, relationships, drugs and even healthy pursuits such as fitness, self-improvement, yoga, and meditation as remedies to this underlying emptiness. For periods of time, we may seem to succeed in these efforts, but because our efforts fail to address the underlying wound these efforts will each, in their turn fail. And even if they seem to succeed, they fail. A spiritual wound requires, as Jung so eloquently stated, a spiritual remedy, not a surface one. It requires Spiritus.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

We can speak about two kinds of love – love with an object and love without an object. Object-based love involves another person, a physical object, or any experience that is a source of pleasure. We say I love this or that, referring to the object of love.In contrast, love without an object is an experience that is unrelated to any object. It is somewhat like the perfume that emanates from the flower. However, in this case the flower is our natural self. This love is innate, built-in, to our innermost self. It is self-arising, ever-present, abundant, and unbiased.Discover through words and practice the important distinctions between these two types of love, and how you can enrich your experience of love and care through this understanding.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

It is certain that each of us will experience loss. It may come in one of many forms - loss of a loved one, loss of mental or physical capacities, loss of material possessions, or future possibilities. Significant loss often heralds a time of sadness, emotional pain, or perhaps a sense of hopelessness or despair. It can be an inconsolable time.Loss is real. Fear, despair, anxiety, and depression are mental experiences superimposed onto loss. Therefore they vary person-to-person. They are reactions to loss. If we can learn to separate our mental add-ons from the experience of loss itself, relax and ease into loss, experience it in our heart, let go of our efforts to control life, and stop resisting what is unalterable, we may discover the possibility of fully experiencing loss without suffering.Join me in this discussion and meditation.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon

There are some experiences that naturally evolve over time. The meeting with our true self and the awakening to a larger life is not one of those experiences. It is here, right now, already, and always. It requires no preparation, no preliminaries, no putting off until another day. What we are seeking is there at the beginning – complete, finished, whole.Support the showWelcome to my PodcastsOn my website below you will find many resources and a sign-up link to our Sunday morning Zoom teaching and meditation. Everyone is invited.www.elliottdacher.orgAware, Awake, Alive on Amazon