Revealing Your True Self

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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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. 

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, 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.

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.

www.elliottdacher.org
Aware, Awake, Alive on Amazon