Rick Chaffee Ph.D.
For the last two decades, my calling has been assisting working adults in their efforts to complete an undergraduate degree with an emphasis in leadership. The ‘voice’ behind my teaching has been shaped by experiences of an ‘underlying oneness to Reality’. There is not much support in academia for those who have such an intuition. My joy is nurturing them as they do their best to be a presence of peace in their families, communities, and places of work.
Before teaching with Union, I had my own company through which I assisted corporate employees and military personnel with the resources they needed to complete an undergraduate degree on site after work.
My definition of leadership: To be a leader is to be a presence, seeing what is needed in the moment and in collaboration with others, helping make good things happen.
My favorite leadership course is Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. I teach it not as a professional skill but as a way of life. In it, participants conduct experiments testing the possibility of an underlying unity, using the responses they receive from Life as evidence for how to live and how to lead.
Our trust in Life may be our greatest gift to ‘others’. A poetic expression of this understanding is found in my favorite quote.
“There is a deep intuition in us, that there is but one single reality....
It is an intuition that gives rise to religion.
Drives Physicists to seek it in a unifying theory.
And compels artists to express Its Beauty.
Its implications reach deeply into every aspect of our lives.
For it means that this consciousness, inside, is Divine.
And our consciousness is the very consciousness in others.” (Francis Lucille)
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Spirituality
The Transition from the Journey to God to the Journey in God
A non-dual understanding of Reality is at the very heart of all the enduring Faith Traditions but mainstream teaching within these traditions is almost entirely dualistic. We can nurture a hunger, a deep intuition that many have, of an underlying oneness to Reality. with its profound implication for how to live and to lead.
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Spirituality
Nurturing the Spiritual Aspect of Leadership
There is a hunger among university students – including those in the law enforcement, firefighting, and business management majors – for a safe place in which to explore the most important issues in their lives. That starts with nurturing their innate sense of spirituality – a desire to become more whole in mind, body, and spirit... and become the kind of leader they feel called to be.