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.
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Spirituality, Consciousness
Non-duality: Living at Two Levels Simultaneously as an Ode to Joy
An experiential investigation into the extraordinary possibility that there is but one Single Reality. What is it like to address the practical (level of the Relative) on the one hand while knowing the Causeless Joy of Being (level of the Absolute) on the other?
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Love, Consciousness
Feeling Oneness: Thought Experiments that Help Us Feel Oneness with Others
How might we help ourselves move from being intellectually open to the possibility of there being one single Reality, that is, one consciousness perceiving all minds, to the experience of feeling our connection to everyone; to experiencing our essential oneness with others; the experience of love.
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Consciousness
Freedom from Psychological Suffering
This is a story of a young woman who had read Eckhart Tolle and had been helped by his suggestion, “whatever life brings, respond to it as if you chose it.” But, as she thought about her own life, the question arose, why would I choose to be born into this dysfunctional family with all the suffering and abuse I had to endure?
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Leadership, Consciousness
Resolving Conflicts in a new Way! Chaos or Design? – Trusting Life in the Age of Global Conflict
In this webinar, Rick Chaffee and Jan Bellermann share a unique guide to lead with calm presence during times of conflict.