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Keynote Address: Integral Health: Health, Consciousness & Human Flourishing by Elliott Dacher, M.D.
Ours is a precious human life. It is so because we are gifted with capacities and possibilities unknown to any other species. Through our own efforts we can gain freedom from suffering and achieve a sustained wholeness, peace, love and joy that surpasses the understanding of an ordinary consciousness. With this achievement all efforts at healing come to an end as we have reached the quintessence of human life health and life divine of body, mind and spirit. But for this level of healing we must look beyond our remedies and therapies to the second great force of healing, the inner force, that can only be activated and mastered through a progessive expansion of consciousness. This is what the ancient healing traditions have always whispered to us if we would but listen. Their healing elixir is simple: larger consciousness, larger health, larger life. As individuals and practitioners, our personal healing, as well as our capacity to assist others in their own healing, is especially dependent upon our ability to access higher levels of consciousness and their naturally emergent qualities of wisdom, wholeness, peace, love and compassion. A vertical leap in consciousness, we discover, is both the ground of our being and the ground of our healing. To attain such an uncommon health and life requires that we invest in the development of our inner life, our consciousness. Utilizing the many traditional contemplative, meditative and other paths that have been left to us by the great sages we can each tap into this singular essence of all healing practices. It is an essence that transcends yet simultaneously infuses all of our manifold methods with an expansive consciousness that is the great elixir and essence of all healing and simultaneously the source of a remarkable human flourishing––a completion and perfection of our humanity that is unknown to ordinary awareness.
KEYWORDS: Integral health, consciousness, healing
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