Of course, like most great life plans, the universe had a different story for Dick to live. He worked in the corporate world as an engineer and later in engineering management for a few years, but he wasn’t happy.

Disillusioned with the corporate treadmill life, he dropped out, opened a Pizza shop, and wrote as a stringer/photographer for a local newspaper. By the time he was thirty, Dick was married with three children, homesteading on 27 acres in upstate New York, milking goats, living in a twelve by twenty-foot cabin, building fieldstone walls, and living off the land.

To support his family, Dick designed silver and gold jewelry, which he sold at craft shows. When he humorously referred to himself as dirt poor financially, it was an understatement. Craft show sales netted the family roughly $7000 a year. As homesteaders living off the land, he, his three children, and his wife worked from dawn to dark most days planting and harvesting the food they ate. They cut, split, and stacked upwards of 12 cords of wood each year for the wood stove, built a home, a rough-cut oak/fieldstone barn, and maintained four hives of honeybees. Horses, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, milking goats, and pigs filled the barnyard.

Like most Saturday evenings in the summer, he and his neighbor friends and families sat around a campfire drinking beer and making music. The kids were playing kick the can in the field down near the pond.

The musical instruments eventually found their way back into their cases, and conversations around the fire had settled into quiet musings about life and philosophy.

The guitar player picked up his beer, looked slowly around the campfire, and asked the philosophical question, “So what would you do with your life if you could do anything you wanted to do with it.” As Dick is fond of saying, “talking about philosophy after a few beers around a campfire is a lot like getting into a taxi and impulsively telling the driver to “just drive.” You have no idea where you’re going to end up.

When it came to Dick’s turn to answer the question, he impulsively responded: “I would be a Pastor.” Talk about a showstopper! He says the only sound for the next thirty seconds was the crackling of the burning campfire. To this day, he has no idea where those words came from, but over the next few months, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head.

The following spring, he signed up for some courses at Colgate-Rochester Seminary to explore the possibility of becoming a Pastor. He tried hard to fit in theologically, but his degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics made it hard for him to accept what he was being taught.

It wasn’t long before the conservative students made it a point to avoid him in the cafeteria. Looking back, he thinks their fear was the possibility that his questions and theological doubts might be contagious. He began to have serious doubts about his decision to enter the ministry.

He loved the sense of community, the idea of adding value to the world, but he struggled with Christian theology. The traditional, conservative religious beliefs that embraced scientifically illiterate first-century worldviews lacked the wisdom and insights he hungered for in his life. Still, the call to grow and “become” was an inner impulse he couldn’t ignore.

As he describes it today, he didn’t want to live a life that simply happened to him. He didn’t want to live a life that others had chosen for him. He wanted to discover the truth for himself. He wanted to discover for himself why he was here, what his soul had come here to do, and what he was meant to contribute to the world. He knew he wanted to add value to the world, not just take up space.

These were the questions he found himself wrestling with as he walked into his first class in Pastoral Counseling 101 with Professor James Ashbrook and knew he had finally discovered the path he was born to walk. He fell in love with psychology and mental health counseling. Learning how our minds work has been his passion ever since that fateful day.

And, as they say, the rest is history.

He eventually earned his M. Div. Degree, was ordained an Elder in the United Methodist Church, worked four years as Chaplain and Mental Health Counselor at Keuka College in upstate New York, and was certified a Fellow in Analytic Object Relations Psychotherapy by the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. He went on from Keuka College to open his private practice where he worked for over two decades as a Mental Health Counselor and writer of his Stony-Hill Newsletter blog, helping people find meaning in their lives, discover their life purpose, and helping them embrace their goals and dreams. Over time, his mental health practice expanded to include Life Coaching.

Today

Dick writes his blog and his books teaching about primitive ego psychology and the life wisdom, ego-emptiness, and non-dual teaching of all of humanity’s great spiritual teachers. In his words, “They are the teachers that taught me the importance of growth in self-awareness. The wisdom that success, happiness, and meaning in life all require the ability to become intentionally self-aware. Until we have learned to tame the immature primitive ego of its early childhood beliefs and conditioning, successful adult life is all but impossible to achieve. Until we have learned to tame our primitive ego and let go of the unhealthy importance of our ego, the harder we try to create the life we dream about living, the more depressed and discouraged we will become.”

Dick writes for are those who dream about living a life of meaning and purpose, those who long to embrace their authentic “self” and become the person they were born to “become.” Those who seek to grow and evolve into a more conscious, compassionate person that adds value to the world and the lives of others.

“Until we awaken to the presence of our unconscious inner-child’s primitive ego, it’s dualistic “us” vs. “them” thinking, and learn to embrace a true non-dual unity consciousness, creating an authentic, meaningful life that adds value to the world and others will remain just beyond our grasp.” Dick Rauscher