Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being

Dr. Jonas Salk—who by discovering the polio vaccine saved thousands of children’s lives and never sought to profit financially from it—once remarked, “What people think of as a moment of discovery is really the discovery of a question.” When I felt stuck as a teenager in the structures of thought and perception of our culture, it wasn’t for a lack

tension diminishes sensitivity.

Because the senses activate our intelligence and orient us to the world, a selected set of senses will privilege a certain way of attending to it. As a child learns her culture’s model of the senses, she is learning how to perceive herself, others and the world around her, as well as how to assign value to everything. She is also learning what not

For simplicity’s sake, we might consider that your being includes all that you discover when you are fully present—for everything to which you are present is a part of your presence, and so is also a part of the process of your being.

Because the Story is largely invisible, its instructions rule us without our being aware of it.

So speech can be thought of as a sense that facilitates discovery. When you understand it in that way, the whole of your being is invited to be present to your act of speaking. By contrast, if you believe, as our culture’s Story has it, that speech is a means of delivering your ideas, your concern will not be on discovery—it will be on the task of

the whole of your intelligence is more astute than any partitioned portion of it could be.

The segregation of our thinking from our being is the primary wound of our culture

Some books are brilliantly wise, but don’t leave us any the wiser.