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

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

The funny thing about the nucleus basalis is that it is ‘switched on’ all day every day until the age of ten or eleven, at which point it pretty much turns off. And then you are no longer a sponge for new information or experience. Past that age the nucleus basalis will switch on only “when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock,

The experience of being is affiliated with feeling. The experience of thinking is affiliated with knowing.

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

Objective knowledge is disembodied knowledge. It stands apart from the Present.

The body is a resonator; attuning to the energies of the world, it knows them.

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 intelligence that lives through the body is a much-neglected resource in our abstract lives—but in hunting-gathering cultures it is the primary resource that enables them to harmonize with their world and to notice its gifts and live in accord with them.

By contrast, the attention of the hero is world-focused.