I don’t believe it will be possible to heal ourselves into wholeness—to feel reality and accord with it—without augmenting the Chosen Five with a new set of senses. We need to recover what the body knows.

“When our thinking unmoors itself from the body . . . we come to feel and believe that we are superior to the world and distinct from it and that the fate of humanity is somehow sealed and independent from that of life on Earth.”

For contrast, consider the Anlo-Ewe culture. One of their foremost markers of success is balance. As children grow up, their expression of balance is noticed, cultivated, encouraged and praised. They come to appreciate what it means to achieve balance in their personal lives, in their families, in their community and in relationship to the world at

The exclusive emphasis on exteroceptors in our culture places great value on what the head knows and demeans by omission what the body knows.

He uses objective knowledge to empower himself, not others. His currency is ‘insider information’. By contrast, we might understand self-knowledge as a world-centered understanding of the self. The insights of self-knowledge are offered to you by the kinship of the world to which you belong. When your attention is surrendered to the world without

True freedom, then, is paradoxically made possible by submission—the hero’s submission to the whole; the submission that lets go of all the soul-baffling divisions we jealously guard, the crippling judgments we enforce, the cotton balls we hold within to stifle the resonance of our being.

Neuroscience organizes human sensese into three categories: exteroception, proprioception and interoception.

The qualities of ‘paying close attention’ and ‘gentleness’ are preconditions for the process of re-sensitizing the body’s intelligence.

Original Wisdom is another book about a European encounter with an aboriginal tribe. In this case, the European is Robert Wolff and the tribe is the Sng’oi of Malaysia. The book’s subtitle—Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing