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

The study revealed two striking results. First, traders with greater sensitivity to the inner life of their bodies had made significantly more money in the previous year. Second, the more years a trader had been working, the greater his interoception, as though the trading floor were selecting for that trait. Coates’s research demonstrates that wha

If we are looking for a framework within which to contain the reality we belong to, we eventually have to face the fact that there is a dimension missing from our Chosen Four of space and time. The missing dimension is the one in which everything is in contact with everything else at all times. It is the dimension of unity that coexists with the di

We all need ideals by which to orient our lives, as the polestar guides sailors—and there are many wonderful ideals to help us do that.

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

This book has laid out three core principles: 1. Wholeness is the inescapable truth of our reality. 2. Our ability to sense wholeness is our primary sense. 3. Our culture systematically disables that sense in us, leaving us out of touch with the reality of the self and the world to which it belongs.

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

These two realms of knowing—knowledge and self-knowledge—are not different varieties of the same stuff but are opposites. And they are bound by a delicate balance: the more our knowledge grows, the more our self-knowledge needs to grow. If that doesn’t happen—if the roots of our self-knowledge don’t deepen to support the growth of our knowledge—the

As you increasingly honor the body’s sensations, you increasingly understand them to constitute a language of thought that is distinct from how the head knows. What the body knows is based on a patient clarity that enables you to act from the whole of your being. But that knowing is inaccessible—and may as well not exist—when it’s been eclipsed by

My overriding concern is with wholeness. If an idea remains unintegrated, it will thwart your wholeness—standing like a road sign between you and the world it purports to represent. When an idea is integrated, on the other hand, it will be reborn as a new sensitivity to the world. Integration is what your body’s intelligence specializes in. It is w