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

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

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

Objective knowledge is a self-centered understanding of the world; self-knowledge is world-centered understanding of the self. • Objective knowledge is fact based; self-knowledge is experiential. • We acquire objective knowledge; we surrender to self-knowledge. • Objective knowledge grows by accumulation; self-knowledge grows by shedding.

A culture’s Story shapes its artifacts and structures, as well as the thoughts and experiences of its members. Every culture’s Story about what it means to be human is unique, and every Story hides in the background of its culture, disguising itself as reality so that it remains almost invisible to its members, even as it firmly establishes what ‘f

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

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

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

Objective knowledge values known relationships; self-knowledge values felt relationships.