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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

In considering the tendency of objective knowledge to excite tyrannical tendencies, and ‘self-knowledge’ to require the surrender of the hero, we turn up a seeming paradox. The tyrant’s attention is self-focused.

Your wholeness is felt, then, by feeling the wholeness of the Present.