Bronze medal winner Independent Publisher;s (IPPY) Award competition Body is wiser than Ego. Ego is cleverer than Body. When Ego catches Body's tune, a song happens. When Ego catches Body's intuition, magic happens. An idea is born. Our bodies are one with the universe and privy to its unspoken secrets. They are the unconscious source of our intuition. When we focus with our hearts on troubling questions, our unconscious comes through for us. Open questions posed to the unconscious act as the strange attractors of chaos theory. They enable the creative speech of discovery. In this book, you will explore how your ego rises from your body through language. You will appreciate how the creative thinking enabled by body-ego interplay builds your personality overtime. The personal and social realms you create have remarkable properties. When you understand those properties, you open new vistas for viewing empathy, visions, hallucinations, dreams, and the reality of language. You open new ways to understand objective reality, the reality of religious myths, and even the reality of death. The motif of most Western thought since the time of Zoroaster and Plato is that we are minds (and souls) trapped within physical bodies. St Augustine reinforced this tradition and Descartes formalized it. The upright man, as symbolized by the stick figure (all head and almost no body) became a standard Western conception. Nietzsche saw the evil of this conception and protested it loudly. Merleau-Ponty demonstrated that our bodies both know and are known. Freud and Lacan showed how the ego rises from the body through the magic of language. Our bodies are microcosms of the universe and bearers of its unspoken secrets. Holograms, chaos theory, and fractal geometry bear witness. For more about this book and its blog, go to www.bodywisdombook.com
Kenneth Bausch, Ph.D. is a former priest, neighborhood organizer, social service administrator, homebuilder, and university professor. He is executive director of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, www.globalagoras.org, which is committed to creating livable communities through structured democratic dialogue. He author of The Emerging Consensus in Social Systems Theory and co-author of How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future. Ken has a voracious appetite for complex challenges. He has immersed himself in thorny questions of psychology, spirituality, philosophy, sociology, and systems theory. Early on, he discarded alluring religious and metaphysical explanations of creativity and transcendence. In accord with Occam's razor, he sought explanations that worked with a minimum of presuppositions. In his early years, he gained acquaintance with Hindu (Vedanta) philosophy, the thought of Heraclitus and Spinoza, and the evolutionary thought of Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin, he was leaning to a view that the material and the spiritual were intimately linked. His further studies led him to the giants quoted in this book: Nietzsche the iconoclastic prophet, Merleau-Ponty the meticulous phenomenologist, Freud and Lacan the proponents of the unconscious who describe the emergence of the ego through the vehicle of language. Through it all, he was seeking the underlying unity of all his studies. He was pursuing the center of the circle identified by Heidegger from where everything could be seen clearly. His conclusion is that the body is that center. From the body's viewpoint, reality's transcendence comes from below. When we relax into our body's oneness with the universe, we open ourselves to unspoken wisdom as our steady attention draws the knowledge we seek in the manner of a strange attractor in chaos. In the context of the Big Mind, Little Mind, and beginner's mind of Zen Buddhism, Ken sees Big Mind as the wisdom of the Universe available through the body. Little mind is the ego tied to language. Beginner's mind is the humble inquiring mind enjoying the interplay of body and ego, and trying to put the unspoken wisdom into words. Ken sees the thinking of Body Wisdom as complementing on a personal level the social constructivist thinking of How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future. Ken Bausch ken@globalagoras.org
