## Metadata - Author: [[Eligio S. Gallegos]] - Full Title: Into Wholeness - Category: #books ## Highlights - In an emotional injury something is separated within the person which needs to once again be joined. The search for a method of rejoining would entail a retelling of the history of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, save for a few fine people, one dimension has been all but ignored in this search, the underlying membrane of the deep imagination. It is through the deep imagination that we gain access to the fabric of our own being and the capacity to support those structures in the positions necessary for their rejoining into wholeness. ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=125)) - Thinking was not meant to be a dictator. Thinking broadens and deepens itself by learning from our other modes of knowing, but it was never intended to be their boss. Thinking must have patience and allow room for deeper processes. Our education system hardly promotes this. We have come to think that thinking is a process of identifying facts, but thinking actually is founded in storytelling. Our earliest learning is communicated through stories; the bard was the original teacher! ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=735)) - Thinking also works by focusing our awareness on differences but also by capturing those differences into generalizations, allowing us to both see how things are different and how they are similar. But because of one particular propensity, polarization, we frequently come to be lodged in only one end of a difference. One pole of a concept gains its identity through differentiating itself from its opposite pole. In other words, we become stuck in only one end of our thinking. And not realizing we are stuck anywhere (thinking we are living in “the truth”) we then assign the opposite of the place we are stuck to another location or to other people. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=739)) - through the way thinking was misused on us when we were children, we ourselves have come to use thinking for giving ourselves instructions and directions rather than for describing to ourselves what is happening in our awareness and in our experience. ([Location 756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=756)) - Perhaps the most damaging aspect of thinking is that we have come to think that understanding is the endpoint of our living. Once we understand something then we can relax. Whereas not thinking but experiencing (including the experience of thinking) is our ultimate encounter with aliveness. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=758)) - People are naturally social, especially once they have come into their wholeness, so there is no need to train them to be social. What we can do is to nurture and support their coming into their wholeness so their own natural social nature can be fully present. ([Location 913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=913)) - I allowed myself to return slowly to the room. There was no hurry. My job was not to take care of the people sitting in the circle but to honor the rhythm of the profound process that I had just been through, and to allow myself all the space and time that I needed. I sometimes think of this as the space surrounding the print on the page in a book. The space honors the print by holding it in a sacred way and in some very fine books there is an excess of space because what is said in print is so valuable. The same esthetic is involved with the time and space that we need to honor concerning our own inner process. ([Location 982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=982)) - It is not to be hurried. It is not to be judged in terms of the conditioning we have been subjected to about not taking space and time from the group. The most valuable thing in our lives is the inner process which sees to our healing and our coming into maturity. ([Location 987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07BDRKBXJ&location=987))