Shepherd, Philip. _New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century_. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2010. # Progressive Summary Myths teach us two things, that we must integrate the masculine and the feminine, and that the hero must overcome the tyrant. The masculine is the male energy of "doing", and the feminine is the female energy of "being". The hero is willing to undergo a transformation, whereas the tyrant is stuck in a static definition of self. We create duplicates of reality as an attempt to gain control over our lives. But all we are doing is cutting ourselves off from lived experience. These duplicates of reality can be referred to as the "known self". Wade Davis observes that the Penan tribe of Borneo have no words to distinguish between "he", "she" or "it", but have six words for "we". They measure wealth not by possessions but by the strength of their relationships. Both the words "atom" and "individual" mean indivisible, although the former comes from a Greek root, and the latter comes from a Latin root. Our culture looks at the world and the self as made up of separate entities. Bohm believed that science's project of explaining the universe in terms of separate, autonomous entities is bound to fail, because everything is interconnected. That's why science can't explain consciousness, because consciousness can't be reduced to smaller building blocks. Bohm explained wholeness via the metaphor of a hologram. A hologram is created by pointing a laser through a photographic plate. But if the plate is broken, the hologram can still be re-created by pointing the laser at any of the parts. The whole is implicate in its parts. Even language depends on relationship. Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound wrote that "the whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of metaphor." Thought rests on relationship. # Head over the body The placement of the head in hierarchical supremacy over the body is the prototype of all the other hierarchies we have created. Parmenides inaugurated this hierarchy by placing reason over the senses. It was not challenged until Blake came along. The head of the Roman Catholic Church is not called the belly or the heart or the lungs of the church, even though spirit literally means breath. We don't say "two hearts are better than one". The symbol of kingship is a crown around the head. The symbol for mastery in karate is a belt tied below the belly button. The *head office* or *headquarters* chooses someone who is *levelheaded* or has *a good head on his shoulders* to *head up* its operations. If the company does well or gets *ahead* of the competition, it might *go to his head*, and he might have a *swelled head*. He is likely to *butt heads* with others, who might challenge his ideas as *wrongheaded*. Chief, captain and capital derive from Latin words meanings "head." The most extreme offenses or punishments are "capital". The head not only rules the self, but has seeped into the very language which the self employs. > When we think, for example, we can do it more effectively if we shut out the world, and sometimes if we can’t shut out the world, it impairs our thinking—all of which seems to confirm that our thinking is independent from the world around us. # Wholeness > The idea that we are part of and sustained by an all-aware, dynamic whole has existed in many forms; it is often referred to as the Perennial Philosophy. Traditionally, that whole is understood to be hidden at all times, yet manifest in all things. The ancient Greeks called that whole the Logos; Lao-tzu famously referred to it as the Tao. Indigenous North American nations knew it as the Great Spirit, and Australian Aborigines as the Divine Oneness. It has also been called the Great Mother, Christ Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, the One Mind, or God. As architect Christopher Alexander observed, God, described by one word or another, is a way of understanding that we are part of an unbroken whole. # Control The word "control" > traces back to a bookkeeping practice developed in medieval Europe whereby accounts were copied onto a duplicate register, or roll, against which they could be checked. The word derives from Old French contre (against) role (roll). > control depends on two conditions: a knowledge of what should be done (which is provided by our duplicates) and a way to compare that ideal with what is being done (which is provided by our self-consciousness). > To exercise its control, then, the male element assembles a filing system of duplicates that stands apart from the fluid intelligence of the body and is at the ready to take charge of any situation—ready, specifically, to prevent Being from carrying us into a fresh, uncontrolled experience. > The wholeness of the felt self cannot coexist with self-consciousness: as soon as the male intelligence becomes the watchful supervisor, even when it merely supervises the fate of our banana peel, our felt wholeness virtually blinks out of existence—although we are not likely to notice, because we can still feel our bodies and emotions.