The Author

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