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the favor, saving their lives on more than one occasion.
    Business, politics, education, and religion may seem like opposing forces at times, but they all share one significant, potentially fatal flaw: mistrust of the body. Civilization has thus interrupted the optimal flow of human evolution. Your body is the horse that your mind rides around on. It’s a sentient being, not a machine. (See Guiding Principle 2, chapter 14 .) Starve that horse, beat it into submission, ignore its vast stores of nonverbal wisdom, and it will fail you when you need it most, throwing you during a crisis, perhaps wandering into traffic at the most inopportune moment. Reawakening corporeal intelligence — learning to form a partnership with instinct, intuition, and emotion — these skills are essential in harnessing the strength, creativity, spirit, compassion, and endurance needed to manifest lasting, meaningful change.
    There’s a whole herd of horses in my cathedral, and they remain my greatest teachers. This is the course, the handbook they’ve dictated in so many subtle and powerful gestures.

Chapter Five
THE LION AND THE HORSE
    T he human psyche is a dynamic ecosystem. Without the right balance of day and night, sunshine and rain, predator and prey, culture and nature, a landscape originally designed to support life turns into a desert, a dust bowl, an apocalyptic, postnuclear nightmare of desolation and alienation. In symbolic terms, daylight represents conscious awareness: what we can see and name, predict and command. Much of that “other 90 percent” operates subconsciously or unconsciously, moving stealthily through the night, resisting full explanation and domestication. Yet people don’t just shy away from darkness in favor of the light. Some odd quirk of human behavior forces each generation to relive the fall of Adam and Eve in all kinds of crafty, covert ways.
    Scientists and atheists are not immune. Practical modern minds tend to glorify what is “light” — that which is logical, socially acceptable, profitable, and/or controllable. Anything outside each person’s current worldview is shrouded in darkness — not just unknown, not just suspect, but damned. This includes forms of perception. If you’re fanatically religious, you’re likely to revere faith and submission to established theological doctrine while distrusting reason, intuition, and feeling. If you’re a genetic researcher, on the other hand, you’re much more apt to promote reason and established scientific doctrine while discounting faith, feeling, and intuition. Either way, significant forms of nonverbal awareness are outlawed, remaining grossly underdeveloped. Families, tribes, and religious and political organizations accentuate this self-limiting tendency, socializing members to accept a particular set of static judgments,inspiring people to smugly dismiss, actively ostracize, threaten, or even kill those who operate from a different perspective.
    No wonder so many of us reach middle age thirsting for something indescribable while feeling frightened or guilty about it. We’ve been reared by a culture of desert dwellers: obsessive, rain-phobic sun worshippers who shine massive spotlights at the stars to chase away the night. The mysterious, nourishing waters of emotion, empathy, instinct, artistic and mythic insight, gut feelings, and intersubjective awareness have all but dried up in many schools and professions. And it promises to get worse in the information age. After all, how do you quantify love or tweet your deepest, most elusive dreams?
    To people who aren’t particularly religious, the fall of Adam and Eve may seem like a quaint little folktale, but it’s actually a brilliant teaching story, a perceptive, richly nuanced assessment of the flaw behind all human flaws: the premature acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil. The first man and woman, as you may recall, ate the