Our goal is the complete integration of natural language understanding with the rest of cognition. Two mechanisms that we have developed and implemented to achieve this goal are: (l) the Direct Memory Access Parsing (DMAP) algorithm, based on the notion of lexically-guided memory search and concept refinement, and (2) an inference-triggering process based on the notion of concept refinement failures. Together, these two mechanisms form a tightly-integrated system of parsing and inferencing, with no artificial boundaries between them.