As a result of living in the service of a chemical God, I have continually violated my core ethical principles and behaved in a manner inconsistent with my values.  This way of living has become so deeply conditioned into my personality, from chronic reinforcement with pleasure-producing drugs, that I have developed a self-sustaining cancer of the spirit, eroding my character so frightfully that I no longer recognize the person my behavior defines as myself.

     My words, thoughts, and deeds have become dishonest, self-centered, self-serving, arrogant, and judgmental; intolerant, inconsiderate, impatient, and closed-minded; self-righteous, fearful, rebellious, and domineering.

     This growing ego-dystonia leaves me frightened and distressed.  The increasing harm that I am bringing upon myself and those I love leaves shame, guilt, remorse, and resentment in its wake.  At times, these negative feelings seem unbearable, and I have resorted, time and again, to chemicals for relief in a vicious self-destructive cycle of ever-increasing ferocity.  I must bring about a core change in my personality - must realign my behavior with my values and ethics or I will destroy myself utterly.

     To this point, all of my attempts to accomplish the needed changes on my own have failed because my reasoning has become contaminated and my will corrupted by the profoundly conditioned obsession with, and compulsive drive to experience, chemical euphoria, and I defeat myself at every turn.  I have become powerless over my addiction.

     This undulating existence has finally become so disorienting that I am forced to leave the field of play briefly to consider the matter of - just exactly what is going on here anyway?   Things certainly did not develop as I had envisioned them doing.  Yet, I can see no readily-apparent explanation for this deviation.  My ancestors were Celtic kings and chieftains.  Their blood flows in my veins, and I have a brave and determined spirit.  I do not believe that I ever wished for chemical dependency, poverty, a ruined career, failed relationships, a criminal record, or pariah status among my fellow human beings.

     My desires and aspirations, I am sure, are similar to yours in many ways.  I want to have friends and find personal happiness.  I want to discover things meaningful, enjoyable, and rewarding to do with my life.  I want to be a loving friend and helpful partner to my wife and to share with her the incredible experience of nurturing the growth and development of our precious child.  I want to make at least a small contribution to betterment of the human condition.

     Qualities that I have admired in others and hoped to achieve for myself include: honesty, humility, courage, open-mindedness, patience, tolerance, willingness, consideration, and cooperation.  I would like to be able to live in such a manner as to be considered a kind, capable, caring, giving, sharing, open, fair, and consistent person.  Where do I begin to unravel the Gordian Knot of an existence gone so far astray from what I intended? Which is the path that leads to wisdom and fulfillment for me?  It is my fervent hope and belief that the following pages mark my initial steps along such a path.

     This work grew out of the journal of my search for self-understanding that I have been keeping for our daughter.  I want her to know me exactly as I am - a person, a man, a husband, a father - no greater and no lesser than any other, with all the strengths and the frailties that are, at once, inherently human, and also uniquely mine.  Allowing her, in this way, to experience, as directly as possible, my true thoughts and feelings as they occurred over time will, I think, be as meaningful a gift as I can give to her to help with her own journey of self discovery.

     This book is about self-understanding, self-liberation, and about becoming whole.  I believe that any proper quest for such things must necessarily begin at the most basic level.  It has been said that the paradox of change is that deep change is not possible without first accepting who we are now.  Since acceptance is facilitated by understanding, it would seem helpful to define who and where we are now and discover how this all came about.  For myself, I have had to start with the timeless, fundamental, existential questions of human existence; "What am I?" and "Why am I here?"  I recorded my thoughts on these matters, over a period of a month, in my journal.  The following discussion is taken whole from its pages.  It represents the synthesis and summation of all that I have either experienced or been able to gather from my various studies of the thoughts of others on these subjects.  Any errors or inconsistencies are entirely mine.

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The Five Selves

     The question, "Who are you?," seems to me to be a request for a description of one's personality and possibly one's contextual life circumstances.  It strikes me that a more essential and primary question to be answered, is "What are you?"  You might reply: a girl, a person, a daughter, a mammal, a primate, a human being, etc. What does all this really mean?  Let us look at what it means to be a human being.

     From the anthropological perspective, the evolutionary divergence of hominids (human-like primates) and apes toward separate paths of development probably originated 12-14 million years ago, in Africa.  The earliest known hominid genus appeared about five million B.C., and the human line (Homo habilis) split off from these around 2.5 million years ago.   Homo erectus, our nearest ancestor, appeared in Africa, perhaps 1.75 million years ago, and began spreading into Asia and Europe soon after.  He had learned to control fire, use the hand axe, and probably had primitive language skills.  Genetic analysis of fossil DNA indicates that, sometime around 600,000 B.C., the H. erectus populations that had left Africa began an evolutionary divergence, ultimately unsuccessful, into what would become known as the Neanderthal people.

     It was apparently from those Homo erectus which remained behind in Africa that all modern humans are descended, possibly from a single ancestor that lived between 100,000 and 200,000 B.C.  Though the footprints of a recognizably-modern human, dated at over 117,000 years old, have recently been found in South Africa, the appearance, in Europe about 38,000 B.C., of Cro-Magnon Man has long been recognized as the first known complete example of fully modern humans of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens.  By 33,000 B.C., a relatively short time later, Homo sapiens had become the dominant species on earth, with no serious rival for supremacy.

     Although we are the only tool-using life form of advanced intelligence in the world today and the only extant species in the primate family Hominidae, this was not always the case.  Our ancestors once coexisted for several thousand years with an evolutionary different type of people, called Neanderthal .  Having first appeared long before us (prior to 100,000 B.C.), they had chinless faces and flattened, sloping heads, along with bodies and brains that were larger than those of early modern humans.  Unable to successfully compete against the superior intelligence possessed by our ancestors, the Neanderthal people became extinct around 30,000 B.C.

     Sociobiologically, human beings are the creatures at the top of the food chain in the Animal Kingdom division of the biosphere of the planet Earth.  Omnivorous and predatory, we belong to the class of warm-blooded, live-bearers called Mammals and to the order of Primates, or apelike creatures.  We live in large social groups through which we attempt to cooperate so that individual needs can be met more efficiently.  We mate for life (theoretically!), and rear our young within this social context. Unlike many other animals, our mating season is year-round, and our offspring have the longest developmental period of dependency of all the world's creatures.  This amounts to almost 20 years these days since childhood has been culturally extended over the last few centuries.

     Humans differ from other creatures in that we have more highly-developed reasoning abilities and an emotional structure which includes love and many subtle feeling variations upon it and its opposite, fear.  Physically, we are the most successful tool users due to the way our hands have developed with the thumb opposing the fingers, giving us tremendous variation in our grasping ability and greatly accelerating the evolutionary development of our species.  Since this gives us the power to change our world and control how we change it, the responsibility for its quality and condition obtains to us.  I have mentioned the above facts to orient us as to our place within the scheme of nature and because one aspect of human nature is its animal aspect - primitive drives for survival which must not be ignored in our concept of what we are.

     A human being actually exists in five separate experiential realities - five qualitatively different fundamental aspects of human existence that may be referred to as the Five Selves .  Although intimately intertwined within an individual's life experience, they may be separated and examined individually.  All of a person's subjective experience of his or her existence falls into one of these five categories.

     In the drawing below, I have made a symbolic representation of these five fundamental facets or "selves" that make up the human being.  The symbolism is less than perfect since it is difficult to show the dynamic interrelationships or the actual organizational structure that exists.  For example, the personality is primarily a combination of our Intellectual and Emotional Selves and is actually organized into ego states, as will be seen shortly.