Inner Ego Communication
Pathways to the inner self
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A Brief Introduction

As the author of this Guide, I should briefly introduce myself. Educationally, I began my career as a short-term high school dropout. My flight from education was not ended by my recognition of the importance of education but by my inability to find a job. I went back to high school and did just enough to squeak by and graduate. In my senior year of high school I was in a serious automobile accident that led to a transformative experience. I will come back to this experience later. Following this experience, I worked for several years, read widely and began attending night classes to correct some of my academic deficiencies from high school. I subsequently enrolled in college and graduated with honors with a double major from a large state university. I then served two years in the U.S. Navy. Following that I returned to school and earned a masters degree. I then began work as a developmental therapist with emotionally disturbed children. Later, I earned a doctoral degree in childhood behavior disorders and began a career in academia preparing teachers to work with challenging children. I taught at three different universities and ended my career as a department chair in a large, urban research university. In short, I've spent my adult life thinking about how to bring about change in people.
The title of this book contains several words that are worth clarifying by way of this introduction. The first word is "creative" by which we mean the generation of something new and unique. Amit Goswami discusses inner creativity and outer creativity in his book The Self-aware Universe. The use of the word in this book is focused on inner creativity, by which I mean creatively changing your way of being. The word "self" is used in two ways. The first part of the book focuses on change in the everyday "self" that most of us think of as who we are. This is also the self that is meant in such terms as self-concept, self-image and ego. The other sections of the book usually use the term "Self" that some of us think of as the higher Self or the spiritual Self. To keep these two uses of the word separate, the spiritual Self will always begin with an uppercase "S," and the everyday self will always begin with a lowercase "s." The only place where case, used to make this distinction, breaks down is at the beginning of a sentence. In those rare cases, you'll have to rely on context to distinguish between the two meanings. The other word in the title is "agency." Agency implies two things. First, agency implies that choices exist. Agency can't be exercised over something if there are no choices. Some would call this aspect of agency as "free will" and I'm okay with that as long as free will is defined as the ability to make choices from a range of possibilities of varying probabilities (see Appendix 1). Will for me means the application of active intent to make a choice other than the easy choice or what has been called the path of least resistance. Only active intent can increase the likelihood of a lower probability choice taking precedence over a higher probability choice. Second, agency implies an agent acting on something -- that would be you, the reader.