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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.
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