The book starts with a journey that takes us back to the beginning of our being. It brings us forward from our childhood where we have almost complete physical and psychological freedom and charts some of most remarkable achievements we have to make, in order to survive.

An early and brief discussion of my training in child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy allows me to juxtapose the milestones of children’s psychophysiological health to adult life and to wonder, with humour, where we went wrong, given the current psychophysiological scene!

Anecdotal stories from my life as an expatriate specialist, often flying into distant and remote locations around the world, while contracted to multinational companies serve to illustrate some of the more extreme dislocations and how to engage them.

These stories and the underlying simple theories build upon themselves chapter by chapter beginning with some of the early ideas about self, which are still very current, and leading the reader towards my own theory.

The genre is self help psychophysiology with a metaphysical or spiritually transcendental proof. The story line which follows Crystal, a young woman from a third culture background uses the theories described and elaborated through the book to reflect on her changing life and the authorship of it as she matures.

Shining a light into the dark spaces which every human being experiences existentially and developing hope, from within an understanding that we are what we need, once we recognise what we are, is the general theme! There are two lines of parallel development within us all, the physiological and the psychological.

Much of what we experience as children is the delightful growth and joy of the physiological which is normally quickly replaced by the pedagogic imperative to be seated and engage the mind at the expense of the body, a practice continued for the rest of most peoples lives. I ask the reader to consider a reunion between adult and child, a reunion which if engaged, offers a vast and forgotten reservoir of energy which when tapped into really assists us in surmounting the obstacles and hurdles we encounter all the way through our lives.

Crucial to the theory is the idea that when the two parallel developmental paths are joined through a process I call centauring, a third sphere of experience occurs and this is the controversial or contentious aspect. It's really the human application of General Systems Theory, the simple idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, that we have within us an energy designed for our use which manifests in a transcendental manner; quite simply creativity.

This theory is new because it discusses uniting innate and normal developmental systems and creating something extraordinary which everyone has potentially within them.

The practical application of the theory utilises this energy and develops a cohesive positive and unique plan that anyone can access and use, no matter what their psychological, physiological, economic or cultural background is and they can enhance the nature of their being and quality of their life at any given moment.

It is a unique book starting from well accepted theory and setting about to recover childhood, a realm so full of original learning and yet today, more than at any other time in recent epochs, a realm seemingly lost to many. I believe in this book, it has been shaping itself within me for half a lifetime and people have shared so much of what is woven within it.

The processes of how we "cope" without understanding what we are as three natured beings is inescapably riveting reading. This is a book which will actually change your life if you open yourself to the chance to be who you were born to be and work with the incredible internally available transcendental energies within!

Michael R Beaumont-Connop

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