• 
    Operating the Creature You Inhabit
  
  
  •    Start Here
  •    Dependence
  •    Learning to Steer
  •    Optical Illusions
  •    The Soul Illusion
• 
    Will & the Illusion of Will
  
  
  •    Two Minds
  •    Determinism
  •    Exercising Will
  •    True Grit
  •    Enhancing Willpower
  •   Perseverance
• 
     Pathology
  
  
  •    The Study of Paths
  •    Matching Considerations
  •    The Impeccable Path
  •    What it Means to Decide
  •    The Open Path
  •    The Enlightened Path
  •    The Truth Wants to Set You Free
  •    An Exquisite Irony
• 
     Emotion Focused Coping
  
  
  •    Coping with Raw Experience
  •    Attachment to Outcomes
  •    Meta-Cognitive Awareness
  •    Mindfulness & Awakening
  •    Curiosity & Being
  •    The Serenity Prayer
  •    The Power of a Will
  •    Hypnosis as Covert Doing
  •    Intention and Attention
  •    Ordinary Trances
  •    Hypnotic Exercises
• 
     Problem Focused Coping
  
  
  •   Stages of Change
  •   Your Core Motivation
  •   Contemplation
  •   The Decision Matrix
  •   The Decision
  •   The Action Stage
  •   The Traps
  •   Action Fork
• 
     Training Tools
  
  
  •    Puppy Training
  •   Warning Signals
  •   Coping Tactics
  •   The Reminder Card
  •   Your Treatment Plan
• 
     Personal Research
  
  
  •   Study the Past
  •   Cheap Research
  •    Hardening
  •    The End

The OPEN Path

The education of the will is the object of our existence

- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

To follow the OPEN Path you would develop an Implementation Intention such as, “When I encounter high-risk situation X, I will execute tactic Y.” You have to exercise your will to carry out your plan, and then, like a scientist, you observe what happens. If you get the expected outcome, you are on the right track. Congratulations!

However, if things did not work out as you expected, nature is telling you that cause-and-effect play out differently than you thought.  Consequently, and you must modify your understanding of cause-and-effect, so you can develop a plan that takes this new knowledge into account. Then, you execute the new plan and be open to the feedback nature gives you, and so forth. Over time you will develop a more sophisticated understanding of cause-and-effect in your universe and a progressively more realistic and effective set of coping tactics.

The OPEN Path refers to: Outcome, Plan, Execute, Nurture:

• Choose an Outcome you want.
• Develop a Plan to achieve it.
• Execute the plan.
• Nurture your understanding through observation and modify the plan accordingly.  Go back to step #3.

Example of H’s plan: “At the wedding reception, whenever I think of drinking alcohol, I will take a sip of club soda and focus on my family.” Later, he will review his observations, asking himself: “What can I learn from this experience?” “What helped and what did not?”

The Truth Will Set You Free!

The objective of the OPEN Path is to improve your understanding of cause-and-effect through observation. If your predictions were good enough for you to create a plan that worked well, congratulate yourself, and note what you did that was effective. Success has a lot of information value: There are many ways to fail, but few ways to succeed.

However, if things did not go as predicted, nature has taught you something you did not know before. The task now is to appreciate and take advantage of this knew information. You might make adjustments or abandon the tactic completely in favor of a different approach. As you continue to accept natural feedback and use it to improve your coping abilities, you will become progressively more effective.

Self-Forgiveness

The follower of the OPEN Path seeks truth as revealed by observation. Personal experiments are conducted primarily to ask a question of nature and receive an answer. These experiments are risky. Unexpected results are common; if we knew what would work we would not have to do the experiment.

Performing these experiments requires courage. Unfortunately, many people with addictive disorders are relentless promoters of self-hate. The inevitable setbacks and hard times are taken as proof of their intrinsic worthlessness or of the hopelessness of their situation.

To utilize the powerful tools of the scientific method you must be:

1. Open to the truth as revealed by direct observation.
   
2. Capable of utilizing the disciplines of inductive and deductive reasoning.
3. Free from attachment to any particular story of the truth.
4. Willing to rehearse your coping tactics so that you can perform them with little conscious guidance.
5. Flexible enough to try something different when a tactic produces unsatisfactory results.

The rigidity of the Impeccable Path is what makes it strong but brittle.  The flexibility of the OPEN Path allows its user to learn the lessons of cause and effect by employing the scientific method. This advantage comes at a price: What seems to be “reasonable” is state-dependent.  When desperate for the pleasure or relief the incentive promises, a reasonable person is easy to corrupt. 

Relapse is common because Soul Illusion distorts our appraisal of what is reasonable.   During a high-risk situation your evaluation of the costs and benefits of a first lapse may be different than it is now.   Followers of the Impeccable Path are not vulnerable to situational motivation, because their commitment is frozen. They do not have to take local conditions into account.  They have no choices other than rigid adherence to their commitment.  For followers of the OPEN Path the task is more complicated.

So far we have described two mutually exclusive paths to self-determination:

• The Impeccable Path requires no decisions, because there are no options—no exceptions are permitted. The problem with this brittle path is that one lapse can undermine the entire effort.

• The OPEN Path requires you to be forgiving of errors and be flexible enough to modify your plan on the basis of new information. The problem with this flexible path is that it is poorly matched to the task of overcoming corruptive influences.