The Science ofSELF

How it all started

My relationship with the questions behind the Science of SELF did not begin as a professional interest.

For more than forty years, I have been preoccupied with existence, human behaviour, consciousness, God, suffering and the strange experience of not belonging to this world. Profound transcendental experiences were a normal part of my life from early childhood, long before I had the language or intellectual structure through which to translate them.

Social norms forced me into compliance with the accepted version of reality. Adversity leading to a near-death experience snapped me out of it. What followed was a live or die quest to understand coherently what I had experienced, the knowledge that came with it, and how that knowledge related to my purpose for being here.

So I went looking. Across psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, metaphysics, neuroscience, psychotherapy, human behaviour, healing traditions and, increasingly, through people themselves. I studied what different disciplines and traditions had discovered, where their explanations converged, where they contradicted one another, and what each could see from the particular level of reality it was examining.

I was looking for the parts of the same picture that humanity divided between disciplines.

The results of that enquiry became the CWS Method teaching the Science of SELF: the knowledge of what we are, why we are here, how human Self-awareness develops, what our experiences are for, and where we — as individual sparks of Self experiencing this particular human life — are going when that experience is complete.

The CWS Method™ became the way I teach and apply that knowledge.

The written work developed alongside the applied work.

My first major book on the subject became Conversations with Self — God, Consciousness And Existence Explained, with its second edition retitled Conversations with Self — God Has Multiple Personalities and You Are One. The books that followed explored the implications of the same knowledge for consciousness, mental health and suffering, childhood, human development and everyday life.

My Work

But just writing about human existence was never enough for me.

Knowledge that cannot survive contact with human reality is of limited use.

For more than fifteen years I applied the work directly with people experiencing some of the most complex forms of human distress: complex trauma, treatment-resistant depression, personality disorders, psychosis, addiction, neurodivergence burnout, severe self-neglect, family breakdowns, and existential crises. They all had incredible results where decades of treatments and therapies had failed them. But they also taught me the limits of 1-1 work.

Through that work, I realised that you cannot fully restore the health of the individual while the environment causing them the problem remained unchanged.

The person doesn't arrive in a consulting room as an isolated psyche. They return to relationships, families, workplaces, services, organisations, communities and social conditions that continually act upon them.

Following that relationship between the individual and the environment took my work progressively outward.

I moved from private work into NHS mental health services, supported housing, clinical and operational leadership, complex Mental Health Adult Social Care, workforce development, safeguarding, governance and organisational culture — and eventually into the Care Quality Commission as an Adult Social Care Inspector.

This investigative quest allowed me to follow the human challenges from individual through progressively larger systems.

And once you follow that enquiry far enough, the problem becomes impossible to ignore:

We cannot keep trying to change the human while leaving unchanged the conditions in which that human is expected to recover, develop and contribute.

→Mental health cannot be separated from social and environmental health.

→Organisational impact on human health cannot be separated from the people whose level of Self-awareness creates and leads them.

→And the individual cannot be understood apart from the larger systems in which they participate and by which they are affected.

We live a divided reality because division makes complexity manageable. But this division and fragmentation of our reality is the cause of all our problems.

The work I teach as the Science of SELF is the restoration of that larger picture.

That is where the next, experience-led application of my work begins.