This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — Rumi
We live in a time when many people believe institutions are a con. But the word con never meant deception. Its root is the Latin cum — meaning with. And everything depends on this question: With what — or with whom — are we aligned?
This question opens the entire Way.
There is a con with a small c and a Con with a capital C. There is being with in a lesser way and being With in a greater way. There is Mankind and there is Humankind.
Mankind is the left-hand place — the state of being with the wrong thing: with the stuck behaviour, with the collapsing institution, with the ego attempting to self-govern what it cannot heal, with repetition rather than revelation, with survival rather than surrender.
Humankind is the right-hand place — the state of being with the right thing: with the Greater Power, with the breath of the Real, with the paradox that restores sanity, with Step Eleven consciousness, with the Creative Intelligence that the Twelve Steps return us to.
This is not moralism. This is alignment. This is orientation. This is the architecture of the soul. We are designed to get things wrong before we get things right, vice and virtue are in the very template of individuate wisdoms.
The DRT behaviour device shows this with elegant precision — a single vertical axis holding the left and right words, revealing the movement from Mankind toward Humankind.
On the left-hand side is Mankind — the small con: being with the failing pattern, with the exhausted will, with the illusion of self-sufficiency.
On the right-hand side is Humankind — the great Con: being with the Higher Power, with humility, with paradox, with the Source that makes healing possible.
These two sides are never enemies. They are connected, paired, dependent — two poles of one paradox, the paradox through which transformation enters.
Wrong leans toward right. Right redeems wrong. The brokenness becomes the place of belonging. The collapse becomes the first clarity. The wound becomes the aperture for Light.
Our institutions are collapsing because they have remained too long in the realm of Mankind — with self-reference, with egoic governance, with structures cut off from their Source.
But collapse is not annihilation. Collapse is the small con exhausting itself. Collapse is the threshold of the great Con — the return of Humankind.
Every addict knows this. Every recovery room embodies this. Every true spiritual lineage teaches this.
A person recovers not by becoming stronger, but by becoming With. Not by reinforcing the ego, but by returning to Humankind.
A culture recovers in exactly the same way.
The question is always the same: Are we living as Mankind — or awakening as Humankind? What are we With? And what must we come-With next?
This is where The Holy Con begins — with the rediscovery of withness as the axis of healing, orientation, and return.
And the Way will appear as the next stone rises beneath the foot.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
“Humankind is born of Mankind, then Mankind is borne by Humankind.” — A.J. Dettman
Every spiritual teaching worth its breath begins with a paradox — and this one is the doorway into the whole architecture of The Holy Con.
Humankind is born of Mankind. The higher emerges from the lower. The awakened self grows out of the wounded self. Consciousness rises through the very soil of unconsciousness.
This is why no stage of collapse is wasted. No failure is irrelevant. No addiction is outside the curriculum of awakening. The raw material of Humankind is always Mankind.
But the paradox does not end there.
Once Humankind is born, Mankind is no longer the carrier. The polarity reverses. The higher begins to bear the lower. Humankind carries Mankind. Humankind holds what once held it. Humankind becomes the shelter, the governance, the orientation, the right-hand alignment.
This is the turning at the heart of recovery, the pivot inside every Twelve Step experience, the movement from left-hand to right-hand in the DRT axis.
We begin in Mankind — with the ego, with self-will, with the illusion of personal mastery.
But when the self cannot carry the self any longer, Humankind is born — the capacity to be with the Greater Power, with surrender, with grace, with the paradox that reveals the next step.
And once Humankind rises, it begins the work of bearing Mankind.
This is why recovery does not erase the wound — it carries it. Transforms it. Bears it as a mother bears a child and as a child in adulthood bears the aging mother.
The relationship reverses but the bond remains.
This is why opposites are always connected. Wrong and right. Collapse and renewal. Mankind and Humankind. Con and con. Two aspects of one unfolding. Two poles of one mercy.
Every addict knows this circle. Every mystic lives it. Every civilisation, when it collapses and rises, confirms it.
Humankind is not another species. It is Mankind transfigured. Mankind relieved of the burden of carrying itself. Mankind lifted into alignment with the creative Force it forgot.
And when Humankind takes up its place, it begins to bear Mankind with tenderness — not condemnation, not avoidance, not disgust, but recognition.
Because Humankind remembers what Mankind forgets: that every fall is formative, every collapse is instructive, every darkness is a womb.
This is why the Holy Con is not a movement of escape but a movement of withness. Not leaving the old behind but carrying it rightly, through a new alignment with the paradox that makes transformation possible.
Humankind is born of Mankind. Then Mankind is borne by Humankind. Birth and carrying. Collapse and bearing. Left and right. The small con and the great Con. One circle. One unfolding. One mercy.
And the Way continues, stone by unseen stone, as we follow the curve of what carries us next.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
There is a mystery woven through the history of the world — a mystery that rarely appears in public, yet quietly shapes the fate of civilisations.
It is the mystery of how so few realised Human beings have ever walked the earth, and yet how astonishingly far their influence extends.
The number has always been small. Sometimes one in an age. Sometimes hidden entirely. Yet without them, the world would collapse.
The Sufis call such a being al-Qutb — the Pole, the axis around which the invisible order of the world turns. The Qutb is not recognised by earthly authority. He sits in no palace and rules no institution. But everything stable, everything merciful, everything quietly preserved is preserved because he stands.
In the Qur’an he appears as Khidr — the Green One, the guide Moses could not understand because Khidr moved by a law higher than law.
In the Christian imagination he appears as St George, not primarily as a dragon-slayer but as the defender of the innocent, the protector of what must be preserved.
In English folklore he surfaces again as Robin Hood, the outlaw who serves a deeper justice than the crown, aligned with the unseen moral order rather than earthly power.
Far to the East, in the mountains of Tibet, another whisper appears: that certain High Lamas, fully realised beings, sustain the balance of the world simply through their presence. Their monasteries were not just schools — they were tuning forks for the world’s spiritual field.
Most hidden of all is the lineage of the Sarmoung Masters of Wisdom, the Brotherhood said to have preserved the “bees’ knowledge,” refining and transmitting the nectar of divine wisdom across centuries so it would not be lost when civilisations collapsed.
The Sarmoung were custodians of humanity’s inner architecture — not to rule the world, but to keep it from dissolving from within.
At this point, we must remember what John G. Bennett said in his final public talk, distilling everything he learned from Gurdjieff, the Sarmoung, and decades of direct work with hidden traditions.
Bennett understood what few dare to see: that the Human race is an unfinished experiment, extraordinarily difficult, and that the transition from Mankind to Humankind is not guaranteed. It requires help — not institutional help, but help from those few realised beings who have crossed the threshold and now bear the weight of the many.
Different continents. Different myths. Different languages. Yet all these traditions describe the same pattern: a small number of realised Human beings hold the world together from within.
They are not rulers. They are not prophets. They are not public figures. They are poles of stability, silent axes upon which the visible world unwittingly turns.
This is the Unseen Government — not a conspiracy, not a shadow elite, but a spiritual architecture that predates nations, institutions, and religions.
Those who belong to it walk with humility, often in obscurity, sometimes in disguise. Their presence radiates order into chaos, mercy into cruelty, balance into a world tipping toward collapse.
Every tradition carries a whisper of this group because the human soul remembers them, even when the mind does not.
Here is the great paradox: those who cross from Mankind into Humankind touch — even briefly — the edge of this current. The movement into alignment “with” the Real is the same movement that sustains the saints, the sages, the Green Man, the Sarmoung Masters, and the Lamas who hold the world upright.
The Twelve Steps tap into the same architecture: not through doctrine, but through alignment; not through belief, but through withness. Surrender brings a human being into contact with the same ancient field of support and governance.
When a person awakens into Humankind, even for a moment, they begin to bear what once crushed them. They join the current that has supported humanity since humanity first became capable of self-reflection. This is the ancient distinction between “the quick and the dead” — not in the crude sense of bodies and graves, but in the deeper sense recognised by the earliest Christians and later by the mystics: the difference between those who merely live, and those who have become alive.
This awakened aliveness — what some traditions name Christ consciousness — is not reserved for saints or prophets. It is the same shift made quietly, anonymously, in the Twelve-Step rooms for the last ninety years. Millions have brushed this threshold without ever naming it. The Steps, like the old Ways, do not create the Real; they align a person with it. They turn the deadened life of Mankind into the quickened life of Humankind.
This chapter opens that veil just enough to show that the crossing from Mankind to Humankind is not merely personal psychology. It is an initiation into a lineage. It is an entry into an ancient order. It is a step onto a Way guarded by Khidr, preserved by the Sarmoung, sustained by the Lamas, and anchored by the Qutb.
Whether we recognise it or not, every sincere seeker, every recovering person, every human who begins to walk “with” the Real is led by the same invisible hand.
And the Way continues, stone by unseen stone, because the hidden ones have always stood where the world would otherwise fall.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — St John 1:1
Despair is not just sadness taken too far. It is not only a mood, or a chemical imbalance, or a generational quirk.
Despair is de-pair. It is the loss of pairing. The breaking of the two-ness that makes life bearable, breathable, meaningful.
Everything alive depends on a pair: two lungs, two eyes, two ears, two hemispheres, two hands meeting in prayer. Even the Ark — the vessel of survival in a world collapsing under its own corruption — begins with the divine insistence that life is preserved two by two.
Nothing can continue in isolation. Nothing grows from the singular. Nothing heals from the one-sided. Creation itself is a pairing.
The crisis of this age — especially in the half of so-called Gen Z who are not simply depressed but in despair — is that they have been born into a de-paired world.
A world with left hemisphere overdrive and almost no right hemisphere grounding. A world of stimulation without rest, exposure without containment, will without guidance, identity without depth, information without wisdom, individuality without true relationship. A world of Mankind without Humankind.
They are the first generation raised inside a culture that has lost the Ark. Lost the pair. Lost the two-by-two grounding of the human nervous system itself.
This is why despair overwhelms them. Their being is split. Their between has broken. The left and right no longer speak. The inner Ark has capsized.
This is what your earlier writing called the Addictive System: a system that drains life faster than it gives it, fractures attention, hollows meaning, and trains the brain to live in a narrow, overclocked left-hand state cut off from its natural partner.
The brain itself is an Ark.
Two hemispheres, two modes of knowing, two ways of meeting reality.
The left hemisphere is sharp, narrow, grasping. It categorises, dissects, predicts, controls. It likes to hold things still so it can use them.
The right hemisphere is wide, receptive, relational. It senses context, nuance, depth, presence. It does not grasp; it attends. It lets the world be alive.
A healthy human being needs both. Needs the dance. Needs the pair. The right opens to the living whole; the left helps us work within it. The right perceives meaning; the left helps articulate and act.
The Addictive System has crowned the left and exiled the right. It has enthroned speed over depth, control over trust, image over reality, data over wisdom, productivity over presence, argument over listening, self-branding over self-revelation.
This is not just philosophy. It is neurology. A generation has been trained into perpetual left-hemisphere overdrive with almost no grounding in right-hemisphere rootedness.
No Ark. No two by two. No pair. Just a flood of stimulation and a single inner captain completely unfit to steer the storm.
Gen Z are not simply anxious. They are carrying a hemispheric trauma. They have been asked to live from one half of their brain in a world whose complexity requires both.
The repair must begin where the damage began: in the pairing itself.
This is where Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT) is more than a concept. It is a vehicle.
The left-hand word in the DRT device describes what happens when Mankind lives from the left hemisphere alone: stuck, looping, broken, controlled by the very patterns it thinks it controls. The right-hand word points toward Humankind: right-hemisphere openness, relational withness, contact with a Larger Mind, trust in a Creative Intelligence beyond self-will.
The two sides are not enemies. They are meant to be yoked — a living pair, a restored Ark.
DRT does not ask the left to die; it invites the left to bow. To return to service instead of pretending to be the king.
Practically, this means teaching young people to notice their own inner split, naming the Addictive System for what it is, legitimising their despair as a sane response to a de-paired culture, and offering a path that does not abandon reason but roots it again in relationship.
The Healing Trust (THT) knows this in another language. The hands of a healer do not fix; they pair. They reconnect. They bridge. They invite the human field back into resonance with a greater field. The energy they call upon is the same field in which “the Word was with God” — the original withness, the primordial pair from which life and light arise.
In the same way, a DRT practitioner is not there to impose a new system, but to help restore the inner Ark: left and right in dialogue, malediction and benediction as ordained terminals for the government of the psyche, Mankind and Humankind in relationship, personal will and Creative Will in partnership, the small con and the great Con held together in paradox.
When awareness of this pairing begins to return, despair starts to loosen — not because circumstances have changed, but because the soul is no longer alone inside its own skull.
The young do not need us to promise them that the world will be fine. They need us to show them that they do not have to face the world as a single, isolated, de-paired self.
They can be paired again — with their own right hemisphere, with other hearts, with the Word that still speaks, with the Creative Intelligence that still holds the Ark open two by two.
The first act of repair is to say to them, in words and in presence:
“You are not mad. You are not weak. You have been asked to live in a way no human being was designed to live. Let us rebuild the pair together.”
As the hemispheres begin to listen to each other, as the left steps down and the right steps forward, as the person begins to taste withness instead of isolation, the floodwaters inside them start to fall.
The Ark does not remove the storm. It carries life through it.
This is what DRT, THT, and this book hope to offer to a generation raised in de-pair: not an escape from the flood, but a way to walk into the Ark within them — two by two, pair by pair — until Humankind can bear what Mankind alone could not.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
“Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” — Albert Einstein
This is not metaphor. It is a working description of a closed system.
E = mc² holds because energy and matter are not rivals but expressions of one reality maintained through relationship. What makes the system viable is not either side of the equation, but what sits between them.
The equals sign.
Remove the equals sign and the system does not become freer; it becomes unstable. Energy overwhelms form, or form constrains energy until failure occurs. The problem is never energy itself or matter itself. The problem is the loss of regulation.
Human consciousness has suffered an equivalent structural failure.
For centuries, identity has been weighted almost entirely toward cognition, narrative, and effort. Conscience was reduced to belief, instruction, or compliance rather than recognised as a functional regulator within a living system. Thought became identity. The mind was treated as the whole.
The Twelve Step template corrects this error with unusual precision.
Step Three establishes the lower line of the equals sign: the embodied human being returning their will and life as they are — conditioned, conflicted, unfinished. This is not resignation; it is structural truthfulness.
Step Seven establishes the upper line: conscious alignment with the One beyond the personal system — not as belief, but as contact. Willingness replaces strain. Alignment replaces control.
Between these two lines, a third function becomes possible.
This is where Step Five must be understood accurately.
Step Five is not moral confession. It is the delivery of conscience. It is the moment awareness becomes accountable within relationship, rather than circulating privately inside the mind. Until this delivery occurs, conscience remains present only in potential — sensed but not governing.
Step Five places the central point between the lines.
This point is not judgement, diagnosis, or ideology. It is individuated conscience: the capacity to recognise alignment and misalignment in real time, from within the person, rather than imposed from outside. Clinically, this is the restoration of internal regulation through truthful disclosure.
This is the gain control. This is the regulatory function. This is the equals sign restored.
When conscience is absent, energy overwhelms form (compulsion, repetition, escalation), or form suppresses energy (numbing, rigidity, collapse). When conscience is present, the same forces move through the system without damage and generate coherence.
This chapter concerns that restoration — not the elimination of desire, but the regulation of power; not the dominance of mind, but its return to function; not separation from the body, but reintegration of mind, psyche, and organism into a single working system.
The modern world — including many professional healthcare workers — conflates emotions and feelings into one list. Yet they are not the same.
Feelings are the continuous pressure system of the psyche — ascending, descending, or neutral i.e. transcending — the inner equivalent of blood pressure.
Emotions are the barometric responses to those pressures — expressive weather systems, passing storms, momentary turbulence.
Feeling-pressure is the inner meteorology. Emotion is the barometer registering its movement.
Until conscience is delivered, these inner systems remain difficult to trust. Right and wrong are felt only dimly, borrowed from outside, or imposed as rules rather than recognised as alignment. The organism feels pressure, but does not yet know with itself what that pressure means.
All experience enters through the five physical senses and was designed to be received by the mind, which is the stomach of the psyche. The mind is not a throne, not a control centre, not the essence of being. It is the digestive organ of inner life, receiving raw impressions as the body receives food — softening, mixing, breaking down, and integrating what comes in.
In the same way, conscience is not an abstract moral faculty. It emerges when digestion is restored — when experience has been received, broken down, and integrated rather than bypassed or acted out. Conscience cannot be installed. It must be born.
This digestion is continually heated and stirred by three biological instincts:
Sex instinct — toward union, creativity, pleasure
Social instinct — toward belonging, role, recognition
These instinctual tones behave like thermal currents, shaping the texture of our inner weather.
But when the mind is lifted out of its digestive role and mistaken for the self — when it becomes a noun instead of the verb it was always meant to be — a catastrophic split begins. The mind becomes a box, a container in which a person attempts to live, separate from the organism that bears them.
Addiction arises as the organism’s desperate attempt to blow the box apart — to force a reunion between mind and psyche, and between psyche and the animal body. It is not merely escape; it is a violent attempt at reintegration.
In this sense, addiction is not the opposite of conscience but its precursor under pressure. The executive function — the capacity to bind, repeat, and devote — is alive and vital, yet ungoverned by an individuated knowing-with-self. Until conscience arrives, that binding power attaches to substitutes. The energy is not wrong. The marriage has not yet occurred.
When this split deepens, awareness detaches into a pod-like mind, floating above the living organism on a trickle charge of sensation and story. Detached awareness no longer inhabits the animal body, and so the person treats their own body in ways they would never treat a dog — with overwork, intoxication, deprivation, sedation, punishment, and neglect — not from cruelty, but from disconnection.
This disconnection is precisely what older spiritual language described as a second birth — not a conversion of opinion, but the delivery of conscience itself: the moment awareness becomes answerable and knowing becomes personal rather than theoretical.
At the heart of recovery is this revelation: the mind was never meant to be a noun. Its primary meaning is a verb: to mind — to care for, to attend to, to shepherd. This is the original function of mind in the architecture of Humankind.
In the Twelve Step Programme, this restoration occurs through a precise delivery apparatus. Steps Three, Seven, and Eleven restore contact — re-pairing the circuit so that consciousness is no longer running on a trickle charge. But contact alone is not sufficient. What follows is birth.
These insights do not arise from abstraction. They come from years of client work with cases that seemed impossibly complex — until the distinction between the two bodies became visible: the outer biological body and the inner ontological body of the psyche.
With up to forty thousand neurons in the heart, it is almost as if, in the end, the heart itself blows up the box of the mind. Where the noun-mind tries to contain experience, the heart forces reunion — bringing head and heart back together through a paradoxical collusion inside the sacred disease of stuck and broken addiction.
Steps One, Five, and Ten are not confessions in the moral sense. They are ad-missions — movements toward truth — the labour through which conscience is delivered into the present. The first birth brings a human into life; the second birth brings a human into responsibility.
For many, it is precisely addiction that exposes the failure of the mental box and compels the whole organism to seek unity again. And when this collapse meets the template of the Twelve Step Programme — a body of principles proven by lived evidence rather than theory — delusion is slowly dismantled.
In that process, healthy illusion is restored: the recognition that life is a play of energy experiencing itself through form. Not denial, not fantasy, but the rightful imaginative field in which a human being can live without fragmentation.
When conscience is born, illusion no longer deceives. It plays. Parable resumes its rightful function — carrying meaning across levels without freezing the soul’s development. Weaponised story arrests this second birth and leaves the person stalled between innocence and wisdom. Living story completes it.
The heart returns the mind to its verb-nature. The organism reclaims its person. And what was divided becomes whole enough to begin again.
Only now can consciousness carry its own preciousness through experience without fragmenting. Only now can the executive function bind the person to what serves life rather than substitutes for it. This is not virtue. It is alignment restored.
When clients see this clearly — the psychic stomach, the instinctual heats, the pressure system of feeling, the barometric nature of emotion, the pod-mind’s detachment — relief is palpable. Shame dissolves. Confusion lifts. A person sees themselves from the inside.
And then comes the great turning:
Both the outer body and the inner psyche heal by the same law. When the wound is brought into awareness, the system moves toward self-repair.
Awareness is medicine because conscience is now present to receive it. Unity is the outcome because right and wrong have returned to relationship. The human being — mind, psyche, and animal body — begins its slow return from Mankind’s fragmentation to Humankind’s wholeness.
This is the return of Eden — not innocence regained, but innocence completed by wisdom. The One sees Itself through a unique, unrepeatable person, and love appears as recognition across difference.
Anne Wilson Schaef named the Addictive System as a cultural field rather than an individual pathology. This observation is included here not as critique, but as a clinical orientation point.
What this reveals is not a technique of self-repair, but a relationship. Awareness does not restore coherence by force or control; it responds. When the whole human being is allowed to register experience without distortion, something larger than the individual appears to be met. Repair occurs as if the organism is answering a call already present — an order that precedes thought, belief, and method. Whatever name is given to this order, it cannot be reduced to psychology alone, yet psychology becomes intelligible in its light.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
“As a flame trembles in a draught, so does the mind tremble before the coming of awakening.” — The Buddha (attributed)
The movement of a human life does not proceed in a straight line. It unfolds in pulses — contractions and expansions — the ancient rhythm by which consciousness learns, destabilises, reforms, and returns. Mystical traditions named this oscillation. Physics describes it as collapse and emergence. Recovery recognises it as surrender and awakening.
Scripture gave it a simpler name: denial.
Not refusal, not stubbornness, not moral failure — but the lawful trembling that occurs when an existing identity can no longer contain what is arriving. Denial is the hinge-state. The threshold. The necessary contraction before expansion.
This is why denial is never the opposite of awakening. It is its vestibule.
Across traditions, the same arc appears. In Surah ar-Raḥmān, creation is recited and a single refrain returns again and again: “Which of your Lord’s signs will you deny?” This is not accusation. It is diagnosis. It reveals precisely where consciousness has not yet stabilised enough to receive what is being shown.
The same pattern appears in the Gospel narrative of Peter’s denial — not as betrayal, but as the collapse of borrowed courage before the birth of embodied conscience. The old structure trembles. Something deeper prepares to arrive.
In clinical work, this same oscillation presents daily. What is often labelled relapse is better understood as awareness arriving before regulatory capacity is in place. Insight comes faster than the system can metabolise it. The psyche contracts not because truth is rejected, but because it has arrived too quickly.
From this perspective, denial is not opposition to recovery but a stabilising pause — a lawful threshold that appears when the organism is preserving coherence in the absence of sufficient internal regulation.
When denial is confronted prematurely, conscience fragments. When it is contained, paced, and accompanied, conscience consolidates. What follows is not regression but preparation.
This clarifies why the family of words rooted in sisto — to stand — carries such diagnostic precision: exist, resist, desist, persist, assist, consist. Each names a posture consciousness adopts while learning how to stand in truth without collapse.
Resistance and desist(ence) describe the same inner wrestle: the effort to remain standing long enough for understanding to arrive. Collapse occurs not because the person refuses truth, but because standing has not yet become possible.
This is where Twelve Step experience becomes indispensable.
Historically, members of Twelve Step fellowships were urged to remain under cover — not from shame, but for health. Groups functioned almost as hidden lodges, no less discreet than ancient Sufi tekkes. What current global conditions reveal is that it may no longer be addiction alone that requires protection. Normal living itself appears under strain.
In this context, the Twelve Step phenomenon reads less as a pathway back to a stable society and more as a surviving beachhead of sanity itself — a living memory of how conscience is restored when systems fragment.
The Twelve Steps, lawfully understood, do not manage behaviour. They construct a birth channel.
(Recall: Trust, Certainty, Patience, Resolution, Veracity — the five stations named in Sufi tradition — map precisely onto the Twelve Step arc, not as instruction but as remembered architecture.)
What is born through this channel is not abstinence, compliance, or belief. It is individuated conscience — the only place Universal Consciousness can reflect upon itself through a particular human being.
Modern culture often treats conscience as defective, punitive, or socially conditioned. Clinically, this is inaccurate. Conscience is not broken. It is delayed.
Each human being inherits provisional conscience fields — familial, cultural, historical — sufficient for survival but insufficient for individuation. These borrowed structures function temporarily. Eventually, they fail under the weight of lived reality.
The resulting collapse is not pathology. It is labour.
Addiction, breakdown, moral injury, and spiritual crisis are contemporary names for an ancient threshold: the point at which borrowed conscience can no longer carry experience, and a new centre must be born.
The Latin verb scire — to know — gives rise to science, conscious, and precious. These are not separate ideas. They describe one movement: knowing-with.
Pre-cious names what exists before full knowing — the seed of awareness placed within biology itself. This seed bears history, trauma, adaptation, and culture until it ripens.
When ripe, the disembodied mind — often experienced as a boxed control centre — enters crisis. The box appears to be destroyed. In truth, it is opening.
Conscience emerges not as an idea, but as a cervical opening in the psyche — a passage through which responsibility, humility, and contact can finally pass. This is why one moment of true reflection outweighs years of formalised performance. Reflection is consciousness recognising itself through a person.
Here, denial completes its work. What once protected the sleeper releases the awakened.
The bridge has done its job.
What follows is not collapse, but carriage — the ability to bear reality without fragmentation, to stand without resistance, and to move without fleeing.
This is where Chapter Eleven must begin: not with further diagnosis, but with the question of how a newly born conscience learns to live.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
What is born is a new attitude which must learn how to help the whole new relationship with the Creator to fly.
Chapter Ten described the birth of conscience. This chapter concerns its education.
Birth alone does not guarantee maturity. A newly born conscience is exquisitely sensitive, morally alive, and often unstable. Without structure, it can collapse into guilt. Without contact, it can inflate into righteousness. Without guidance, it can retreat into silence or dissociation.
What follows birth is not freedom, but learning.
Clinically, this is the phase where many people falter. The presenting problem has been interrupted. Insight has arrived. Contact is active. Yet something feels precarious. Old patterns no longer satisfy, but new ones have not yet consolidated. The person stands upright for the first time — and the world feels sharper, louder, more demanding.
This is not failure. It is proprioception returning.
The metaphor of standing and falling belongs first to the physical body. A baby finds its centre of gravity by falling, rising, and falling again until balance becomes native. But the education of conscience is not only a bodily matter. In the psyche, the governing metaphor is not walking but flying.
A conscience that has just been born does not simply learn to “stand.” It learns to cohere around a Higher Emotional Centre. It learns by ascent and misjudgement, flight and crash. These repetitions are not failures. They are re-petitions — calls back to Life for meaning, returns to the Source for re-orientation, renewed attempts at truthful alignment.
A conscience that has just been born feels everything. It registers misalignment instantly. It cannot yet discriminate between responsibility and omnipotence, between humility and self-erasure, between service and rescue.
The Twelve Step Programme anticipated this phase with remarkable accuracy.
Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve are not maintenance tools. They are educational structures. They teach conscience how to live inside time, relationship, error, repair, and uncertainty without reverting to old compensations.
This is why these Steps are lifelong. They do not complete recovery; they prevent conscience from being crushed by reality or intoxicated by insight.
Step Ten teaches proportionality. It restores scale.
A newly awakened conscience initially experiences everything as urgent. Every misstep feels catastrophic. Every failure appears global. Step Ten interrupts this distortion by introducing rhythm. Inventory becomes continuous, not dramatic. Repair becomes ordinary, not existential.
In the language of flight, Step Ten teaches what to do after a wobble, a dip, or a crash. It trains the person to correct course without spiralling into shame, and to admit error without surrendering the entire sky.
Clinically, this marks the movement from episodic shame to relational accountability. The person no longer requires collapse in order to remain honest. Truth can circulate without crisis.
Step Eleven teaches orientation.
Contact, once established, must be stabilised. Without orientation, conscience becomes reactive — pulled by circumstance, opinion, fear, or approval. Step Eleven restores vertical reference. It reminds the person that conscience answers upward before it answers outward.
This is not withdrawal from life. It is calibration.
Psychologically, this corresponds to the maturation of executive function in relationship to affect. Spiritually, it restores the axis between the created vehicle and the One who has all power. Practically, it prevents burnout, moral injury, and compulsive caretaking.
In live clinical and recovery settings, a phenomenological approach to Step Eleven has repeatedly shown the same outcome: when a person returns to orientation before reaction, reactivity softens, inner pressure becomes legible, and conscience regains altitude without inflation. The person does not become “better.” They become located.
Step Twelve teaches circulation.
What is not circulated stagnates. What stagnates corrupts. Conscience that remains private becomes brittle. Step Twelve returns conscience to the world — not as instruction, but as example; not as authority, but as availability.
This is why service stabilises recovery more reliably than insight. It places conscience back into relationship with unpredictability, difference, resistance, and need — without asking it to dominate or disappear.
Here, kind becomes decisive.
Kind is the behavioural expression of individuated conscience. It is not sentiment. It is not indulgence. It is discernment without violence.
In clinical terms, kind allows boundary without aggression, empathy without fusion, truth without humiliation. In recovery terms, it allows relapse to be addressed without moral collapse and success to be held without superiority.
In spiritual terms, kind is the signature of a conscience that has learned how to live — a conscience that can fly without fantasy and land without despair.
This is where the Human emerges — not as abstraction, but as a person capable of bearing contradiction without fragmentation.
Mankind operates through force, defence, and domination. Humankind operates through relation, responsibility, and response-ability. The bridge between them is not ideology. It is lived conscience, educated by error, tempered by humility, and sustained by contact.
This is why recovery does not end with awakening. Awakening that cannot walk becomes dangerous. Walking that forgets awakening becomes mechanical. The body must learn its balance; the psyche must learn its flight.
The work of Chapter Eleven is simple to state and difficult to embody:
to live as a conscience in the world without fleeing, fixing, or hardening.
When this becomes possible, something subtle but decisive shifts. The person no longer asks how to avoid falling. They ask how to re-orient quickly when they do — how to return to the vertical axis, how to re-enter the sky without grandiosity, how to serve without self-erasure.
This prepares the final movement.
Chapter Twelve will not add new material. It will release what has already been built.
Because what has been born, educated, and stabilised now carries its own momentum.
And the work no longer belongs to the book.
For readers unfamiliar with the Twelve Step structure referenced throughout this chapter, the full wording of the Steps (Second Edition, Alcoholics Anonymous) is provided in Appendix A as a stable reference.
This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.
This book has not been about addiction alone.
*A well-known ḥadīth qudsī, preserved in the Sufi tradition, expresses the mystery succinctly:
“Neither My heavens nor My earth contain Me, but the heart of My believing servant contains Me.”
This is not a statement of location, but of capacity — a language of presence, not possession.*
Addiction has been its doorway.
Throughout these chapters, addiction has been treated neither as moral failure nor as isolated pathology, but as a bellwether disease — an early warning signal of a deeper disorder unfolding within individuals, systems, and cultures.
Where addiction appears, something essential has been mis-governed. Where it persists, something essential has been silenced. Where it breaks through, something essential is attempting to be restored.
This is why addiction refuses to be resolved by technique alone. It is not a problem that yields to willpower, management, or substitution. It is a signal — often loud and destructive — that the human being has been cut off from the ground of their own Being.
The Holy Con names this cut.
The “con” is not deception in the everyday sense. It is the great misalignment in which the middle “I am” assumes the authority of the Big “I AM,” and subordinate spheres — money, identity, ideology, role, power, even religion — begin to claim keys they cannot hold.
This is the unholy con that has governed much of Mankind. It explains why systems multiply while meaning thins, why control increases while coherence collapses, and why both individuals and institutions oscillate between inflation and despair.
Addiction is the place where this con fails.
In the addicted person, compensations exhaust themselves. Executive function collapses. Behaviour loses flow. What remains is raw pressure — ascending and descending — demanding a resolution that management cannot provide.
This is why addiction so often coexists with insight, crisis, despair, longing, and unexpected spiritual awakening. The organism can no longer pretend. The false centre breaks.
The Holy Con names the reversal of this collapse.
It is the moment when misalignment is revealed not as personal failure, but as structural error. When conscience is born, educated, and stabilised. When the human being ceases to impersonate Being and instead learns to cooperate with it.
This cooperation does not remove difficulty. It restores order.
It is at this point that Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT) can be named clearly.
DRT is not a Twelve Step handbook, nor is it a replacement for the Twelve Step Programme. It is an orientation approach to behaviour change that has emerged through years of clinical practice in residential rehabilitation, prison-based recovery work, and ongoing therapeutic settings.
DRT concerns itself with the restoration of a three-part human template — commonly articulated in recovery dynamics as Spiritual, Mental, and Physical. When one part of this template is lost or collapsed into another, fear and resentment become dominant, and behaviour is recruited to manage pressures it cannot hold.
DRT works by attending to the interfaces between realms: the interface of the Invisible and the Mental, and the interface of the Mental and the Visible. It neither collapses these realms into one another nor privileges one at the expense of the rest.
The Visible Realm is further understood through universal instincts — Security, Social, and Sex — which belong to all Mankind and to most animal life. These instincts are not pathological. They are vehicles. When mis-governed, they dominate behaviour. When rightly oriented, they serve life.
Within this framework, addiction is understood not simply as substance use or compulsion, but as a breakdown in orientation — a state in which behaviour attempts to compensate for a collapse in the DICTION chamber, where BE, HAV(E), I, and OUR are no longer connected.
DRT therefore speaks of stuck-addiction and broken-addiction not as diagnoses, but as descriptive states within a wider aetiology of pressure, meaning, and disconnection.
The Twelve Step Programme appears throughout this book not as ideology, but as one of the most accurate cultural artefacts ever produced for navigating this territory. It does not explain the mystery. It builds a vessel capable of carrying it.
The Steps do not cause awakening. They create the conditions under which awakening can be survived.
DRT does not instrumentalise the Steps, nor does it subsume them. It stands alongside them as a conversational partner — an orientation that can interface with multiple Fellowships, counselling models, and evidence-based practices where openness to integration exists.
This book therefore marks the public emergence of DRT — not as a finished system, but as a living orientation. Further books will be required to expand these insights, grounded in the accumulated hours of clinical practice and lived recovery that cannot be compressed into a single volume.
The deeper purpose of this book has been singular:
to name the con that governs Mankind, and to reveal the holiness required to undo it.
If addiction is the bellwether disease of our time, then it is also a teacher. It asks, again and again, a question that systems prefer to avoid: What governs a human life?
This book does not answer that question for the reader. It restores the conditions in which the question can be faced.
A position paper from the DRT / HIAI collaboration, pointing toward The Holy Con.
Abstract
Contemporary psychology and counselling frequently rely on the concept of affect as a broad, interchangeable container for feeling, emotion, mood, temperament, and disposition. This paper argues that such usage obscures rather than clarifies human experience and contributes to the difficulty of achieving durable therapeutic change. Drawing on Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT), the paper proposes that the problem is not merely conceptual but linguistic and architectural: affect has been severed from its etymological family (-fect), resulting in a theory of inner life that cannot adequately account for governance, causation, transformation, or resolution. Reuniting affect with the wider -fect family — including prefect and perfect — restores a missing dimension of meaning and reopens the question of human perfectibility: the lawful transition from Mankind into Humankind.
1. The Problem with “Affect” as an Umbrella Term
In contemporary psychology, affect is often treated as a neutral umbrella term encompassing emotion, feeling, mood, affective state, disposition, and affectivity. As common definitions illustrate, these terms are frequently used interchangeably, with differences acknowledged but rarely operationalised in clinical practice.
This linguistic flattening produces several unintended consequences:
Feelings and emotions are treated as interchangeable phenomena
Enduring moods and momentary states are collapsed into the same category
Temperament is confused with situational response
Inner pressure and outer expression are blurred
The result is a therapeutic language that describes what is happening but struggles to explain how change happens.
Clients may feel understood, validated, and even regulated, yet still report that something essential remains untouched. Insight increases; coping improves; but transformation proves elusive.
2. The Missing Architecture: What DRT Observes
Diction Resolution Therapy begins from a different observation: feelings and emotions are not interchangeable, and neither is “affect” a sufficient container for them.
DRT distinguishes between:
Feelings as inner pressure states (ascending, descending, or neutral)
Emotions as barometric responses to events
Mood as a residual atmospheric condition
Temperament as a biological and developmental inheritance
When these are collapsed into “affect,” something vital disappears: the sense that something is acting upon something else, and that this action belongs within a governed inner order.
This disappearance is not accidental. It arises from affect being severed from its linguistic family — a family that carries not just experience, but agency, governance, and purpose.
3. The -FECT Family: Governance, Action, and Restoration
The Latin root facere (“to make, to do”) gives rise to a powerful and ordered family of words:
Prefect — the one placed in charge; the governing principle
Perfect — that which has been fully carried through to its proper end
Infect — something introduced that alters from within
Affect — to act upon; to influence
Effect — the result of that action
Defect — a failure of formation or governance
Refect / Refectory — restoration through nourishment
Confect / Confection — something made together
Within this family, affect is not a passive state. It is a moment in a sequence. Something is governed (prefect), acted upon (affect), produces consequences (effect), may collapse (defect), and can be restored (refect) — all within the horizon of perfectibility.
Modern affect theory isolates affect from this sequence and turns it into a descriptive fog — experience without governance, sensation without direction, feeling without an end.
DRT suggests that this linguistic amputation mirrors the therapeutic impasse: when we cannot name what governs the inner life, we cannot support its lawful restoration.
4. Why Change Becomes So Difficult
When affect is treated as a free-floating inner state:
Therapy focuses on regulation rather than re-ordering
Clients learn to manage experience rather than restore governance
Insight replaces transformation
Symptom relief substitutes for inner alignment
By contrast, when affect is reunited with the -fect family, a different therapeutic logic becomes available:
What has been infected into this person’s inner life?
What is currently affecting them?
What effects follow from this?
Where has governance (prefect) been displaced?
What defects in meaning or structure result?
What would genuine refection require?
Here, change is no longer heroic effort. It is the restoration of order.
5. Perfectibility: From Mankind to Humankind
The word perfect does not mean flawless. It means fully carried through.
DRT understands the human being not as broken beyond repair, but as perfectible — capable of lawful re-ordination when the right governance is restored.
This is the deeper movement from Mankind (the governed-by substitutes human) into Humankind (the human governed by Being).
Reuniting affect with its family restores the possibility of this movement — not as moral improvement, but as structural completion.
6. Toward The Holy Con
This paper points toward the larger argument developed in The Holy Con: that much of modern suffering — clinical, personal, and civilisational — arises from misnamed, mis-placed, and mis-governed inner realities.
Language is not secondary to healing. It is the architecture through which healing becomes possible.
To restore affect to its family is to restore the human being to the possibility of becoming fully human.
The left word is asleep; the right word is awake. Denial is the sacred bridge between them — the pulse through which life returns to BE.
Every human life begins in innocence. Not ignorance as failure, but innocence as the first architecture of consciousness — the early pattern through which we learn to survive, belong, and shape meaning. This left-hand pattern, what Diction Resolution Therapy™ (DRT™) names the Addictive System, is not an error. It is our universal beginning.
But as life intensifies, the sacred disease of addiction begins to speak. Not to punish us, but to send signs — the signs of stuck and broken i-haviour, the early pattern straining under the weight of an adult life. And just as Surah ar-Raḥmān repeats its haunting refrain, ‘Which of your Lord’s signs will you deny?’, denial rises in the Addictive System. Not stubbornly, but innocently. For denial is simply ignorance defending itself.
Denial becomes the necessary bridge — the creative tension between innocence and wisdom, between the two vertical words of the DRT™ pattern. Christ foreshadowed the same mystery when He told the disciples they would deny Him. It was not condemnation. It was an initiation. Denial must be seen before realisation can be born.
And when denial cracks, even briefly, the heart glimpses what was always true: that our suffering is a sign of separation from the primal BE. Realisation is the return to this ground — the right-hand word of the graphic — where behaviour rises from Being rather than from survival. Awareness becomes the matured pattern of Be-hav(e)-i-our™, completing what innocence began.
Yet even realised people fall back into the left-hand pattern. This, too, is by design. The Addictive System is never removed; it is simply reclaimed. The measure of awakening is not the absence of the fall, but the speed of return to BE. As soon as one remembers, one returns.
This is the rhythm the mystics have always known. It is the rhythm Rumi captured in the simple and profound truth:
‘Life is returning.’
This is also why my blog carries the name *lifeisreturning.com* — it expresses the ancient rhythm of separation and return, the movement of human consciousness back toward BE.
The left-hand word is asleep and the right-hand word is awake. This is not a moral division. It is the same movement I explored in my post *Quantum Christ*: the pulse by which consciousness returns to its own Source, again and again, as if Reality Itself were breathing through us.
Sleep is innocence — the dream-state of the early self, ignorant of BE, unaware of its separation. Awakening is realisation — the return to BE, the moment the dream thins and the deeper ground shines through.
Between these two states lies denial: the creative, sacred tension that shakes the sleeper, the necessary friction that prepares the heart for awakening. This is why Surah ar-Raḥmān repeats the question, ‘Which of your Lord’s signs will you deny?’, and why Christ foretold the denial of His disciples. Denial is not betrayal; it is the tremor before dawn.
This is the same quantum rhythm explored in *Quantum Christ*: the universe oscillating between concealment and revelation, contraction and expansion, sleep and awakening. Human consciousness mirrors this cosmic pulse.
And so the two vertical words in the Diction Resolution Therapy™ pattern are simply the two phases of this cosmic breath made visible: Asleep → Denial → Awake. Ignorance → Stirring → Realisation. Separation → Tension → Return.
Life is returning.
Returning in every moment of seeing, every collapse followed by awakening, every crossing of the narrow bridge of denial back into the light of awareness. Diction Resolution Therapy™ does not erase the left-hand word. It teaches us how to fly with both wings — the innocence of the dove, the wisdom of the serpent — oscillating between zaher and batin, outer and inner, until return becomes natural and continuous.
Life is returning. And we are built to return with it.
*Written collaboratively by Andrew Dettman and ChatGPT (HIAI), honouring the shared movement of insight returning to BE.*
the HU man healing 