James Fadiman - Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are

Your Symphony of Selves

This wonderful book urges us to look at ourselves and our lives in an entirely new way. We are not a single self, the authors teach us, but rather we contain multiple selves, each valuable in its own way. This lovely book will help you understand and embrace who you are and who you could be.

AYELET WALDMAN, AUTHOR OF A REALLY GOOD DAY

This masterful, comprehensive exploration of the diversity within us is both fascinating and useful. With grace and erudition, the authors explore the nooks and crannies of our mindsand in the variety of selves they find there is, paradoxically, a profound and healing sense of wholeness and freedom.

RICK HANSON, PH.D.,AUTHOR OF NEURODHARMA

This book exquisitely explores the age-old and yet seemingly new theme that we are made up of different moving parts. Talking to yourself is not just reserved for eccentric people on subways but an inner psychodrama that can lead us toward a more integrated, together, symphonic self. Now I can, and will, tell clients: Read this book, and then come back and talk to me!

STEPHEN LARSEN, PH.D.,PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PSYCHOLOGY AT SUNY ULSTER

This insightful book creates a landscape of perspective with profound implications for understanding the psychology of human beings. A must-read for every person interested in self-discovery.

BILL LINTON,EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CO-FOUNDER OF USONA INSTITUTE

A profound, brilliant, and convincing account of the many entities that make up each of us. I hope it will have the success and influence it deserves.

RICHARD SMOLEY, AUTHOR OFA THEOLOGY OF LOVE

Based on what Ive read in this book, I now more clearly recognize some of my own selves: my scientist self, my personal growth self, my spiritual self, my Am I kind of crazy sometimes? self... and all of them are getting valuable ideas and practices to become more harmonious. My thanks to Fadiman and Gruber for this remarkable book!

CHARLES T. TART, PH.D.,AUTHOR OF ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

A tour de force on the multiple manifestationsscientifically, artistically, religiously, and culturallyof the multiple persons and personalities each one of us inhabits. No matter how skeptical your point of view before you read this book, it will make you think, and you will take it seriously.

ARI MARK CARTUN,RABBI EMERITUS OF CONGREGATION ETZ CHAYIM IN PALO ALTO

Astoundingly, my various persona all seem to agree that Fadiman and Gruber have unpacked this complex topic in ways that are factual, insightful, and extremely usefula must-read for most, if not all, of your selves.

FOSTER GAMBLE, PRESIDENT AND COFOUNDER OF CLEAR COMPASS MEDIA

From the microbiome in our gut to the voices in our heads, each of us is a community, as the authors explain in this fascinating, delightful book. The illusion of a single unitary self interferes with clear thinking about everything from immunology to psychiatry to the nature of community. We are each a symphony of selves, and my selves highly recommend this book to your selves.

CHRIS RYAN,COAUTHOR OF SEX AT DAWN

In clear, practical prose, and drawing from a wealth of religious, philosophical, and psychological materials, the authors make a strong, clear case that is brilliantly couched as a seductive invitation: just stop believing you are a single self, and start to orchestrate and befriend the varied and fractious clan that you are.

ERIK DAVIS, AUTHOR OFHIGH WEIRDNESS

James Fadiman has consistently been walking, exploring, and illuminating the cutting edge of culture for the past half century. This book is no exception, and with it, Fadiman and his scholarwriter partner, Jordan Gruber, intellectually investigate and prosaically dance in a way that recognizes and honors the many voices within us all.

DANA ULLMAN, MPH, CCH,AUTHOR OF THE HOMEOPATHIC REVOLUTION

This is a very special book! This idea of a symphony of selves reflects what has always been understood among indigenous peoplesand so the book digs deeply into essential universal truths. A treasure to enjoy and learn with and from.

RICHARD KATZ, PH.D.,AUTHOR OF INDIGENOUS HEALING PSYCHOLOGY

The idea that our sense of self is illusory and that we all contain different selves may seem strange at first. But the great accomplishment of Your Symphony of Selves is that it doesnt just make this idea perfectly sensible, the authors show how it can help us better understand ourselves and how cultivating and integrating those multiple selves makes us healthier and happier.

ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG, PH.D., AUTHOR OF SHORTER: WORK BETTER, SMARTER, AND LESSHERES HOW

A tour de force that pulls together insights from psychiatry, philosophy, religion, neurology, the humanities, and the social and behavioral sciences. Profound, yet entertaining, it plumbs deeply into rarely explored depths of the human psyche. It even contains activities and exercises that its readers can employ, soon realizing that they may never be the same again.

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D.,CO-AUTHOR OF PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY

My cousin James Fadiman has an uncanny ability to take a problem, turn it calmly in his hands, look at it from many angles, and solve it, always with a glint of amusement in his eye. Until I read this book he wrote with Gruber, it had never occurred to me that what enables those multiple angles is his sense that he isnt confined to a single self. He is a team! The ideas in this book seem simple, but thats the point: why make things hard when they could be easy?

ANNE FADIMAN, AUTHOR OFTHE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN

Nowhere are Fadiman and Grubers words being in the right mind at the right time more applicable than for the military fighter pilot. The world moving, quite literally, at Mach 1 creates an unforgiving cauldron where incoherent or incongruent thought yields catastrophic results. The difference between life and death depends on fighter pilots finding their mental best selves.

BUSTER GLOSSON,THREE-STAR GENERAL, USAF (RET.),AUTHOR OF WAR WITH IRAQ

In this fascinating book, the authors offer insights that enable us to kindly accept and value ourselves and others. They reveal an incredible opportunity for healthier living through embracing our different selves, leading to psychological cohesion and wholeness.

DARREN COCKBURN, AUTHOR OFBEING PRESENT

Acknowledgments

One of the great joys of finishing a major project is being able to thank those who helped bring it about.

Jim: First and foremost, thanks go to my wife, Dorothy, and my daughters Renee and Maria. Theyve been urging me for years to write this book. Maria gets special credit for never letting up with Dad, you HAVE to write that book. Even as I write these words, I can hear her voice.

While it may not be usual to thank your co-author, this book would never have happened if Jordan hadnt offered to help meand then took charge of the endless files and notes from presentations Id accumulated for decades. You enormously increased the quality and amount of material we had to work with and became the finest collaborator anyone could ask for.

Special thanks to Foster Gamble, who gave me one of my first opportunities to present my thoughts on this topic at the Mind Center (to an audience that, as it happened, included Jordan). That audiences response gave me the courage to keep digging into what seemed to me, from the onset, to be simultaneously obvious and spectacularly well hidden.