Anyone who has had any kind of run-in with addiction knows that the idea of personal ‘free will’ is in most cases as substantial as smoke, blown downwind from a fire that has gone out.

Science has put the lie to it, showing us that the ‘you’ that decided to engage in behaviour that stimulated a change in your brain chemistry is literally no longer ‘there’. Your brain has been changed by the action itself (see Ghost and the Machine), and though you may have ‘freely’ chosen the action the initial few times, after that you’re playing follow the leader, and it’s your brain chemistry in front.

We are, belief systems aside, evolutionary individual organisms, being acted on outside of our ‘free will’ by much larger forces than we can control. Nature’s clock keeps time not in hours, or even stages of life, but in adaptations. This process is outside our overall control, but not outside our influence, or we wouldn’t be down here in this stuck place to begin with.

The same process that we engaged to dig this hole can be used to begin to tunnel out, using something called the S.A.I.D. principle.