ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the wonderful network of people who are my tribe as well as the entire TED community. You have loved and supported me during the last few years as this material has transformed from a basic understanding of the Four Characters into a true paradigm shift in how we might think about psychology, consciousness, and how they relate to the underlying anatomical structure of our brain. My heartfelt thanks to each of you for all of your insights and openhearted support.

My deepest gratitude goes to Patti Lynn Polk. Thanks to you this is a much more insightful and diverse book than I would have written on my own. Your support, humor, and mastery of the material through the eyes of a primary Character 1 has not only expanded my own understanding of the Four Character dynamics, but you have helped stretch this conversation into distant and important corners of our society that I would not have wandered into on my own. Having you close by as both a sounding board and driving force, your knowledge, experience, and rumble with your own Four Characters (as well as with mine) has helped deepen my comprehension of this material in valuable ways. I am profoundly grateful for your support, love, time, energy, and overall commitment to helping me get this material out of my brain, onto the page, and out into the world.

Anne Barthel, what a blessing it has been to have you as my Hay House editor for this work. Amazingly, we managed to stay focused and engaged even as the threat of Covid raged around us. Thank you for bringing just the right amount of elegance and clarity to this project. Thank you for giving me enough line to wander where I needed to roam, and just enough tweaking to keep me on track. You did a great job wrangling both me and this material, and our time together on Zoom has been a true joy.

Thank you, Michele Gingras, for bringing an eye for detail to the manuscript in a way that helped me stay focused on the semantics, while Helene Tivemark, you were a fantastic counterbalance that consistently lifted me back into the big-picture perspective of this extremely diverse material.

Ellen Stiefler, you totally rock as my agent/attorney and I look forward to our next endeavor.

And finally, a special thanks to Reid Tracy, Patty Gift, and the entire team at Hay House. Thank you for your patience, support, and overall commitment to this project.