Conscience: Your Ultimate Personal Survival Guide

by Patricia E. West

Conscience is the necessary follow-up to the Common Sense Book of Change, clarifying how and why it works. It's underlying philosophy, codified in The Positive Paradigm of Change, links the worldwide leadership deficit (and related budget deficits) to an underlying knowledge deficit. For lack of what The Book of Change has to offer, people everywhere remain perplexed as to how and why so much continues to go so horribly wrong. As the compendium of natural law and the premier leadership training and decision-making manual in China for thousands of years, it fills in a fatal knowledge gap. Mainstreaming this vitally important information is the first, necessary step towards the positive change which many call for, but remain unable to achieve. The I Ching is called The Ultimate Personal Survival Guide because it refers to ultimate timeless wisdom. This wisdom is accessible on a personal level, facilitating inner and outer change, one person at a time. This change gives us the edge on survival, influencing who will survive, how, on which levels of experience. And it’s a guide that helps put us in resonance with the ultimate inner guide -- conscience. However, no physical book, however inspired or useful, is correctly called an ultimate survival guide. Books are just material things. Conscience alone is the ultimate survival guide. The value of using the Book of Change is that it leads the individual back to personal conscience. It serves to reconnect the user with the eternal center which resides at the hub of the Positive Paradigm Wheel.

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2014

About the author

Pat West combines a rare blend of education, travel, work experience and introspection to produce a work uniquely her own. She balances an array of traditional credentials with non-traditional schooling in music, yoga, world scriptures and on-the-job training in a host of work settings.

West attended Oberlin College, where she took a B.A. in history and philosophy, while performing in the conservatory orchestra and string ensembles as an “amateur.” Her M.A. in English and Ph.D. in Educational Administration are from the UW-Madison.

At the Robert Schumann Konservatorium in Düsseldorf, Germany, West participated in Sandor Vegh’s master violin class, at the same time teaching English-as-a-Second-Language at the state Volkshochschule.

Later, she worked as a confidential administrative secretary at the UW, while also training along-side pioneers of the holistic health movement. She spent personal time in Spring Green, enjoying the hospitality of an extended family of Frank Lloyd Wright apprentices.

For over 35 years, West has immersed herself in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese compendium of natural law. She’s applied the principals of change mapped in this perennial leadership manual to the organizations she’s moved through, observing the dynamics of work-place relationships in hospitals, law firms, corporate businesses and schools.