November 17, 2013

The Road Less Traveled (re-post from 12/29/07)

This is such a fantastic book written by M. Scott Peck. I read this book in my early 20's and it was revolutionary thinking for me. It was one of the many books that helped me become a better person. I highly recommend this book to everyone, including teenagers.

The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978, is Peck's best-known work, and the one that made his reputation. It is, in short, a description of the attributes that make for a fulfilled human being, based largely on his insights as a psychiatrist and a person.

In the first section of the work Peck talks about discipline, which he considers essential for emotional, spiritual and psychological health, and which he describes as "the means of spiritual evolution". The elements of discipline that make for such health include the ability to delay gratification, accepting responsibility for oneself and one's actions, a dedication to truth and balancing.

In the second section, Peck considers the nature of love, which he considers the driving force behind spiritual growth. The section mainly attacks a number of misconceptions about love: that romantic love exists (he considers it a very destructive myth), that it is about dependency, that true love is not "falling in love". That type of love is cathexis, it is a feeling. Instead "true" love is about the extending of one's ego boundaries to include another, and about the spiritual nurturing of another, in short, love is effort.

The final section describes Grace, the powerful force originating outside human consciousness that nurtures spiritual growth in human beings. To do so he describes the miracles of health, the unconscious, and serendipity—phenomena which Peck says:
  • nurture human life and spiritual growth
  • are incompletely understood by scientific thinking
  • are commonplace among humanity
  • originate outside conscious human will
He concludes that "the miracles described indicate that our growth as human beings is being assisted by a force other than our conscious will".

Taking responsibility for our problems is perhaps the most difficult. Only by accepting the fact that we have problems can we solve them. An attitude of ‘It’s not my problem!’ will not take us anywhere. Neurosis and character-disorder are the two disorders of responsibility. Neurotics assume too much responsibility and feel culpable for everything that goes wrong in their life. The latter instead, shirk responsibility, and blame others for their problems. ‘Neurotics make themselves miserable, character-disordered people make everyone else miserable.’ All of us are neurotics or character-disordered at some time or the other. Neurotics must realize that they need not be excessively guilt-ridden, while character-disordered ones must learn to take things in stride, instead of becoming a yoke to the society. The words of Eldridge Cleaver, “If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem”, hold good for all of us.

Dedication to the TRUTH comes next. We ALL have a certain worldview that MUST be constantly UPDATED and REVISED as we find ourselves EXPOSED to new data. If our viewpoint is NARROW, misleading and outdated, then we will be LOST. The same applies to our life experiences. A bitter childhood can leave a person with the false idea that the world is a hostile and inhuman place. Yet, if the person has to grow, he must set aside this prejudice and revise his worldview. Being true also implies a life of genuine self-examination, a willingness to be personally challenged by others, and total honesty to oneself and others.


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