Further Along the Road Less Travelled

Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth

© 1993 M. Scott Peck

255 pages

Peck is always an interesting author for me to read. He and I typically do not see eye to eye on many issues, but like Thomas Cahill, I find his work to be interesting regardless. Perhaps the interest I take in Peck is that he expresses opinions I don't agree with, but he does so in a manner I can respect -- most of the time. As mentioned before, Peck is a psychiatrist who attempts to combine it and spirituality, seeing spirituality as mental health and maturation. A note on the book identifies this as "Edited Lectures", meaning that unlike The Road Less Traveled, this may not have been written as a book in itself -- but that it consists of essays that have edited and fitted to one another. Although the lecture/essays were not written as a deliberate whole, the "space" in between them is not too jarring: the book flows fairly well, and is divided into three parts: "Growing Up", "Knowing Yourself", and "In Search of a Personal God".

One trait of Peck's writing that I like is that it tends to be widely focused. This book is an example of that, as individual essays see him writing on consciousness, forgiveness, death and meaning, mystery, self love versus self-esteem, mythology, spirituality, addiction, religion, the New Age movement, and sexuality. The strength of the essays varied for me: in general, I thought the first half of the book was strong and that it faded quickly, especially in the sexuality essay. That one was more than strange.

A good bit of the book is about religion, and it was this I enjoyed the most. I consider myself a nonreligious person, but lately I am trying to find the good in it. Admittedly, that's a tricky direction in which to go, but I am interested in religion as a human endeavor, and I think that a genuine concern for human well-being and growth lies somewhere in them. I am not convinced that it is the heart of every religion, but I think it is least least a part -- and I want to see if this is true and if so to what extent. It was the Dalai Lama that first set me on this course, but Gyatso and Peck are quite different: Gyatso's approach to spirituality is simple, direct, and is aimed at cultivating happiness. Peck is more stern and less humanistic: he focuses on fixing problems, and believes we have to depend on God for growth.

The book is typical for Peck: I found it interesting, and will probably read more of Peck in the future, but I don't recommend it to everyone. I think the book is valuable in making me consider ideas I'd never thought of before.

The Road Less Traveled

The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
© 1978 M. Scott Peck
315 pages

In February, I read A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered by M. Scott Peck, a psychologist who applied the tools of his craft to society at large. In that book, he focuses on relationship/organization-building behavior (his working definition of civility), but the general idea of using psychology or psychiatry in a "mindful" sense fascinated me. Granted, Peck's mindfulness is more "clinical" than "spiritual", but I think they're similar. I decided to read his first and apparently most known work this week in The Road Less Traveled.

In his first book, Peck uses psychology to address the matter of spirituality, and the results for me are fascinating. The book addresses the importance of discipline, love, growth and religion, and finally "grace". He begins by saying that "Life is difficult" and compares this to Siddhartha Gautama's first noble truth -- life is suffering. According to Peck, people create suffering for themselves when they attempt to avoid facing life's difficulties-head on. He proposes an unflinching path of self-discipline that involves (among other things) delaying gratification, avoiding deceit, keeping our minds clear of dogma and being open to new evidence, and giving though to the things we do.

Peck devotes his second section to love, which he defines as the extension of one's self for one's own or for someone else's spiritual growth. While acknowledging its "mystery" -- holding the opinion that we don't really know what it is -- he is quite stern on what it isn't, and writes at length on romantic love, ego boundaries, dependency, cathexis (emotional investment: it's my word for the week), and various other behaviors or concepts associated with the idea of love. He's definitely gotten me to thinking about the subject more.

He writes next on spiritual growth and religion, and his criticisms are more sharp than I expected, given how much emphasis he placed on deity-based ethics in A World Waiting to Be Discovered. His definition for religion is very broad, encompassing "worldview" and bringing in science under its wing. Peck does not criticize science-as-religion: indeed, he advocates the scientific approach as a very necessary part of human studies. A good bit of this chapter consists of case-studies, the common theme of which is that ideas about religion and god can both hurt and help people. I found this section to be somewhat thought-provoking as well.

It is in the last section that I find the most fault -- the section on "Grace". He begins the section with a series of "Isn't it interesting" type essays in which he identifies a Mysterious Quality about good health, the unconscious, serendipity, evolution, and power. He then attempts to reconcile the Judeo-Christian creation story with his own worldview by interpreting the "original sin" as laziness -- Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise not because they'd disobeyed an arbitrary rule, but because they didn't bother to question God about the rule.

Although I found this section weak and more than a little unfocused, the book as a whole was well-done. It was definitely one of the more thought-provoking reads this week.

Abounding Grace

Abounding Grace: An Anthology of Wisdom
© 2000 ed. M. Scott Peck
384 pages

Abounding Grace is a strangely titled book of quotations, compiled and commented on by M. Scott Peck, a psychologist who wrote a number of so-called "self-help" books. The book is divided into twelve major themes, most of which have subsections. For instance, "Happiness" -- part one -- id divided into "Acceptance", "Cheerfulness", "Contentment", "Forgiveness", and so on. Peck introduces each theme with a few pages of commentary, explaining the meaning and importance of the theme. Peck writes that he was careful to choose quotes that were devoid of too much mystical language, hoping instead to err on the side of "pithy". I recognized many names among the quoted -- Robert Ingersoll, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Anne Frank. Peck seems to have deliberately chosen quotations so that quotations in a given section might contradict one another, presumably to force the reader to think about context.

Outside of this, I don't know what to add. I enjoyed reading the quotations, and will go through the book later to cull out my favorites and write them down.

A World Waiting to be Born

A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered
© 1993 M. Scott Peck
366 pages


"Society is sick", declares author M. Scott Peck by way of introduction to his book A World Waiting to be Born. Peck is a psychiatrist and author who attempts to take the methods of his craft and apply them to society at large, reminding me of Erich Fromm's work. Divided into three parts, Peck's work redefines "civility" and explores its practice in both the home and business. The first third of the book is conceptual, as Peck hammers out the aspects of what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. The remaining two parts of the book see his lessons applied in the home and business. The first part of the book was the most interesting ,at least for me, because Peck addresses a multitude of issues. He attempts to build a thought-system of civility, which he defines as behavior conducive to building and maintaining healthy organizations. His use of organization is so broad that "marriage" counts, as do small work crews. The family and businesses are seen by Peck as the basis for the rest of society, and this is why he concentrates on them. The thought-system he builds involves god-centered ethics, mind-emptying mediation, unconditional love, and "true" consciousness of the real self and of one's role within groups. His aim is to improve "psychospiritual health", which is a combination of the obvious factors.

It's an interesting read for me, without reservation. I did disagree with parts of what he said -- for instance, that humanist ethics don't hold up in hard times. Some of what he wrote, while interesting, is hard to classify. For instance, in the family section he wrote about myths that the family structure brings with it, and he provides anecdotes about families and couples he counseled, using them to examine "civil" behavior. As I do not read much psychiatry, I cannot comment on the validity of his analyses except to say that they didn't sound too objectionable to me. His interpretations of elements I am familiar with seem wrong to me. Take, for instance, his comment on the opening chapters of Genesis, where he writes that for a book of legend, its first chapter portrays a stunningly accurate account of how the universe came into being, with the sun forming first and then life evolving. The problem with this is -- besides being a metaphor that's gone too far -- is that the Sun didn't come first in the bible. It came after the plants and so on.

It's a strange book -- thought-provoking, sometimes objectionable, and sometimes confused. In general, I enjoyed reading the book. I only lost interest in the chapters on organizational behavior in business.