Book:The Road Less Travelled

A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth 

Confronting and solving problems is a painful process which most of us attempt to avoid. And the very avoidance results in greater pain and an inability to grow both mentally and spiritually. Drawing heavily on his own professional experience, Dr M. Scott Peck, a practising psychiatrist, suggests ways in which facing our difficulties - and suffering through the changes - can enable us to reach a higher level of self-understanding. He discusses the nature of loving relation-ships: how to recognize true compatibility; how to distinguish dependency from love; how to become one's own person and how to be a more sensitive parent.

Quotes:

One hour of pain followed by six of pleasure was preferable to one hour of pleasure followed by six of pain. 

If a child sees his parents day in and day out behaving with self-discipline, restraint, dignity and a capacity to order their own lives, then the child will come to feel in the deepest fibers of his being that this is the way to live.

Parents will take the time to make these minor corrections and adjustments, listening to their children, responding to them, tightening a little here, loosening a little there, giving them little lectures, little stories, little hugs and kisses, little admonishments, little pats on the back.

The feeling of being valuable-"I am a valuable person"-is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline

Take the time necessary to analyze family problems so as to develop well-thought-out and effective solutions.

In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.

If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there.

We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain, To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth.

Yet when one is dedicated to the truth this pain seems relatively unimportant-and less and less important (and therefore less and less painful) the farther one proceeds on the path of self-examination.

Genuine psychotherapy is a legitimate shortcut to personal growth which is often ignored. 

Balancing is the discipline that gives us flexibility. Extraordinary flexibility is required for successful living in all spheres of activity. 

The loss of balance is ultimately more painful than the giving up required to maintain balance.

I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

A true acceptance of their own and each other's individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow.

The temporary release from ego boundaries associated with falling in love, sexual intercourse or the use of certain psychoactive drugs may provide us with a glimpse of Nirvana, but not with Nirvana itself. It is a thesis of this book that Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through the persistent exercise of real love.

A good marriage can exist only between two strong and independent people.

Allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself.

Hobbies are self-nurturing activities. But if a hobby becomes an end in itself, then it becomes a substitute for rather than a means to self-development. 

Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, con-fronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting.

True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

The more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. 

Romantic "love" is effortless, and couples are frequently reluctant to shoulder the effort and discipline of true love and listening. 

Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future. On some level spiritual growth, and therefore love, always requires courage and involves risk. It is the risking of love that we will now consider.

I've made a commitment to you. I will work with you as long as is necessary, whether it takes one year or five years or ten years or whatever. I don't know whether you will quit our work together when you're ready or before you're ready. But whichever it is, you are the one who will terminate our relationship. Short of my death, my services will be available to you as long as you want them.

With this consciousness the loving person assumes the responsibility of attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God, to fulfill God's will without mistake.

Constant self-discipline! Constant self-examination! Duty! Responsibility! Neopuritanism, they might call it. Call it what you will, genuine love, with all the discipline that it requires, is the only path in this life to substantial joy. 

Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss.

It is essential for the therapist to love a patient for the therapy to be successful.

Laymen can practice successful psychotherapy without great training as long as they are genuinely loving human beings.

The absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. 

Spiritual growth is a journey out of the microcosm into an ever greater macrocosm. It is a journey of knowledge and not of faith. 

We are all individuals, but we are also parts of a greater whole, united in something vast and beautiful beyond description.

At these times the conscious mind of the patient is engaged in trying to combat therapy, intent upon hiding the true nature of the self from the therapist and from self-awareness. It is the unconscious, however, that is allied with the therapist, struggling toward openness, honesty, truth, and reality, fighting to "tell it like it is."

God is the goal of evolution. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination. That is what we mean when we say that He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

The development of consciousness is the development of awareness in our conscious mind of knowledge along with our unconscious mind, which already possesses that knowledge. It is a process of the conscious mind coming into synchrony with the unconscious.

The ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with God. 

insofar as we might then through our conscious decisions be able to influence the world according to His will our Iives themselves will become the agents of God's grace. We ourselves will then have become one form of the grace of God, working on His behalf among mankind, creating love where love did not exist before, pulling our fellow creatures up to our own level of awareness, pushing the plane of human evolution forward.

"Let thy will, not mine, be done. Make me your instrument," is their only desire. Such a loss of self brings with it always a kind of calm ecstasy.

Loneliness is the unavailability of people to communicate with on any level. Aloneness, however, is the unavailability of someone to communicate with at your level of awareness.

Mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual substantially deviates from the will of God, which is his or her own unconscious will. 

Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in them-selves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. 

individuals with psychoses are thought to have experienced extremely poor parenting in the first nine months of life; their resulting illness can be ameliorated by this or that form of treatment, but it is almost impossible to cure. Individuals with character disorders are thought to have experienced adequate care as infants but very poor care during the period between roughly nine months and two years of age, with the result that they are less sick than psychotics but still quite sick indeed and very difficult to cure. Individuals with neuroses are thought to have received adequate parenting in their very early childhood but then to have suffered from poor parenting sometime after the age of two but usually beginning before the age of five or six. Neurotics are therefore thought to be less sick than either character-disordered people or psychotics, and consequently much easier to treat and cure.

It is possible for an individual to be extremely ill and yet at the same time possess an extremely strong "will to grow," in which case healing will occur.

All of us are called by and to grace, but few of us choose to listen to the call.

It is our laziness, the original sin of entropy with which we have all been cursed. Just as grace is the ultimate source of the force that pushes us to ascend the ladder of human evolution, so it is entropy that causes us to resist that force, to stay at the comfortable, easy rung where we now are or even to descend to less and less demanding forms of existence.

Fearfulness and sense of unworthiness is so great as to consistently prevent the assumption of power, it is a neurotic problem.

1 do believe that the awareness of the existence of grace can be of considerable assistance to those who have chosen to travel the difficult path of spiritual growth. 

To utilize dreams effectively we must work to be aware of their value and to take advantage of them when they come to us, and we must also work sometimes at not seeking or expecting them. We must let them be true gifts.

But when we nurture ourselves and others with-out a primary concern of finding reward, then we will have become lovable, and the reward of being loved, which we have not sought, will find us. So it is with human love and so it is with God's love.

Spiritual growth is guided by the invisible hand and unimaginable wisdom of God with infinitely greater accuracy than that of which our unaided conscious will is capable.

The journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action.

The fact that there exists beyond ourselves and our conscious will a powerful force that nurtures our growth and evolution is enough to turn our notions of self-insignificance topsy-turvy. 

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