Saturday 6 March 2010

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

This episode is a discussion of M. Scott Peck's bestseller, The Road Less Traveled. Here is a summary from Wikipedia:

The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978, is Peck's best-known work. It is a description of the attributes that make for a fulfilled human being, based on his experiences as a psychiatrist and a person.  In the first section of the book 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".', 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. The final section describes Grace, his concept of a force originating outside human consciousness that nurtures spiritual growth in human beings. 

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