Look, just take a deep breath.”“FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!”“You will close your mouth and breath in deeply through your nose.”. Welcome back. Now, it took me a long time to get here. You on the other hand have been lying on the ground in this dingy hovel for, a while. So I am going to do the talking.
You may answer my questions. Otherwise, you will remain silent.”. Now, before I got here. Were you in discomfort?”“Yes.”“And now that I am here. Adobe Font Folio 10 List.
Are you still in discomfort?”“Yes.”“Let me ask you again, but first take another deep breath.”. Are you still in discomfort?”“No.”“Perfect. Now, do you like the sensation of this feeling?”“Yes.”“Would you like to remain this way?”“Yes.”“Then you will do exactly what you were doing before I arrived.”“But—““What did I say earlier?”. You will do exactly what you were doing before I arrived. Do you understand?”“Yes.”“Good.
Now if you see me again, you did something wrong and our conversation will go a bit differently.”. Those lovely moments where we are shown how much power we have through our ability to make decisions for ourselves. How funny that we often feel completely impotent in those moments, right?! That’s the pain of freedom. If we truly want to rid to ourselves of dysfunction, we must accept responsibility for our own problems, inherited and self- inflicted, so that we may confront them and work through them.“. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever- changing course of events.
Nor is this assessment and reassessment painless if performed adequately and conscientiously. To perform either process adequately we must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self- examination. I think I hear the drips calling my name.”Turns out there is more than fun to be had by accepting responsibility for our disorders and committing to working through them, there is joy: “What transpires then in the course of many years of loving, of extending our limits for our cathexes, is a gradual but progressive enlargement of the self, an incorporation of within of the world without, and a growth, a stretching and a thinning of our ego boundaries . And as our ego boundaries become blurred and thinned, we begin more and more to experience the same sort of feeling of ecstasy that we have when our ego boundaries partially collapse and we “fall in love.”So this silly little thing called love is the vehicle for transmogrifying pain and suffering into spiritual evolution. Love, the fundamental ordering process, working against the fundamental disordering process, the force of entropy: “The process of evolution is a miracle, because insofar as it is a process of increasing organization and differentiation, it runs counter to natural law—the downhill flow of energy toward the state of entropy.”And there we have it, the fundamental opposing forces: laziness and love. And we get to choose. All the time.“Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves 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.
What they once perceived as problems they now perceive as opportunities. What were once loathsome barriers are now welcome challenges.
Thoughts previously unwanted become sources of energy and guidance. Occurrences that once seemed to be burdens now seem to be gifts, including the very symptoms from which they have recovered.”I’ve found The Road Less Traveled to be the most insightful synthesis of wisdom on spiritual growth and self- realization I have yet come across. The source of insights range from M. Scott Peck’s personal experiences as a psychotherapist to Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, T. S. Eliot, William Johnston, Edith Hamilton, Joseph Campbell, Erik Erikson, Carlos Castaneda, P.
D. Ouspensky, and Buckminster Fuller to name a few. The essential message is nothing new, but what’s most helpful is how that path is elucidated through rational analysis and real- world examples of people discovering, understanding, and ultimately changing their dysfunctional behavior. It’s always easier to recognize our own disorders in the actions of others, and the patients' stories offer many entry- points for revelation. My only criticisms are of occasional unnecessary language and the slave- owner analogy used for controlling one’s emotions. Phrases like, “In a sense,” “By virtue of the fact,” “First of all, as has been pointed out,” are clumsy and do not add any clarity. The slaver- owner analogy comes off embarrassingly callous.
For such a comprehensive conception, this one comes out of nowhere. My favorite part of the book is Peck’s speculation on the purpose of spiritual growth and where our collective evolution may lead. It’s such a wild concept, I think learning of it is reason enough to read the book.“The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life.”.