Sunday, September 18, 2011

What M.Scott Peck Said


M. Scott Peck (1936-2005) was a psychiatrist and the best-selling author of a terrific book called The Road Less Traveled. I read it during the 1980s and it had a profound effect upon my life in terms of helping me deal with my life at that time and in making some necessary changes. I recommend it because it contains some real wisdom and advice on how to deal with life and its trials and joys.While Peck himself didn’t always live up to the high ideals he espoused for others (he didn’t always practice what he preached), he was an inspiration and a man of wisdom, perhaps all the more so for his failings and weaknesses, and he shared his wisdom and thoughts in his writings. 

·         “Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. ”
·         “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
·         “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
·         “Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.”
·         “Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. ...Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love.”
·         “We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”
·         Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another...The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness. ”
·          “The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior. ”
·         “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity. ”
·          “You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time. ”
·         “It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. ”
·          “If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything. ”
·         “Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.”
·         “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
·         “There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.”

The four important F's

My friend Cindy, who is a retired minister, sends me different spiritual and inspirational reflections as she comes across them and thinks I...