Book SummaryThe Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Road Less Traveled

According to psychotherapist M. Scott Peck, the purpose of life is spiritual evolution and, in the context of wellness, spiritual competence is the highest form of mental health. In The Road Less Traveled, Peck teaches you how to face the inevitable challenges in your life, grow through hardship, and ultimately attain deeper self-knowledge.

First, we’ll look at common obstacles to self-knowledge and spiritual evolution. Then, we’ll explore the four factors that assist you in your journey: discipline, love, personal religion, and grace.

What Hinders Spiritual Evolution?

There are two key obstacles to spiritual evolution.

#1: Laziness

Laziness impedes you from working through the problems that support your growth. Furthermore, if you don’t conquer laziness, you won’t conquer the other obstacles; if you do conquer laziness, you know the others are conquerable, too.

#2: Fear of Power

When you spiritually evolve, you develop greater awareness of your actions and their impact. This makes decision-making more difficult, because being aware of the impact of your actions means understanding the pain and suffering you can cause. The more spiritual awareness you develop, the greater your uncertainty may become.

What Supports Spiritual Evolution?

There are four factors that positively impact individual spiritual evolution.

Factor #1: Discipline

If you have strong discipline, you use willpower to work through the discomfort associated with problem-solving. The challenges of life require mastery of four components influenced by discipline.

#1: Delayed Gratification

We often procrastinate solving problems because the process is uncomfortable, and we are not willing to sit with discomfort even if doing so will result in an overall more positive result.

To develop strong discipline, you need to be willing to sit with the discomfort of the problem-solving process. When you immediately take care of painful or frustrating tasks, you enhance your experience of later, more enjoyable activities.

#2: Acceptance of Responsibility

Related to procrastination, people with poor discipline usually struggle with embracing responsibility. But If you try to make your problems the responsibility of others, they won’t get solved, and you will be the one who suffers. Avoiding responsibility can lead to one of two types of mental illness:

Neuroticism: Neurotics feel responsible for too much, leading them to avoid commitment, develop codependent relationships, and succumb to generalized anxiety.

Character Disorder: Character disordered people feel responsible for too little, leading them to blame others for their problems and stagnate their own growth.

Life is a series of choices, and the best way to develop a healthy sense of responsibility is to engage in rigorous self-examination while you make those choices. Observe yourself, and notice whether or not what you expect of yourself is realistic, and make adjustments where necessary. Alternatively, notice when you may be blaming others for a problem that is your responsibility, and take responsibility for solving it.

#3: Committed Honesty

Seeing and engaging with the world through an honest lens is often painful, but when you have the discipline to do so, you are able to make choices that best support growth.

One obstacle to committed honesty is transference: We inherit our perception of reality from our upbringing. As we grow, these perceptions become outdated, and this misalignment causes mental illness.

• For example, Peck once had a patient named Stewart, who was a successful professional in his midlife who developed severe depression. There did not seem to be a specific trigger, but he had grown up in a dogmatically religious environment, and in adulthood had become an atheist. Stewart, through therapy, eventually realized that his upbringing had instilled in him a belief in a punishing God, whom he had rejected once leaving home. His attempts to reject the existence of God had only suppressed this underlying belief.

You can overcome transference by evaluating your current values and beliefs and determining whether or not they are outdated. You must deliberately replace outdated values and beliefs with ones that are consistent with who you are.

• For example, in Stewart’s case, he realized that his idea of God had actually come from his experience of his own parents. They had been ruthless in their punishments for any perceived transgressions, and consequently, Stewart grew up to believe in a world and God that was terrifying and dangerous, just like his parents.

#4: Balancing

Balance is an aspect of discipline that allows you to take a measured approach to your life. Optimal balance looks like:

• Understanding when to be truthful and when to withhold truth for the higher good.
• Understanding what you are and are not truly responsible for in life.
• Understanding when to delay gratification versus when to be in the present moment.

Balancing is critical because it keeps you from making extreme decisions. For example, when you’re angry, you might be inspired to do harm to another person when that isn’t the appropriate course of action to take. There will also be times when you’re angry because you’re genuinely under threat and you’ll need to take action to defend yourself. Balancing this choice is the job of your flexible response system, which controls how you moderate the expression of your emotions. For most people suffering from mental illness, the flexible response system is out of balance. Therapy often seeks to correct this imbalance.

Optimal balance (and indeed, optimal wellness) occurs when you find a middle ground between contrasting needs, objectives, or experiences. This kind of balance requires you to give up certain needs, objectives, or experiences. For example, when you’re angry and choose not to lash out at the...

The Road Less Traveled Summary Part 1: Discipline

In The Road Less Traveled, psychotherapist M. Scott Peck teaches you how to face the inevitable challenges in your life, grow through hardship, and ultimately attain deeper self-knowledge.

The Road Less Traveled is based on three assumptions:

1. The mind and spirit are connected (mental growth is spiritual growth and vice versa).
2. Spiritual growth is a painful, complicated, lifelong process.
3. The purpose of life is to develop full spiritual competence and spiritual power.

According to Peck, our greatest impetus in life is to spiritually evolve. Our greatest obstacle to spiritual growth is the reality that it only occurs through the overcoming of obstacles. We would rather complain, suffer, and resist, because acceptance means confronting our problems, and the confrontation process is often uncomfortable or painful. However, avoiding spiritual growth eventually leads to poor mental health. In fact, the core of mental illness is the inability to confront problems and the pain or discomfort associated with them. Avoiding problems = decreased growth and increased suffering.

In contrast, **confronting and solving your own problems builds courage and allows you to...

Shortform Exercise: Check Your Discipline

Consider the key components of discipline as it relates to delayed gratification.

Think of a time recently where you had an impulse to do something but chose to take your time before acting on that impulse (maybe you had the urge to snap at your mom, but instead took a breath and explained your frustration calmly. Or maybe you had the impulse to buy some ice cream while out, but you knew you already had some at home so you chose to wait). What was that experience like? Was it easy or hard to delay acting on the impulse?

Shortform Exercise: Achieve Balanced Truth Telling

Review the rules to balanced truth-telling.

Recall the last time you felt the need to lie. What was the lie? Whose needs did it serve?

The Road Less Traveled Summary Part 2: Love

The last chapter was about discipline, and the four tools used to practice it. To grow spiritually, you need to be willing to confront reality, and discipline supports you in doing that. But what motivates discipline?

According to Peck, developing your will to love is how you improve your relationship to discipline, which then enhances your ability to confront reality. In this chapter, we’ll discuss myths about love, what genuine love is, how genuine love supports spiritual growth, and how to act with it.

To genuinely love is to be willing to stretch the boundaries of your “self” to support your or another’s spiritual evolution. Before we can explore what love is in greater depth, we first need to understand the myths around it.

Myth #1: Love Is a Feeling

What seems to be love can often be some other motivating force or emotion (for simplicity, let’s call this force nonlove). This is because there is a misconception that “falling in love” is genuine love or a manifestation of it. In fact, falling in love is simply an experience we feel intensely. There is a feeling of “I love you,” but it’s not a feeling based in reality.

Why Isn’t “Falling in Love”...

Shortform Exercise: Distinguish Between Genuine Love and Nonlove

Review the differences between nonlove and genuine love.

Nonlove:

• Defines love as a feeling
• Is motivated by the desire for comfort or control
• Often considers the needs of one partner more than the other

Genuine love:

• Defines love as an action
• Is motivated by the desire to support the spiritual growth of the other person
• Considers the needs and well being of both partners equally

Now read the following scenarios and see if you can identify which represents genuine love and which represents nonlove.

You and your partner have been together for three years. Typically, you work full-time, and they work part-time, spending the rest of their free time working on their creative ambitions. You suddenly develop an auto-immune disorder that makes it difficult for you to continue working at the level you normally do. Your partner offers to work full-time while you take time off to stabilize your health. What kind of love is this and why?

The Road Less Traveled Summary Part 3: Personal Religion

Everyone has a personal religion (also known as a worldview). In order to grow spiritually, you need a personal religion that reflects a healthy balance between reality and your experience of it. To develop a healthy personal religion, you need to constantly question and revise your understanding of reality. This section explores why developing a personal religion supports spiritual growth, how to discard it when it is outdated, and how to develop a healthy one.

The Power of Your Worldview

Your growth in the areas of discipline, life experience, and love is equal to the growth in your understanding of the world and how you fit into it. This is your personal religion. While everyone has one, most people aren’t conscious of it. Often, people even consider themselves devout to a traditional “religion,” when in reality their belief system indicates something entirely different than their chosen worldview.

For example, you might consider yourself a devout Roman Catholic in practice, but your personal beliefs indicate an inherent deviation from the beliefs that would motivate genuine devotion. Perhaps your “official” religion condemns homosexuality as a sin, encouraging its...

Shortform Exercise: Revise Your Personal Religion

Reflect on your beliefs and perception of the world.

What is one life lesson or truth about the world you learned from your family or community growing up (perhaps something like “people cannot be trusted” or “I need to make a lot of money to be happy”)?

The Road Less Traveled Summary Part 4.1: Obstacles to Grace and Spiritual Growth

There is one final tool available to us on our journey of spiritual growth. Arguably, it is the most significant, and yet, the least explainable. Grace is the force greater than ourselves that aims to support us to stay on the path to spiritual evolution. It does this by giving you clarity and encouragement along the way through auspicious phenomena like the collective unconscious and serendipity. To develop it, you need to work through any resistance you have to it and be willing to be open to its influence.

Before you can understand grace and its impact on spiritual growth, you need to understand the roadblocks that grace eliminates. In this chapter, we’ll explore the three core obstacles to spiritual growth. In the next chapter, we’ll look at why grace is the answer to these problems.

Obstacle #1: Laziness

Laziness is the greatest obstacle to spiritual growth. Discipline is about fighting against laziness. Genuine love is about fighting against laziness. Everything that keeps you from growth can be traced back to laziness.

For an example of laziness in action, consider the story of original sin. God tells Adam and Eve that they can live in this beautiful garden...

The Road Less Traveled Summary Part 4.2: Openness to Grace

To overcome the obstacles to spiritual growth, become open to grace.

Based on theology, grace has traditionally been defined in two ways. The first is the Doctrine of Emanance, which is the notion that a god outside of ourselves passes grace down to us. The second is the Doctrine of Immanence, which is the notion that grace exists within us as a manifestation of God. This is a paradox, and the issue with this paradox (or any paradox) is that we want to categorize the concept cleanly. This tendency makes us want to “make sense” of grace by determining whether it comes from God or comes from us. Truly, the relationship between us as individuals and the mystery of grace as it relates to God is an integrated one. Grace is an external force that is of God but nonetheless moves through us.

All manifestations of grace share the following:

• They contribute to and protect the growth of the human spirit.
• They make only partial sense (dreams) or completely defy the laws of nature (paranormal events).
• They occur frequently and universally.
• They do not originate in the conscious mind, nor can they be deliberately summoned by the conscious will.

These...

Shortform Exercise: Analyze Your Dreams

Reflect on your dreams, serendipity, and the unconscious. Try to recall a recent dream. If you’re not able to remember a dream, keep a notebook next to your bed, and the next time you wake up from a dream, engage in the following process.

Quickly write down a basic summary of your dream, and underline specific aspects or details that stand out most to you.