Morgan Scott Peck (May 22, 1936 – September 25, 2005) was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author who wrote the book The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978.
The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.
Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.
I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible. It no more has horns, hooves and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something basically nameless.
Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
Whenever we think of ourselves as doing something for someone else, we are in some way denying our own responsibility. Whatever we do is done because we choose to do it, and we make that choice because it is the one that satisfies us the most.
A discussion becomes destructive when it begins to generate more heat than light.
The giving up of personality traits, well-established patterns of behavior, ideologies, and even whole life styles. . . these are major forms of giving up that are required if one is to travel very far on the journey of life.
Since true listening involves a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the others. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable, and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the dance of love is begun again.
The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.
An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes.
Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.
It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.
You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.
Often the most loving thing we can do when a friend is in pain is to share the pain-to be there even when we have nothing to offer except our presence and even when being there is painful to ourselves.
Good discipline requires time. When we have no time to give our children, or no time that we are willing to give, we don't even observe them closely enough to become aware of when their need for our disciplinary assistance is expressed subtley.
Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs
Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.
An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.
Sickness begets chaos, which, through hard work and a touch of grace, leads to growth and resurrection.