Utrinki knjige: The Road Less Traveled

Scott Peck, M.D.: The Road Less Traveled, A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

Vsaka prebrana knjiga pusti nekaj svojih sledi za sabo, ki nekako vibrirajo z mojo dušo. Tako je tudi s knjigo The Road Less Traveled. Knjigo je napisal psiholog/psihiater in govori o svojih izkušnjah, prepričanjih, ki izhajajo iz njegovega dela in življenja. Temelj knjige sem razumela kot neke vrste seznam ugotovitev oz. načinov delovanja, ki jih mora človek pri sebi prepoznati in upoštevati, da lahko stopi na pot osebne/duhovne rasti…

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»Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:

• The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
• The fantasy of omnipotence
• The desire or total (including sexual) possession of one’s parent(s)
• The dependency of childhood
• Distorted images of one’s parents
• The omnipotentialitiy of adolescence
• The “freedom” of commitment
• The agility of youth
• The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
• The fantasy of immortality
• Authority over one’s children
• Various forms of temporal power
• The independence of physical health
• And, ultimately the self, and life itself.”

(str. 71-72)

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“The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new. The pain of death is the pain of birth, and the pain of birth is the pain of death. For us to develop a new and better idea, concept, theory or understanding means that an old idea, concept , theory or understanding must die. Thus, in the conclusion of his poem “Journey of the Magi,” T.S. Eliot describes the Three Wise Men as suffering the giving up of their previous world view when they embraced Christianity.

All this was long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all the way for
Birth or Death? There was Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and
death,
Buth had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

(str. 74)

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“It is to these milder but nonetheless destructive common forms of parental narcissism that Kahlil Gibran addresses himself in what are perhaps the finest words ever written about child-raising:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

(str. 165)

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“It is from the loneliness of his wisdom that once again the prophet Kahlil Gibran speaks to us concerning marriage:

But let there be spaces I your togetherness
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but dring not form one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can containg your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

(str. 169)

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“The majority of patients even in the hands of the most skilled and loving therapists, will terminate their therapy at some point far short of completely fulfilling their potential. They may have traveled a short or even a goodly distance along the journey of spiritual growth, but the whole journey Is not for them. It is or seems to be too difficult. They are content to be ordinary men and women and do not strive to be God.” (str. 180)

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“Since everyone has some understanding – some world view, no matter how limited or primitive or inaccurate – everyone has a religion. This fact, not widely recognized, is of the utmost importance: everyone has a religion.” (str. 185)

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“And at the end of the first section on the discipline it was also noted that the learning of something new requires a giving up of the old self and a death of outworn knowledge. To develop a broader visions we must be willing to forsake, to kill, our narrower vision…The path go holiness lies through questioning everything.” (str. 193)

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“As the theologian Alan Jones has said:

One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function. I accept the word of physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust. I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living which I am ignorant. Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and raising of chickens, I can live with. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.” (str. 194)

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“I have firmly stated that it is essential to our spiritual growth for us to become scientists who are skeptical of what we have been taught – that is, the common notions and assumptions of our culture. But the notions of science themselves often become cultural idols, and it is necessary that we become skeptical of these as well. It is indeed possible for us to mature out of belief in God. What I would now like to suggest is that it is also possible to mature into a belief in God. A skeptical atheism or agnosticism is not necessarily the highest state of understanding at which human beings can arrive. To the contrary, there is reason to believe that behind spurious notions and false concepts of God there lies a reality that is. That is what Paul Tillich meant when he referred to the “god beyond God” and why some sophisticated Christians used to proclaim joyfully, “God I dead. Long live God.” Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth leads first out of superstition into agnosticism and then put of agnosticism toward an accurate knowledge of God? It was this part that Sufi Aba Said ibn Abi-I-Khair was speaking more than nine hundred years ago when he said:

Until college and minarets have crumbled
This holy work of ours will not be done.
Until faith becomes rejections, and rejection becomes belief
There will be no true Muslim.

(str. 223)

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“In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining the same time a scientific orientation.” (str. 230-231)

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“…the individual will often feel “reborn.” “I am not the same person I was,” a patient will say with real joy about the dramatic change in his or her consciousness; “I am a totally new and different person.” Such a person has no difficulty in understanding the words of the song: “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.” (str. 251)

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“The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle.” (str. 253)

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“But for the moment let me suggest that one of the reasons we fail to take full advantage of grace is that we are not fully aware of its presence – that is, we don’t find valuable things not south for, because we fail to appreciate the value of the gift when it is given to us.” (str. 258)

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“I have said that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with Got. It is to know with God. Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally, wholly God…As I have mentioned, there is a regressive quality to the mystics thought of some Hindu or Buddhist theology, in which the status of the infant without ego boundaries is compared to Nirvana and the goal of entering Nirvana seems similar to the goal of returning to the womb. The goal of theology presented here, and that of most mystics, is exactly the opposite. It is not to become an egoless, unconscious babe. Rather it is to develop a mature, conscious ego which ten can become the ego of God. If as adults, walking around on two legs, capable of making independent choices that influence the world, we can identify our mature free will with that of God, then God will have assumed through our conscious ego a new and potent life form. We will have become God’s agents, his arm, so to speak, and therefore part of Him.” (str. 283)

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“Yet those who have attained this stage of spiritual growth, this state of great awareness, are invariably possesses by a joyful humility. For one of their vey awareness is the awareness that their unusual wisdom has its origin in their unconscious. They are aware of their connection to the rhizome and aware that their knowledge flows to them from the rhizome trough the connection. Their efforts at learning are only effort so to open the connection, and they are aware that rhizome, their unconscious, is not theirs alone but all mankind’s, all life’s, God’s. Invariably when asked the source of their knowledge and power, the truly powerful will reply: “It is not my power. What little power I have is but a minute expression of a far greater power. I am merely a conduit. It is not my power at all.” I have said that this humility is joyful. That is because, with their awareness of their connectedness to God, the truly powerful experience a diminution in their sense of self. “Let thy will, not mine, be done. Make me your instrument,” is their only desire. Such a loss of self brings with it always a kind of calm ecstasy , not unlike the experience of being in love.” (str. 286-287)

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“Why, then, do only some people spiritually grow and evolve beyond the circumstances of their parentage? I believe that grace is available to everyone, that we are cloaked in the love of God, no one less nobly than another. The only answer I can give, therefore, is that most of us choose not to heed the call of grace and to reject its assistance. Christ’s assertion “Many are called, but few are chosen” I would translate to mean “All of us are called by and to grace, but few of us choose to listen to the call.” (str. 301)

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Zanimivost: knjigo sem kupila preko Amazona, iz druge roke. V njej je kar nekaj podčrtanih stavkov in besed (sun). Na koncu knjige pa tudi nekaj zanimivih zapisov:

SAm KEEN PH.D

HymNS TO AN UNKNOWN GOOD

Fire IN the Belly

INWARD BOUNd

your mythic Journey

w/ ANNe VAlley Fox

TO A DANCING God

The PASSIONAte Life, AND

FAces of the eNemy

SUN       I Am a child of God

MON     I Am peAce

TUeS     I Am Love

WED      I Am life

Thurs    I Am INtelligence

FRI         I Am hARmoNy

SAT        I Am Spirit

Knjiga gre zdaj svojo avanturo naprej, v roke naslednjemu bralcu…