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.
There are two key obstacles to spiritual evolution.
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.
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.
There are four factors that positively impact individual spiritual evolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Balance is an aspect of discipline that allows you to take a measured approach to your life. Optimal balance looks like:
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 object of your anger, you are letting go of your need to “get even” or your perception of yourself as “under threat.”
To master discipline, you need to harness the energy of genuine love. Genuine love occurs when you move beyond yourself to support your own spiritual growth or the spiritual growth of someone else.
There are five myths to understand to master genuine love.
We tend to believe love is a feeling because we’ve grown up on the idea of “falling in love.” However, what we think of as “falling in love” is actually a process called cathexis, during which we identify something as an extension of ourselves and, because this creates a bond, invest our energy into it. We can cathect people, pets, or even objects.
Cathexis:
Genuine love:
Dependency causes relationships to become parasitic, where the needs of one person are prioritized, which prevents spiritual growth. For example, say you’re primarily staying in a relationship with someone you don’t love because they pay your bills. Not only are you financially dependent on this person, but you’re unable to grow into your own competence, and the relationship is keeping you from finding a partner you truly love.
The foundation of genuine love is the ability to make choices freely. In this context, you are aware you can meet your needs on your own, but you wish to develop a mutually fulfilling partnership with someone anyway.
The idea that love requires self-sacrifice causes two potential problems:
In contrast, the purpose of genuine love is self-replenishment. Genuine love can be selfish or selfless as long as the motivation for your actions is your own spiritual growth or the spiritual growth of someone else.
Many people believe that love shouldn’t require work, but spiritual growth and interrelational fulfillment cannot occur with this mindset.
The only way to develop a genuinely loving relationship between yourself and another person is to extend yourself through deliberate effort. This requires energy and attention. One of the key ways you can develop attention is to practice good listening.
A common misconception about love is that we all have a soulmate, and when we find them, they are our “forever” relationship. This causes us to stay in unhappy or unfulfilling relationships out of a desire to preserve the myth. But when you value coupledom over being in a genuinely loving and fulfilling partnership, you impede your ability to build such a relationship, because neither partner is seen as a whole and separate individual.
Genuine love honors the separateness of both individuals in a relationship and treats each person’s spiritual growth with equal importance. In a genuinely loving relationship, the relationship is not the focal point, but a vehicle to serve the spiritual growth of the individuals within it.
As with every step on the journey to self-knowledge and spiritual growth, loving genuinely is not easy, and there are four significant risks involved:
To grow in any area of your life, you need to understand the world and your place in it. This understanding makes up something called your personal religion. Your personal religion is most influenced by the environment of your upbringing, including your culture and the respective personal religions of your parents.
As you age, the religion of your upbringing typically begins to clash with your developing perception of the world. As you structure this perception, you may run into three core problems.
There is a widespread misunderstanding that religion is about God and requires a belief in God. In reality, religion does not require God at all and is simply made up of your own personal beliefs about the nature of reality.
Most people don’t choose their first personal religion. Instead, it’s handed down to you by your caretakers. This means your perception of the world is initially a result of transference—your thoughts and behavior are based on someone else’s perception of reality. For example, if your caretakers see the world as a hostile place, so will you.
No two people have the same perception of the world. We have a world full of contrasting perspectives, and yet we are forced to coexist. This causes conflict, usually as a result of blind spots where one person thinks their worldview is more correct than others’.
It’s critical to develop your own perception of reality. Living by an inherited personal religion will cause you to do and say things that don’t feel authentic to you, and the dissonance will eventually lead to mental illness. To avoid this, spend time observing and revising your worldview to be sure it’s well-aligned with you. Question everything you believe, and maintain an openness to editing your understanding of reality. If you’ve never done this deliberately before, you may find that you need to first reject everything you think you believe.
For example, if you’ve had premarital sex, and you’re suffering because you think premarital sex is a sin that God will punish you for, you might start by asking yourself: “Who taught me this? Can it be proven? What evidence do I have that I will be punished?”
The final tool you are given on your growth journey is the availability of grace, a mysterious force supporting you to remain on your path to spiritual evolution. You need to work through your resistance to spiritual growth before you can access grace. There is one core obstacle to embracing spiritual growth.
Evil is the most extreme manifestation of laziness, characterized by the deliberate avoidance of growth and destruction of goodness. If genuine love is the willingness to extend yourself to support the spiritual growth of yourself or others, evil is actively narrowing yourself to avoid your own growth or positively impacting the growth of others. In other words, evilness is anti-love. The light in the world illuminates the pain evil is avoiding and evil is motivated by the desire to remain ignorant of this pain.
For example, the decision to cheat on your spouse because you’re unhappy in the relationship is a result of laziness. The decision to cheat on your spouse because you feel contempt towards them for how well they treat you and want to hurt them might be rooted in something closer to evil.
Grace is a spiritual force that originates beyond you but moves through you or to you through others for the purpose of contributing to your spiritual growth. Instances of grace are characterized by:
Many believe grace to be an expression of support from a genuinely loving God who wants us to grow. The suggestion is that this God wishes for us to spiritually evolve to the point of becoming God. We resist because if we don’t, we would have to take on the immense responsibility of being a God-like version of ourselves. This goal requires continual, intense effort, and accepting that we can become God puts us in confrontation with our greatest obstacle to God: laziness (or evil, when expressed to an extreme).
In short, mental illness. In order to evolve to full spiritual competence, you must live life in alignment with your soul. This requires an impeccable relationship with reality, which requires engaging in continual, rigorous evaluation of your worldview. If you avoid this, you will grow increasingly disconnected from reality, and your behavior will look increasingly erratic or peculiar to others.
To open your connection to grace, you need to understand how it shows up in your life. There are four indicators which, when examined, lend evidence to the existence of grace.
Indicator #1: Resilience
In the realm of both psychology and medicine, there are cases where, against all odds, patients retain resilience. For example, consider people who experience extreme abuse in childhood, yet go on to live happy and successful lives, or those who are in horrific car accidents, yet go on to make full recoveries. What can explain this? Evidence suggests that the secret ingredient in these types of circumstances is grace, supporting the human resistance system to recover and thrive.
Indicator #2: Synchronicity or Serendipity
Synchronistic events are events that occur outside the boundaries of natural law with impeccable and unexplainable timing or frequency. Serendipitous events are moments where positive occurrences arise unexpectedly and at times of great significance. For example, when a person is shot, but the bullet misses all vital organs, what can explain this? There is no natural law suggesting that the organs move to avoid the bullet, or one suggesting that the human body somehow influences the bullet to curve in such a way that it avoids the organs.
Events of synchronicity and serendipity are common, but many see them as coincidences and choose not to see a deeper meaning in them. This is a powerful indicator of grace, as moments of grace are only meaningful to those who are open to them.
Indicator #3: The Unconscious
5% of the human brain is conscious, while the remaining 95% makes up the unconscious. The unconscious is a major vessel of grace, communicating important insights to us through dreams, idle thoughts, word vomit, and symptoms of illness (both mental and physical). These occurrences can bestow any of the following benefits:
The greatest indicator of a message from the unconscious is it being unexpected or unwanted. Traditional psychologists (like Freud) thought the unconscious was bad because its insights often reveal neuroses. Modern psychologists (like Jung) have evolved to view the unconscious as the “unfiltered truth” of the human psyche, providing deep wisdom for meaningful growth. In this context, again, symptoms of mental illness revealed through the unconscious (obsessive thoughts, irritability, anxiety, and so on) seem to be manifestations of grace, alerting you to the state of your soul for the purpose of redirection.
Indicator #4: Evolution
The miracle of evolution may be the greatest indicator of grace there is. The law of thermodynamics shows us that the flow of growth in the universe is always rushing downstream. Rather than expanding, it is narrowing. Over time, energy becomes less complex and more disordered. Eventually, this process will reach its conclusion, with higher complexity no longer possible. This is known as entropy. The downward flow of growth is the force of entropy. Evolution is a process of expansion, where energy becomes more complex, with greater and greater states of differentiation. The upward force of evolution pushes against the downward force of entropy to evolve organisms to their highest state of differentiation (currently, human beings). From a spiritual standpoint, the process is identical. Human beings fight against the force of entropy (laziness) to evolve to the highest state of spiritual competence.
A key aspect of spiritual competence is awareness, and evil is the greatest expression of ignorance, awareness’s opposite. This suggests spiritual evolution and the evolution of consciousness are the same journey. If the term “conscious” means “to know with,” consider that the unconscious is the source of ultimate knowledge, and full consciousness is to bring that knowledge into conscious awareness. Further, the source of unconscious knowledge is God. This suggests the unconscious is a vehicle of grace, something not “of us” that nonetheless moves through us. The process of bringing the unconscious to the surface to be integrated into the conscious is to know God within us and bring God into conscious action through us.
The primary goal of spiritual evolution is to integrate human consciousness with God-consciousness. We engage in growth to develop awareness and spiritual competency, which allows God to influence our actions for the betterment of humanity. The mysterious force of grace moves through us to help others experience consciousness as well.
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:
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 develop wisdom. You can do this by developing discipline, love, personal religion, and grace. The Road Less Traveled is an in-depth exploration of these tools through the lens of Peck’s experiences as a psychotherapist.
The first and most valuable tool you can develop to support spiritual growth is discipline. There are four key components to discipline.
To delay gratification means to confront pain when it arises because you know it will allow you to experience greater pleasure in the long run. The goal is to get the challenging part out of the way first, then be able to enjoy yourself without anxiety.
How you are parented is what determines whether or not you develop the discipline for delayed gratification. There are two subtle problems that can occur when a child does not learn how to delay gratification.
When you don’t develop the discipline to delay gratification, you don’t learn how to work through feelings of frustration or discomfort, and consequently, your ability to problem-solve will be underdeveloped. Unless you have a mental disability or difficulty, you are capable of solving your problems as long as you’re willing to take the time to do so.
For example, say you get a flat tire, and because you don’t know how to change a tire, you just take the bus until you can afford to pay someone to do it. Your choice to take the bus reflects an attachment to instant gratification (immediate access to transportation), whereas, with the willingness to delay gratification (taking the time to find out how to change your own tire), you would have saved money and developed greater confidence in your ability to problem-solve.
When we have issues solving our problems, it is usually partially because we are hoping they’ll go away on their own. This is another example of the trouble with delayed gratification. Solving problems requires discomfort upfront, and the willingness to suffer through that discomfort for long-term happiness.
For example, undisciplined parents who avoid their own problems and growth will often punish their children for behaviors they themselves demonstrate, resulting in kids who struggle with problem-solving and impulse control (a crucial factor in delayed gratification). Parents who demonstrate healthy discipline will inspire their children to use the same healthy habits.
There are two critical components to the development of discipline in a child.
Parents who improperly teach discipline often use abandonment as a threat to control a child’s behavior. What this tells the child is that they need to behave in a specific way in order to be loved and cared for. The parent dismisses love in favor of power. Children grow up in fear and engage with life from that fear (as if the world is not safe). Consequently, they have immense difficulty in becoming healthy, disciplined adults. For example, if a parent says loving words, but their actions don’t match, the child may consciously accept this. However, on a subconscious level, they can sense that they are not valued.
Alternatively, homes where there is chaos but some amount of genuine love produce children who can still become healthy, disciplined adults. For example, if parents truly love their children, the children will feel it even during times of struggle in the relationship. Love is crucial because when you love something or someone, they become valuable, and when we consider things valuable, we take care of them. Children learn their value by being shown by their caretakers that they are valuable. Knowing your value is crucial for mental wellness and for self-discipline because self-discipline is self-caring.
If you don’t take the time to truly observe your children, not only will you not accurately pick up on the subtle moments where healthy discipline is needed, but you will teach them that they aren’t valuable. Additionally, when parents aren’t dedicated to deeper awareness, they often become overwhelmed by a buildup of behavior and are likely to distribute disproportionate discipline (usually violent or cruel) without considering the context. This impedes the growth process because when you see the world as threatening, you will cling to the comfort of instant gratification instead of trusting the value of delaying gratification.
Parents who pay attention to the details of their children’s lives and behaviors will pick up on subtleties that they can respond to with encouragement or light discipline before it comes to a point where more firm discipline is needed. Additionally, in paying such close attention to your child, you will empathize more deeply with them. Children with empathetic, supportive parents are more willing to support themselves, which is the foundation of self-discipline.
Another aspect of discipline is accepting responsibility. There are three important realities you must accept in order to accept responsibility.
Taking full responsibility for your choices gives you access to total freedom. Most people avoid taking responsibility because they are afraid of the consequences of their free will. For example, psychiatrists say that most patients who are struggling with a sense of powerlessness don’t actually want to be responsible for their lives, so they give their power away to things outside of themselves, and then wonder why they feel powerless.
Additionally, the process of truly accepting responsibility requires the discipline to conduct rigorous, regular self-reflection. This type of self-examination is often painful and difficult.
Figuring out what you are responsible for in life is one of the most difficult problems you will ever encounter. For this reason, to some extent, we all end up expressing one of two types of mental illness: neuroticism or character disorder. Neurotic and character disordered people respond to problems in contrasting ways.
Through experience and self-reflection, usually over a long period of time, we are able to get a realistic sense of what we owe to the world versus what we owe to ourselves. Parents can assist children in the process of accepting responsibility by recognizing opportunities to address a lack of responsibility, as well as opportunities to discourage a sense of responsibility that is unrealistically high. This requires time, attention, and effort, and is usually uncomfortable for all parties.
Truth = reality. Your perception of the world is like a road map. When you see reality, you see the world as it is, and you can make wise choices from that standpoint. You can only see the path clearly if you see the world clearly. This requires the discipline to engage in constant awareness and revision of your perception.
Many avoid making the map clear because seeing the reality of the world is painful, but if you see the world underneath a lot of illusion, lies, and so on, the path will be unclear, and you will feel lost.
Transference is what occurs when an individual builds a belief system based on the environment of their upbringing and carries that belief system into adulthood even when it no longer aligns with reality. It is the basis of most mental illness, manifesting in both overt and subtle ways (all of which are generally unhealthy). Transference is a problem because you end up living by values you created to protect yourself from certain circumstances, and these values may no longer be valid or may have been built erroneously.
For example, you may have been abused by a parent and realized you could not trust that parent, which led to the belief “I can’t trust anyone.” It was protective when the abuse was occurring, but in adulthood, it’s destructive, because the perception was never meant to be applied across the board. Now, it’s keeping you from developing healthy intimate relationships. You might even unconsciously create experiences that reinforce the lack of trust.
It can be very difficult to overcome transference and revise your perceptions. In many cases, it requires you to confront the exact feelings you’ve been protecting. For example, changing your perception of distrust would require you to accept that you did not have a normal upbringing, and perhaps that your abusive parent did not love you (among other things). All of this might be very painful to confront.
We are often extremely resistant to revising our map of reality, but to be healthy, we must confront reality and let go of outdated perceptions of it. This requires the discipline to see the truth at all costs. Being dedicated to the truth also requires an openness to challenge, because the truth of reality can be difficult to accept and you will often feel confronted by it. Spiritual healing has not taken place until being open to challenge is second nature.
For example, most people seeking therapy are looking for relief, rather than growth. Many quit once they realize therapy is a challenge. The therapist tries to teach the client that relief is found through practicing the discipline to embrace challenges. Sometimes, the patient will continue therapy but resist the process of growth. Consider free association, which is a method therapists often use to encourage openness in a client. Free association is saying whatever words come to mind without a filter, and if there are multiple, choosing the least comfortable words to share. Many patients end up curating their “free associations” to leave out any information that feels too vulnerable.
A life dedicated to truth means a life that is completely honest. To be honest is to be sure that all your communications are reflective of reality. This includes word choice, tone of voice, both verbal and written communication, and so on. This is not easy.
Lying is an attempt to avoid real pain, but this avoidance often leads to mental illness. Avoidance encourages shortcuts, which can prevent you from completing the steps necessary to ensure a healthy, lasting outcome. That being said, a shortcut is not always bad. There is a distinction between a productive shortcut and a destructive one.
This occurs when you are in therapy or seeking therapy for the wrong reasons. Maybe you’re getting therapy with your partner because you want the therapist to fix your relationship, but you think your partner is the one who needs help, and you are doing nothing wrong. You are not looking to grow, you are looking for a way to avoid the pain of growth by putting the responsibility on someone else (your therapist and your partner).
This is productive because support during the process of growth makes the experience overall less arduous, without sacrificing the quality of growth.
The required self-discipline for truth-telling is such an overwhelming idea that most people avoid living a truly honest life. They instead settle for a life of limited vulnerability, limited authenticity, and limited visibility. Everyone lies to some extent, but habitual lying (to yourself or others) as a way to avoid the pain or challenge of reality eventually leads to mental illness.
There are two types of lies.
This is the traditional lie. It is a knowingly false statement.
This is a lie that omits an important part of the truth. The intention is not to make a blatantly false statement, but to misrepresent the truth.
White lies can be just as toxic as black lies. They are hard to detect or address because of their covert nature. White lies are also more socially acceptable because many people think lying to avoid hurting others is justifiable, even an act of kindness. This is very common in families. It’s a problem because:
The tricky thing is that lying is sometimes necessary. Or, at least the withholding of the truth is sometimes necessary. Here are some examples:
To be successful in many types of environments you will often need to make decisions based on the needs of the whole equally as much as on your individual needs. The key here is balance.
Rule #1: Never communicate something that is untrue.
Rule #2: The choice to withhold should always be for the needs of others, and not to serve your own needs. Withholding the truth will always involve some form of lying, therefore, each time you consider withholding, be prepared to engage in this moral dilemma.
Rule #3: Because identifying someone’s needs is a delicate responsibility, you can only make a morally accurate decision in regards to withholding if you are operating with genuine love (we’ll define this in detail in Part 2).
Rule #4: In assessing others from the context of genuine love, you should be assessing whether or not the truth will progress their spiritual growth.
Rule #5: We usually assume that people can’t handle the truth. When deciding what to do with the truth, you should be aware of the likelihood that you are underestimating the capacities of others.
The benefit of being truly honest in life is an experience of continual growth, long-lasting intimate relationships, the knowledge that you are a source of illumination for others (rather than shadow), and ultimately true freedom.
Even discipline requires discipline, and that’s where balancing comes in. Balance is the component of discipline that allows us to remain pliant and adaptable, rather than rigid with extreme expectations of ourselves or others. Balance looks like:
For example, anger is a survival mechanism. We experience anger when we sense someone might be trying to harm or control us. Without it, we would let others walk all over us. However, it’s not always appropriate to express anger. Whomever you perceive to be a threat may not actually be a threat, or, it may not be wise to confront someone who is a threat. In either case, you need to have the flexibility to moderate your expression of anger. Sometimes it’s necessary to express it loudly and in the moment. Sometimes it’s best to express it after careful thought and consideration, or in a calm, measured way.
It is the responsibility of your flexible response system to determine the best balance for anger, as well as all other emotions and behaviors. We all have difficulty with our flexible response system. Most therapy includes some attempt to improve the efficacy of this process. The more mired in mental illness the patient is, the more difficult it is to refine their flexible response system.
Consider someone who is deeply mentally ill and has a very black and white flexible response system (all or nothing). This person might struggle to discern boundaries. So, if they determine a response to something, it becomes the default response, even when it would cause less suffering to deviate. For example, maybe they had a bad experience in childhood with parents taking things from their room without permission. Perhaps in adulthood, they decide anyone who wants to come into their room is not trustworthy, or they simply don’t allow anyone in their room at all. They are not recognizing that some people warrant a response of trust, and some don’t.
True mental wellness requires the ability to find a balance between contrasting objectives or needs. To establish that kind of balance you need to make sacrifices. This is what makes balancing a discipline. Giving things up is painful, but the loss of balance is more painful than the pain of giving things up. In life, you must give up all kinds of things to maintain balance, such as old belief systems or old personality traits, or you will not be able to grow on your life journey. Often, people choose not to grow rather than experience the pain of giving something up.
Major things that need to be given up during a successful journey of spiritual evolution:
The last on the list may seem impossible to accept, like a terrible twist of fate that makes our lives meaningless and without purpose, because western culture is terrified of death, considering it a cruel ending to the sacred light of life. In reality, giving up the attachment to self and honoring the reality of death allow you to experience the most vibrant life possible. Death gives life its meaning. Giving up the self is also required in order to experience genuine love (discussed further in Part 2). During our lives, we are learning how to live, but we are also, in many ways, learning how to die.
Giving up the self is generally a gradual, lifelong process, but you can use a tool called bracketing as a way to practice (we’ll also explore this in Part 2). Bracketing involves suspending your “self” temporarily in order to integrate new knowledge.
For serious growth to take place, much of the old version of you has to be let go of, or “given up.” The unconscious mind tends to know this before the conscious does (discussed further in Part 3). Therefore, you might seek therapy because of depression and not realize that at least part of the old self is already in the process of being given up. The choice to attend therapy is demonstrative of that giving up (you are “giving up” on “being ok”).
Depression is unhealthy when it becomes chronic. This can occur if the “giving up” process is interrupted by an event or stagnates for some other reason. Often when this occurs, depression does not resolve.
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?
How were you able to delay taking action?
Consider the other three components of discipline (acceptance of responsibility, commitment to truth, and balancing). Which of these tools did you use? Are there any tools you could have used that you didn’t?
Continuing to consider the four components, what is one component you’d like to improve in the future? How might you do so?
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?
What were the consequences of the lie? Was it harmful, helpful, or neutral to the person on the receiving end? What about for you?
How did the lie serve or impede spiritual growth (yours and/or another’s)?
How could you have handled the same situation in a more balanced way?
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.
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.
One reason falling in love isn’t genuine love is that it’s linked to erotic feelings. We only fall in love when the underlying motivation is sexual in nature. Additionally, the feeling of falling in love is impermanent and chemical.
Love as a feeling occurs when you find a person or object you are attracted to and committed to beyond your ego boundaries. This process is called cathexis. To “cathect” someone is to become invested in them in a way that pulls you outside of yourself. Paradoxically, when you stretch outside of yourself to invest in a person (or thing), you also incorporate them into yourself. This creates a bond. Once something has been cathected, you see it as an extension of yourself.
Love as action occurs when you do what is best for the higher growth of others, whether or not you feel a sensation of love for them (cathexis). You can be loving towards people for whom you have no loving feelings. The distinction is passivity versus action. “Desire” on its own is passive. “Will” is a form of desire, but unlike pure desire, it’s actionable. In other words, desire is, “I want to be good to you,” whereas will is, “I will be good to you.”
Genuine love requires committed action, and this requires discipline. We choose to commit because we understand that not committing will have a harmful effect on the growth of the relationship, but more importantly, the growth of the individuals in it.
For example, commitment is crucial in a therapy dynamic. A patient has to know the therapist is committed to being there throughout the therapeutic growth process. In this context, commitment is demonstrated by the therapists’ willingness to do their job whether they feel like it or not. In the context of a romantic relationship, commitment is demonstrated by each partner’s willingness to show up for the relationship even if they don’t feel like it.
As you will learn in Part 4, genuine love is a force rooted in evolution. When you truly love someone, you extend your limits to accommodate, receive, or support them, which expands your own growth. Furthermore, spiritual growth requires discipline, so if you don’t have the discipline to accommodate your own growth, you won’t be able to extend that discipline to nurturing the growth of others through love.
The second most common myth about love is that love and dependency are the same. Dependency is being unable to feel a sense of wholeness without the certainty that someone else is going to care for you. Freedom and choice are not present in dependency, because dependency is based on need. When you need another person in order to survive, that is a parasitic dynamic, and in an otherwise healthy adult, a type of mental illness. That being said, we can differentiate dependency from “dependency needs” or feelings. We all want to be nurtured. The problem occurs when those needs run your life.
A passive dependent personality disorder is characterized by dependency on others to the point that you spend all your energy seeking to be loved or nurtured, leaving you empty of the energy necessary to give genuine love (to yourself or others). Commonalities amongst sufferers:
Increased dependency means decreased freedom. Consider the wife who “cannot drive,” and her husband who drives her around everywhere in his spare time. There is a sense of security for both of them because of mutual dependence. He is secure because she needs him, and she is secure because she is being taken care of. But this is not a healthy relationship, nor is it one rooted in real love. People in healthy relationships have habits that encourage mutual independence (like trading off with chores, or routine tasks like picking up the kids from school).
Dependency impedes spiritual growth because the priority of the dependent person is always meeting their own needs. Growth is neither the motivation nor the goal. Any relationship dynamic based on need is not genuine love. For example, we tend to think we love our pets, but they can’t communicate their thoughts or feelings to us, and they are dependent on us for survival. We have simply cathected them. Not only can we project anything we want onto them, but we can also control them. We sometimes even get rid of pets who have a will that we cannot control (or at least send them to obedience school).
Similarly, you are experiencing cathexis when you are only willing to be loving towards people if they behave the way you want. For example, you should be wary of a partner who treats you like a child or a pet. It’s possible their loving behavior will become dependent on you playing the role they want (no will of your own, no strength, no independent needs, and so on).
Genuine love is rooted in freedom of choice. It means knowing you are capable of living without someone, but choosing them anyway. Additionally, genuine love is not just about being giving. Genuine love asks that you use your best judgment to determine when it is healthy to give, and when it might be healthier to withhold.
To foster interdependence in your relationships means to set strong boundaries (which at first will feel aggressive if you are used to suppressing your needs to meet the needs of others). For example, you’re nurturing interdependence when you tell a family member that they are not entitled to your space and need to knock before entering your bedroom.
When you think love is self-sacrifice, you end up with two problematic results.
Social sadomasochism is the unconscious desire to hurt or be hurt emotionally in interpersonal relationships. Sometimes, when we continually accept mistreatment, we do so because we are getting something out of that experience. For example, if we are mistreated in childhood, in adulthood, we may become attached to the moral superiority of our role in an abusive dynamic. We may also accept mistreatment in the name of “being loving,” seeking to martyr ourselves. Regardless, the motivation for these behaviors isn’t genuine love. In reality, we’re seeking a type of revenge on the people who first made us feel mistreated (generally our parents), and the behavior is motivated by something closer to hatred.
Consider the woman who repeatedly goes back to an abusive partner as long as they beg for another chance. On the surface, she speaks about the suffering of mistreatment, but on a deeper level, she may put up with it because it makes her feel like “the good guy.” In order to maintain that sense of self, she needs her partner to be “the bad guy.” The partner begging for another chance serves that goal because they highlight (if only for a moment) her moral superiority.
In destructive nurturing, the nurturer is wearing a mask of love, but their deeper intention is to ensnare another in codependency in order to meet their own needs (not maliciously, but out of a need to be needed).
Anytime you consider what you are doing to be “for” someone, you are not taking full accountability for your own choices. Parents who tell their children they aren’t grateful enough for everything being done for them could be lacking in genuine love, because if they feel resentful towards their children for being “ungrateful,” their loving behavior may not be coming from healthy intentions. What you choose to do for others is often done to fulfill your own needs. As stated before, this is not necessarily malicious. We engage in loving behavior because it feels good and right to be loving. Generally the effect of that behavior is positive for the person receiving it as well.
Love should not be martyrdom or masochism. Genuine love requires an extension of the self, not a total sacrifice of it. The goal is to self-replenish. It’s not that genuine love is unselfish, and nonlove is selfish. Genuine love can be both selfish and unselfish. The difference is that with nonlove, the goal is anything but spiritual growth, whereas, with genuine love, the overall goal is always spiritual growth.
Put simply, we tend to expect love to be easy, believing it shouldn’t require work (and that if it does, it’s not “true love”).
Love can be measured by effort and energy. You can only expand your limits through deliberate effort. Love is supposed to take effort, and effort requires attention.
Being a good listener is the best way to demonstrate attentiveness. When you genuinely love someone, you listen as an act of love. You determine that the person is valuable to you, and you invest your will to love in the form of attention. As a listener, you are both giving and receiving. This is true for the speaker, as well. That being said, it’s hard work. People who don’t listen well either don’t understand that it requires effort, or are not willing to commit that effort.
With children, most listening approaches have some sort of merit. Sometimes kids need to be quiet, sometimes they need to chatter away and they don’t care who is listening. Sometimes it’s sufficient to make a few acknowledgments so they know you are there, other times they prefer to go in and out of communication which makes selective listening plenty. Other times it is essential that you listen fully. The difficulty of parenting is determining the proper balance of all these methods for your child’s particular set of needs. Why listen to children?
These truths are not limited to parenting. Listening with full attention is a critical act of genuine love for any type of relationship. The best tool you have for practicing this is bracketing, which requires you to temporarily set aside your “self” (belief systems, wants, needs, and so on) to create space for another person to connect with you and be fully received.
For example, let’s say you’re in an argument with your partner, they’re saying things that are triggering for you. You set aside your emotion to hear what is really being said. You’re using bracketing by temporarily setting your worldview aside to integrate new information into your knowledge bank. This allows you to temporarily accept others in their totality (as a result of setting your own self aside). It’s effective because people sense when they are being totally accepted and become willing to open up further. Bracketing can only be fueled by love, due to the immense effort it requires.
Love, in all its forms, is discipline in action. If you care about yourself or others, you will put forth your best effort to support mutual spiritual growth.
There is a widespread, erroneous belief that being disciplined means ignoring your feelings. In reality, feelings are meant to be used as tools. There are two traps we fall into when addressing our feelings.
We fall into this trap when we let our feelings run the show, setting no limits, and allowing them to make all our choices. This is destructive because it generally causes chaos.
We fall into this trap by strangling our feelings with too much control. We might repress them or punish ourselves for having them. The problem with this is that eventually we start to rebel against the rules and this causes the same chaos as the first trap.
The best way to handle your feelings is with measured discipline. With this method, you build security by being respectful of your feelings, asking yourself questions, giving yourself reassurance, and giving your emotions clear roles. It’s especially important to treat feelings of love with measured discipline because to overextend your capacity for love is to eventually cause harm to the spiritual growth of others. Why? You will not be able to show up with the presence or energy necessary to genuinely support anyone. For example, if you’re in a relationship, but you continually prioritize giving your energy to new and exciting friendships, you will not have the energy to give to the growth of your relationship.
It’s important to determine if the person you wish to give genuine love to is able to support your spiritual growth the way you are able to support theirs. If they are not, then giving love will be a waste of your energy. Alternatively, there are some who have a greater capacity for love than others, and it is important that they love to their full capacity, rather than limit themselves. If you fall into this category, discipline is essential to be sure you do not spread your love too thin.
We often think there is one true soulmate meant for all of us, and once we meet them, we will live happily ever after. If the relationship with “the one” doesn’t work out, we think we made a mistake. It’s a lie that primarily serves the survival of our species (the myth entraps people in marriage, so they can have children and stay together long enough to raise them). Even when the magic has worn off in a relationship, and you have fallen out of love, you may likely still try to force that relationship to fit the myth. Couples who do this value togetherness more so than growth and this is precisely what keeps them from growing after breakdowns in the dynamic of the relationship.
In interpersonal relationships, there is often a failure to distinguish between the self and the other. In its most severe state, this inability to distinguish manifests as narcissism, which renders the narcissistic individual unable to connect with others outside the context of themselves. For example, parents who are narcissistic lack empathy and don’t give proper emotional support or validation. Their children grow up with little to no ability to understand or manage their emotions. This lack of healthy individuation creates conflict in all intimate relationships as the child ages, because they are unable to appreciate the separateness of others, and consequently unable to give or receive genuine love.
Genuine love always recognizes that there is a distinction between the self and the other. Furthermore, genuine love seeks to respect and honor that separation. It requires that both individuals embrace true mutual acceptance. That separateness is necessary to build or rebuild a healthy foundation for a long-lasting relationship. In the context of spiritual evolution, a relationship is a supportive entity, meant to function as a respite where each individual can replenish while pursuing their own growth.
Mystics believe that you can only truly experience reality when you give up your ego boundaries and become one with all of the universe. However, you need a solid awareness of your ego boundaries before you can release them (in other words, you need to know yourself before you can transcend yourself).
For example, infants are great at tuning in to oneness because they don’t yet have an ego. However, while the infant has no ego boundaries, and therefore is closer to reality, they are still defenseless without the care of adults and don’t have the ability to verbalize any wisdom they may have from living in that oneness. Clearly, their oneness is neither the result of spiritual growth nor an entirely good thing—their lack of boundaries and dependence on others threatens their survival. In contrast, because adults do have ego boundaries, they have the opportunity to access the state of oneness and consciously use it to become fully present in reality, enriching their spiritual growth.
Cathexis love merges your identity with that of another, but this expansion of your ego boundary is too limited—it doesn’t truly connect you to reality, which is much bigger than your merged egos. Genuine love also expands your ego boundaries, but it takes you a step further and actually dissolves your ego boundaries.
In sum, you need to be willing to make sacrifices to support your spiritual growth, and you are better equipped to do that when you embrace separateness. Genuine love uses that separateness to enhance each individual’s growth, which consequently also enhances the growth of the relationship and society at large. Eventually, once your ego boundaries have served their purpose, you’ll transcend them into oneness.
Once you dispel the myths around love, you must then confront the risks you engage with when you pursue genuine love.
To love is to risk change, rejection, losing pieces of ourselves, abandonment, and more. Therefore, love requires the courage to risk loss (courage is the ability to take action even when experiencing fear).
When you avoid risk, you diminish yourself, and this diminishes your growth. For example, while cathexis is not love, it can still precede genuine love. A feeling of cathexis motivates you to extend yourself in egoic ways but still requires risk. Once you determine someone is important to you, you automatically risk loss or rejection. Additionally, when you cathect, pain is inevitable, because even if someone does not deliberately leave or reject you, all living things die, so you will experience loss no matter what. If you don’t have the courage to cathect anything, you are unlikely to have the will to sustain genuine love. To love genuinely is to risk, to risk is to act with courage, and acting with courage requires discipline.
One might say that our relationship with death is what will determine our relationship with life, and all its most meaningful experiences. If you are afraid of death, if death is your enemy, you will fear all death, including the little deaths (losses and transitions) you experience through a fully lived life. Trying to avoid the pain inherent in real love will cause you to live a life that is devoid of meaning and fulfillment. If you can accept the reality of death and allow its wisdom to guide you, you can use your awareness of time being limited to live the most full, meaningful life possible.
The more you act with genuine love, the more risk you encounter, and no risk is greater than the risk of independence. To be independent is to take the minor and major steps necessary to establish yourself as an adult separate from your parents. What does this have to do with love? Discipline is needed to complete the steps towards independence, and discipline is fueled by self-love. Additionally, establishing independence is the enlargement of the self (a key aspect of genuine love). If you value yourself, you will value living a life that is yours, and love fuels the courage you need to take these steps.
It’s worth noting that the love messages you received from your parents will impact your ability to access courage. If your parents communicate to you that their love is based on approval, you will have great difficulty embracing a life that doesn’t match their desires. You may not take steps towards independence and stay fearfully stuck in a psychological state of childhood, living by values passed down from your parents, and ultimately living a life that is not your own. Fortunately, courage can be developed at any age. For example, maybe you’ve been in a 20-year marriage with a person who infantilizes you, and you divorce them to learn how to build a life you value.
Alternatively, if your parents communicate that you are loved for who you are no matter what, you will be more willing to take the risk of establishing independence. When you allow yourself to do so, you prepare yourself to experience higher levels of growth, and therefore you support yourself to deepen your experience of love. The greatest manifestations of love are created from accepting and embracing the freedom to choose the life you live.
As we’ll see, many people view commitment as a risk. But first, why is commitment important? Commitment is the cornerstone of genuine love. Deep commitment is your greatest tool for ensuring the longevity of your relationships. If you care for the spiritual growth of another person, you recognize that consistency is required if that growth is to take place. For example, children cannot grow if they are always afraid their parents will abandon them. They need to know it is safe to grow. So it is with any relationship. If you don’t make a commitment to the other person, they will not have the safety or endurance to work through difficult interpersonal issues.
As discussed earlier, there are two directions you’re most likely to go when your upbringing isn’t based in consistent, genuine love: neuroticism (overly responsible) and character disorder (averse to responsibility). People with character disorders generally make shallow commitments. They understand the idea of commitment, but not the reality of it (likely because they did not see it demonstrated growing up). Neurotics do understand commitment but are terrified of it. This is usually due to an experience in childhood of parents being committed initially, then retracting that commitment. The child experienced intense pain as a result of their own commitment to their relationship with their parents, and consequently, they are averse to commitment in adulthood. The neurotic can obtain healing only through a positive experience of commitment to counter the negative one.
If you did not experience a solid commitment from your parents in childhood, you may be an adult who now engages in the dance of leaving before you can be left. The closer you get to another person, the more prominent this defense mechanism may be. This is why commitment is critical in the therapeutic relationship. Patients only grow when they commit and trust the commitment of the therapist. Changing yourself, whether or not that occurs as a result of therapy, is an immense personal risk. Changing means having experiences that are new and unknown, and this kind of vulnerability can often be more terrifying than feeling physically unsafe. Additionally, there is always the risk that the fear will be too great, and you will fall back into old, more comfortable habits.
A huge risk you take when you genuinely love is the risk of confrontation. Confrontation is the exercising of power for the purpose of redirection. There are two kinds of confrontation you can engage in: toxic or loving.
Toxic confrontation has an air of “I’m right, you’re wrong, and you should change.” It’s often impulsive, coming from anger or irritation, and full of self-righteous criticism. People who engage in toxic confrontation do so with the impulsive conviction that they are right, and the other person is wrong. Confrontation without genuine love is akin to thoughtlessly playing God and can be extremely destructive.
Loving confrontation is characterized by the awareness that confronting someone you love means establishing yourself (temporarily) as superior to them. Lovingly confrontational people acknowledge and honor the other person’s individuality and engage in confrontation only after meticulous self-examination. They must determine if they truly understand the needs of their partner well enough to offer redirection, if their desire to confront is self-serving, and if they are seeing the situation clearly. Loving confrontation is also playing God, but with full awareness of the seriousness of that act, which allows it to be nourishing instead of toxic.
A confrontation is an expression of leadership. Failing to confront when doing so would enhance spiritual growth is to miss an opportunity to act with genuine love. It is the choice not to care. Loving confrontation redirects another person’s path for their greater good and therefore is rooted in genuine love. Regardless of the method, confrontation is necessary if we want to support the spiritual growth of the people we care about.
Exercising power for the purpose of redirection is not limited to confrontation, and it should be noted that confrontation is not always the best way to exercise power. Genuine love means expanding yourself to meet the other person where they’re at, and that may mean adjusting the way you communicate to match their needs. Confronting someone who isn’t ready to handle what you want to say can be pointless or even destructive. Sometimes gentler forms of redirection (like positive reinforcement, or storytelling, if kids are involved) are more appropriate.
Review the differences between nonlove and genuine love.
Nonlove:
Genuine love:
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?
You are in your mid-30s with a busy job and usually visit your parents (who live out of state) quarterly, at their insistence. One day, you are offered a promotion at work, but it will require you to cut down on your visits this year. When you tell your parents, they become angry and encourage you to turn down the promotion so that you can continue to visit them. What kind of love does this represent and why?
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.
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 followers to stay away from “practicing” homosexuals, but you personally do not believe this, have many close friends who are gay, and harbor no fear or judgment of them.
The most significant factor in the development of your religion is always the culture you grew up in. We tend to match our beliefs to that of those around us. For example, you are more likely to become a Christian in America than in India, where Hinduism is the norm. Beyond your greater societal culture, you are most influenced by the worldview of your parents. You watch how your parents behave, you experience how they treat you and others, and this is what creates your initial worldview.
You can run into a number of problems navigating personal religion.
We often have difficulty developing a personal religion partially because our idea of religion is too limited. There is a common assumption that religion is theistic (that it requires a God or a belief in a God). This limited view causes suffering because an understanding of the world and one’s place in it varies from person to person. In reality, religion is made up of your particular set of beliefs, both intrinsic and extrinsic, about life, which influences your thoughts and behavior.
The first experience you have of “God” is with your parents, and therefore, your religion in adulthood is a result of transference. These early experiences often cause you to form a religion that is not rooted in your reality. In childhood, God's nature and the nature of our parents are indistinguishable. If our parents are loving, forgiving, and peaceful, we will believe God and the world to also be so. If our parents are domineering, punishing, and chaotic, that is how we will experience God and the world. If our parents are neglectful, we may see God or the world as uncaring, and so on.
We live in a world with huge masses of people who have totally different ideas about the nature of the world and yet must coexist. Due to each individual’s micro experience growing up, everyone believes their own worldview is universal, rather than relative. This creates conflict. To make things more difficult, most people have no real idea of what their worldview is. They are unaware of their own assumptions and blind spots, and yet, they believe they are fully aware.
No hand-me-down worldview will be adequate for a growing individual. To take on someone else’s worldview is to take on their understanding of reality. If you do that, you will express yourself through that inherited understanding, and not your own. This results in you doing, saying, thinking, and believing things that don’t reflect who you are or how you see the world. To grow spiritually, you need to actively question everything you believe. It starts by no longer trusting the original belief system and forcing it to earn its place by questioning its validity.
To develop a realistic personal religion, you have to be willing to revise your understanding of your external and internal reality to integrate new knowledge. You need to constantly expand your understanding of the greater world and your place in it. This is the practice of revising your reality maps, as noted in the first section of the book. You start this process by first rejecting your parents’ religion (as it is always more narrow than yours), and replacing it with the religion of science.
For example, perhaps you have a lifelong belief that to be a good person you must place the needs of others before your own. You might consider where this belief came from, and find that it was a belief instilled in you by your parents, who taught you to neglect your needs in favor of focusing on others. To revise this belief, you might ask yourself whether or not this belief makes rational sense. Of those you know in your life, identify the ones who place their needs above others, those who place others’ needs above their own, and those who occupy more of a middle ground. Do their varying approaches have an impact on the quality of their character? Are they happy or unhappy? How do you feel as a result of placing the needs of others above your own? Is there perhaps a different approach you can take that will allow you to take care of yourself and support others as well?
Initially, your path to personal religion must be based on knowledge, rather than faith. You need to learn in order to liberate yourself from the worldview established by your formative years. Learning facilitates the expansion of the self, and consequently the expansion of your worldview. Be willing to release your limited vision in order to embrace a more expansive vision. It’s more comfortable to keep your old road map, but only in the short term. In the long run, embracing the discomfort of revision will enrich your growth.
To release your inherited worldview, you need to rigorously evaluate its validity using scientific principles. Once you have developed a new worldview, you may use the same principles to revise and maintain it:
There is a natural dissonance between the concept of science and the concept of religion. For example, scientists are generally unwilling to accept evidence of God. There are two reasons for this.
Science is entirely based on the ability to observe, experience, and verify. Consequently, truth is defined by what is measurable. For something to be measurable, it has to be experienced and observed with replicable accuracy. Anything that is not predictable enough to fit within these boundaries is often rejected. God is abstract, and cannot be measured. Therefore, science doesn’t take God seriously.
Using its methodology of measurement, Science has determined a number of natural laws used to make sense of observable phenomena. These laws have become deified, and when something observed doesn’t fit into one, it is seen as illegitimate.
Religion similarly dismisses the legitimacy of science. Those who believe in God don’t feel there is value in measurement or tangible understanding of what cannot be explained. Neither science nor religion wish to compromise their perceptions.
Some people argue that believing in God is a sign of mental illness.
For example, one of Peck’s patients, Kathy, grew up with such an absolute belief in God that it eventually led her to a mental institution. She grew up with a very religious mother and married young to a man who treated her generously but did not seem interested in her sexually. She began to fantasize about being unfaithful, and her belief that God would punish her for her thoughts sent her into a mental breakdown. As she examined the source of this belief (her mother) she began to discard what no longer resonated and eventually built a life that felt right to her, sans religion.
However, there are also cases that suggest that it is dogma, not a belief in God, which forms the root of psychopathology as it pertains to religion.
Consider the case of a young woman named Marcia, whose upbringing, rooted in atheism, caused her world to become cold and narrow. When she began to blossom into a warmer, more open-hearted version of herself, a belief in God arose organically and enriched her life.
Both Kathy and Martha suffered primarily as a result of the absolutism inherent in their respective beliefs (catholicism versus atheism) and experienced relief as they allowed their perceptions to expand. Given this, dogmatism may indeed be the true root of psychopathology.
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”)?
Reflect on the truth or belief and try to identify when you first learned it. What was the reason for its conception? What positive purpose did it serve at that time?
What are the differences between your circumstances then and your circumstances now? What are some ways you might adjust the belief to better fit current circumstances?
What are some actions you can take to demonstrate any new adjustments (for example, if you’re upgrading the belief “people can’t be trusted” to “trust is earned,” you might try opening up about something you haven’t shared before to a friend who has demonstrated reliability or respect)?
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.
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 but not to eat from the tree of knowledge. The serpent tells them otherwise, as you know, and Eve eats the apple. What is noticeably absent is an effort from Adam and Eve to first ask God why they can’t eat from the tree. Instead, they listen only to the serpent. Since God represents good and the serpent represents evil, their contradictory advice about the apple tree is a debate between good and evil. This is a debate you have the opportunity to have in your mind all the time, but it’s easy to only partially engage it, or, like Adam and Eve, not engage it at all.
When you don’t engage in the debate between “good” and “evil,” you don’t get “God’s perspective.” Meaning, you don’t listen to the God within you when determining which action to take, whether that be an opportunity to act with genuine love versus toxic love, or an opportunity to make a meaningful change in your life versus remaining the same. We choose not to have these internal debates because to listen to God within us would encourage us to take the course of action that requires greater effort and often more suffering. Essentially, this boils down to laziness. Therefore, it might be said that original sin is laziness.
We all struggle with laziness, no matter how motivated and ambitious we think we are. Fear is often a manifestation of laziness. The root being fear of change and the effort it takes to enact it. Adam and Eve might have been afraid of God’s reaction were they to ask God for an explanation of the apple tree rule. Instead, they took a destructive shortcut and were deceptive.
This relates to growth in a therapy context when you consider that most patients, while in therapy to create change, are afraid of the effort it will take to make those changes. The laziness at the root of this is what makes patients quit. Most patients are not aware of this laziness, because our general tendency is to rationalize it.
In theology, evil is considered the greatest obstacle to God. Science has little opinion on the subject of evil. However, in the context of spiritual evolution, evil is indeed real. There are people in the world who act with hatred and attack goodness. They engage this way with anyone they have power over, not from a place of maliciousness, but from ignorance. The reason they hate the light is that the light illuminates what they are avoiding in themselves. To embrace goodness means to confront badness; to embrace love means to confront laziness or fear. “Evil” people are seeking to avoid the pain of becoming aware.
Evil is the most extreme manifestation of laziness. Love is the willingness to move beyond your ego in order to foster spiritual growth in yourself and others. It is the opposite of laziness. The difference between evil people and those who are simply lazy is that the generally lazy person will passively avoid effort, but the evil person actively avoids their own growth to the point where they might even kill those who threaten their commitment to avoidance. Evil people seek to protect their sick selves from change at all costs.
Therefore, the definition of evil is the use of force to tear down others (subtly or blatantly) to avoid one's own spiritual evolution. While regular laziness is nonlove, evil might be called anti-love. The presence of evil is unavoidable because we can assume that as long as laziness exists, there will be people who succumb to the pull of it. The downward flow of laziness and the upward flow of genuine love are conflicting forces, therefore while there will be many people who fall in the middle of that spectrum, there will also be people who exist at the extremes of both ends.
For example, Hitler demonstrated extreme laziness in convincing masses of people that the reason Germany wasn’t reaching its potential was because of the Jewish population, rather than taking the responsibility for the weaknesses of the country and taking loving action to resolve those weaknesses for the betterment of all citizens. Alternatively, Martin Luther King demonstrated extreme genuine love by taking responsibility for the quest for equality (where he could have easily fallen into hatred and blame), fighting for the dignity of all, even knowing he might lose his life in the process.
The purpose of spiritual evolution is to come into full spiritual awareness. Often, when we make decisions, we are not totally aware of the motivation for the decisions nor the possible consequences. Additionally, it’s possible to make well-intentioned decisions that have perilous outcomes (and vice versa). When we’re certain, that may be when we have the least awareness. When we are uncertain, we are often more aware. Those who seek to fight the inertia of ignorance commit to developing greater awareness. A commitment to developing awareness leads to deeper understanding of the impact of your actions, which leads to greater competence, and this competence allows you to act with spiritual power.
As we come to spiritual power, we are all making decisions with varying levels of awareness of how they will impact the world. With higher awareness, you understand that you influence the world beyond those directly impacted by your decisions. For example, when you choose not to show genuine love to a child, that child grows up carrying the results of that nonlove to every one of their interactions, and those interactions impact countless others indirectly.
The greater your awareness, the greater your competence, the greater your obligation to act, and often then, the greater your fear of acting. Overthinking decisions causes overwhelm and you may simply not act at all, which in itself is an action that has an impact. Consequently, spiritual power might also be defined as the ability to continue making strong decisions even as you develop increasing levels of awareness. To be God is to make decisions with full awareness.
However, the more Godlike your awareness becomes, the more you empathize with God’s position. To come to full consciousness is to experience not just the power, but the pain of full awareness. When you are spiritually evolved, you are competent, disciplined, and loving. This causes you to be of service to the world in ways that eventually require major decision-making or problem-solving. These scenarios create equal opportunity for major pain because making decisions or solving problems from a place of spiritual awareness causes more suffering than making decisions or solving problems with limited awareness.
For example, let’s say there are two managers at an animal shelter, and they each have to decide which animals will be euthanized. Let’s say one manager is spiritually evolved, and the other is not. The spiritually evolved manager is going to suffer more making these decisions because they will be fully aware of the nature and impact of those decisions, whereas the other manager, from limited awareness, may just consider the decision making a job of little emotional consequence.
A final problem that arises with spiritual power is loneliness. At the height of spiritual power, there may be no one else to blame or to be reassured by or even to get advice from. There is no guarantee that there will be anyone at the same height. You are the sole source of your decision making. Were it not for the increasing connection with God as you ascend in spiritual power, you would experience a pain of loneliness that would be nearly impossible to shoulder alone.
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:
These characteristics all can be explained as being an expression of the influence transcendent of human awareness and comprehension which exists to support the spiritual development of humanity, known as grace.
You have many tools available to you on the spiritual growth journey, but using them is a matter of discipline. Your will to heal is what will determine your growth, and your openness to the tools of growth, including grace. The determining factor for how much the tools impact your life is your level of commitment to using them. There are plenty of severely ill people who heal, and plenty of mildly ill people who do not. For some, no matter what is available to them, they are resistant to growth, and therefore none of the tools are put to effective use. The will to grow can be directly compared to the will to love, as love is defined as the will to extend yourself for growth. The influence of grace, which cannot be measured, represents God’s love. It is available to all, but not everyone is open to receiving it.
If grace is a representation of love given by an external God who supports our spiritual growth, there is the question of why. What is the purpose of this evolution? It might be said that the purpose is to become our loving God, but we don’t like this idea, because it’s easier to believe in a God whose position is exalted above us and unattainable. To believe that we can access God’s position ourselves would ask of us an astronomical level of responsibility and effort. If we see God as nonexistent or hating, or untouchable in some way, we have no obligation to grow spiritually. We can live life at the most comfortable level, and not push ourselves to become our most loving, most responsible, or most competent selves.
Essentially, if we accept that we can become God, we will never be able to justify lack of effort again. The level of responsibility we give to God we would then be responsible for embodying ourselves. The idea that God is encouraging our growth so that we can become God forces us to confront our greatest problem in life: our laziness.
To gain insight into the consequences of rejecting grace, consider the following truths:
To live your best possible life you must live it in accordance with reality to the best of your ability. Understanding reality requires rigorous internal and external examination and making adjustments where necessary. This process is difficult and painful. The more you use defense mechanisms to avoid the pain of seeing reality as it is, the less accurate your perception of reality. This can cause your actions to become unrealistic, and this will be apparent to those who observe you. These observers might then identify you as mentally ill, even if you yourself are convinced you are seeing reality accurately.
Your unconscious communicates this disconnect to you before the external observers do. Symptoms can include panic attacks, nightmares, depression, and so on. The unconscious, having full knowledge, tries to alert the conscious to the disconnect between the truth of reality and the denial of it. Only those willing to accept total responsibility for the symptoms of their mental illness will come to understand that the symptoms are a result of their conscious actions being out of alignment with their soul, recognize their occurrence as a manifestation of grace, and take action to heal themselves through deliberate effort towards growth.
One way to become more open to grace is to reflect on the evidence of its existence. What is the evidence of grace?
Psychology can explain exactly how mentally ill patients came to be mentally ill, but oftentimes there are patients who, based on their traumatic experiences, should be more severely mentally ill than they actually are. These people often, despite experiencing terrible traumas, grow, and excel immensely in their lives. Additionally, we know quite a bit about the causes of diseases that are physical, but not much about the causes of physical health. Why do some get sick while others remain healthy? The medical world calls this “resistance,” asserting that the body is simply defending itself well against illness. But why? How? When someone falls ill, can it be that the forces that often protect us simply failed to operate in this person?
How about automobile accidents in which the car is twisted into a pretzel but the occupant escapes unscathed? Alternatively, consider people who go through a series of unfortunate events and terrible things keep happening to them one after another. Why are they so accident-prone or subject to “bad luck?” Many explain survival as instinct, but while we know of instinct, we know little about what drives instinct. We tend to accept that instinct is a product of a mechanism from within the individual, initiated by external stimuli. However, we can’t explain how, when someone survives an accident that should have killed them, instinct as a mechanism could be the reason. Does the car instinctively protect the human? Does the human in the car instinctively mold their body so they’re unharmed?
On the subject of evil, for every evil experience, there are countless people who react to that evil by becoming enlightened. Experiences of evil expand your awareness and show you where not to go. The miracle, therefore, is not in the failure of the resistance system in some, but the thriving of the resistance system in most. For physical, mental, and spiritual health, it appears that there is a force that protects and facilitates our growth even after horrific experiences. We know little about how or why this is the case. However, it can be suggested that phenomena like freak accidents with no injuries might be explained by aspects of grace, such as synchronicity and the unconscious.
The principle of synchronicity details the potential of unlikely occurrences that arise with unexplainable frequency and defy natural law. Timing is the most intriguing factor, as often these types of events occur at a time or with a frequency that is significant in some way.
Serendipity is defined as the ability to locate meaningful, positive occurrences, and a skill you can hone to tune into manifestations of grace. Occurrences of serendipity arise all the time, but most choose to view them as chance or coincidence and do not ascribe any deeper meaning or significance to them. Because of this, we derive no value from them either. This relates directly to grace, as grace is specifically defined as something that is available to all, but not all are open to. If you don’t experience it, it is likely that you are not seeking it, or are not open to it arising.
For example, let’s consider the survival of a freak car accident. There is no natural law that demonstrates how a car could change form in such a way that the occupant remains unharmed, nor a law that demonstrates how the occupant could influence the car to change form in such a way that they remain unharmed. Despite this, somehow, the car and the occupant can change form in such a way that the occupant remains unharmed. This kind of event occurs a lot more often than can be explained by chance, and the timing seems to be a significant factor, which supports the principle of synchronicity.
A key characteristic of miracles, synchronicities, psychic phenomena, and so on is that most incidents appear to be positive or to benefit the experiencer(s) in some way. It’s possible just as many occurrences exist that are harmful, but it seems that there are more beneficial occurrences than malignant ones. It’s not necessary for these occurrences to be life-altering to qualify, often they simply offer avenues of improvement.
The unconscious makes up 95% of the human mind. Only 5% of our mind is conscious. The unconscious mind communicates to us in a variety of ways, the most commonly known being dreams, but also through random thoughts, emotional and physical symptoms of illness. One of the ways grace communicates directly to us is by popping up through the unconscious into our conscious awareness.
Dreams are an especially well-known form of unconscious communication (used heavily in psychotherapy) because generally, we all have them. Regardless of the nature of the dream, the information given to us seems always to be beneficial for our growth. When we are awake, we can also get some of these insights through being open to “idle thoughts” and images. These thoughts can either give us insight into ourselves, or insight into others.
The unconscious communicates information that supports us in the following ways:
The main characteristic of information from the unconscious is the sense of it being unfamiliar and that it arrives without permission (or desire, at times). Because of this unwanted quality, traditional psychologists like Freud believed the unconscious mind was bad. With Freud’s patients, the feelings representing mental illness were discovered in the unconscious, so he determined that the unconscious mind itself was the cause of mental illness.
Another view considers that these “bad” feelings cause mental illness because they are repressed. The unconscious contains all that is beneath the surface and is the “truth” unfiltered. The conscious mind rejects negative feelings because it is too painful to accept and address them. Therefore, it is the conscious rejection and disowning of the feelings that cause the mental illness, not the unconscious itself. Jung believed that the wisdom we hold is passed down, and recent research indicates that this is true. Knowledge can be stored inside cells, and the reality of this indicates that there are vast amounts of knowledge present in our brain matter that we do not readily access. With this in mind, he rebranded the unconscious as a wealth of wisdom, able to give you key insights into yourself and your psyche.
The unconscious speaks to you through your own behavior, and if you embrace that, it can contribute to your growth. The way it speaks to you is through “slips” or “accidents” in things you say or do (also known as Freudian slips). It should be noted that these slips can be positive or negative. The unconscious contains all, and when there is a slip-up, it is simply the unfiltered truth, positive or negative. The conscious mind is always busy trying to hide from itself, and slips are the unconscious slipping through the cracks to consciousness. For example, in a therapy setting, it is actually the unconscious that is prepared to be most truthful, not the conscious (as demonstrated by exercises of free association and the resistance of some patients who undergo it).
Spiritual growth and individual evolution are indistinguishable, but while the spirit is limitless, the body is not. Physical bodies change throughout life but they don’t evolve. That being said, the process of physical evolution can give us insight into spiritual evolution and the mystery of grace.
Based on what we know of science and the universe, evolution itself is a miracle because the law of thermodynamics clearly indicates that the universe is always “winding down,” rather than expanding. It states that energy automatically devolves, demonstrating lower and lower differentiation, becoming naturally more disordered over time. Visually, you can compare this to a stream of water flowing downwards. It’s unnatural for the water to reverse course. It would take a great deal of effort and many tools to redirect the water back to the top of the stream. The energy for that process can’t come from the stream, it has to be applied externally.
Again based on thermodynamics, we know that after a certain number of years, this downward flow of the universe is destined to wind down entirely with “higher differentiation” eventually no longer possible. Once it reaches this state, it will have reached a state of entropy. The automatic downward motion is what we call the force of entropy. The action of evolution is counter to the force of entropy. Evolution is characterized by organisms developing increasing complexity. As an image, you might draw a triangle, put humans at the top of the triangle, and entropy at the bottom. On both sides, flowing downward is an arrow that marks the force of entropy. Evolution pushes up against this force in order to evolve organisms to the point where we are now (humans being the current highest expression of this process).
You can also draw the image from above by replacing entropy (at the bottom) with “low spiritual competence,” and placing the term “high spiritual competence” at the top (where we would place “man”). The process of spiritual growth also moves against the forces of entropy. It is inherent in us (and therefore much easier) to resist spiritual growth. Entropy supports us to stay stuck in the same old patterns and use the same old maps. However, spiritual growth does occur. Human beings, in spite of entropy, grow and evolve out of old patterns with the appropriate effort.
Therefore, spiritual growth is a miracle, because it defies the laws of nature. This miracle indicates that there is a force outside of you that supports you to defy entropy. Every individual must overcome entropy to grow, and in doing so, each growing individual supports society to also evolve in spite of entropy. Furthermore, there is more evidence that society is indeed growing spiritually than there is evidence it is not. Many of us look at the state of the world with a mentality of “this should be better,” but the fact that we have that mentality at all is proof that we hold ourselves to a higher standard than perhaps generations before us. There are so many aspects of society which, while unsatisfactory to us in the present, in the past used to be unheard of, and therefore represent progress. We need this disillusionment to motivate growth.
Love has been defined in this book as the dedication to stretching your boundaries of identity to support your own or someone else’s growth. Growth requires effort, and you put that effort in when you genuinely love yourself and others. This love supports your growth and motivates you to support the growth of others. In essence, the force of evolution is the force of love. Love defies entropy.
Where does the force of love come from? Grace is not part of consciousness, but love is. What is love in the context of grace? The theory is that the mystery of grace and the miracle of evolution are a result of a loving God. This is simplistic, but it is perhaps the only definition available due to us not having a sophisticated way of measuring or studying these processes.
We have discussed a great deal at this point about awareness. For example, in regards to evil, it is not a malintent but a deliberate lack of awareness that pushes evil to its extreme. Spiritual evolution, alternatively, is characterized by the deliberate pursuit of awareness. Every principle we’ve explored thus far is, at its core, part of a pursuit for greater/deeper awareness. Therefore, spiritual evolution is indistinguishable from the evolution of awareness (or consciousness).
Conscious can be translated as “to know with.” What does this mean? Based on what we know about the unconscious mind, we know it is full of knowledge. If we identify generally with our conscious self, we might say that the unconscious knows more than we do. In reality, the information from the unconscious is the knowledge you already possess, but in accepting the truth of the knowledge, you relearn it. In other words, true consciousness is actually just acknowledging what your unconscious mind already knows. Awareness is developed by making what is unconscious conscious, so the overall goal is the integration of the unconscious into consciousness.
Taken further, consider that the unconscious is God. Consider that God is the source of all the knowledge in the unconscious. That would make the unconscious at least in part a vessel for grace to operate within us from an external source. If the collective unconscious is God, and the conscious is the human identity, then the individual unconscious is like a bridge between God and humanity. This is how God has been within us all this time. The process of bringing the unconscious to the surface to be integrated into the conscious is to know God within us and bring God into conscious action through us.
Given that the conscious is the actionable part of our being, the ultimate goal of spiritual evolution is to develop the consciousness to the point where it is identical to the consciousness of God. In this way, we become conscious and spiritually competent, and as God works through us, we become an embodiment of the mystery of grace which supports others to come to consciousness as well.
Grace is not something you can search for. It arises for you and/or through you. Some ignore the knocking at the door of grace; others might say it comes into their lives in such a way that they experience it whether they choose it or not. It’s true that you can’t force grace, but you can prepare for its arrival. If you exercise discipline, genuine love, and build an accurate map of reality, you can put yourself in a receptive position for the magic of grace to move to or through you. The fact that you can choose to open to grace, and yet also must wait for grace to arrive on its own is an example of serendipity (the mysterious paradox explored earlier in the chapter).
For example, Buddha became enlightened while sitting underneath the bodhisattva tree. He was ready to receive, but not seeking, yet he spent years preparing for that moment. This is mirrored in the growth process for human beings. Let’s use dreams as another example. Patients who believe in dream analysis and excessively analyze their dreams may not find significant benefit until they learn to release their grip, allowing insight to arise naturally, rather than analyzing every detail of every dream. Alternatively, there are patients who are unaware of the value of dreams and may dismiss them as meaningless. These patients benefit from being taught to value and utilize the gifts and insights inherent in their dreams.
In the context of grace, and all other forms of mysterious assistance (love, premonition, serendipity, synchronicity, and so on), you must always prepare yourself for assistance. For example, we all desire to be loved, but you must first be able to receive love. This requires you to become a person who has the discipline to love genuinely. If you are looking for love externally, you will never find genuine love—instead, you will find dependency. If you treat yourself and others with genuine love and are not seeking to get love from that behavior, you become lovable simply by being the source of love. Consequently, you will attract the love you want without having sought it out (this is the case with the love of God as well).
The result of opening to the grace-driven messages of the unconscious and facing mental illness enough to make concrete changes in yourself is that, not only are you healed of your symptoms, but you are freed from the suffering of your childhood, and you experience the world in a brand new way. Obstacles become opportunities to overcome challenges, undesirable thoughts become opportunities to gain insight into oneself, undesirable feelings become fuel for growth, and perhaps the experience of mental illness itself becomes a blessing in disguise.
Once you are aware of grace, every aspect of your life becomes meaningful. The awareness communicates to you that your growth is bigger than you, and motivated by something bigger than you. So far as to say that grace proves the existence of God and proves that God desires that you spiritually evolve. You are indeed the center of the universe, but rather than this being in an egocentric way, this centricity is for the purpose of bringing the world into God-consciousness, and as a result, bringing God-consciousness into the world.
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.
Reflect on these aspects and details. Is there anything going on in your life that relates to them? How so?
What constructive “meaning” or “message” arises from the details (or dream overall)?
What actions can you take in your life as a result of these insights?