The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth

The Road Less Traveled[6] published in 1978, is Peck's best-known work, and the one that made his reputation. It is, in short, a description of the attributes that make for a fulfilled human being, based largely on his experiences as a psychiatrist and a person.In the first section of the work Peck talks about discipline, which he considers essential for emotional, spiritual and psychological health, and which he describes as "the means of spiritual evolution". The elements of discipline that make for such health include the ability to delay gratification, accepting responsibility for oneself and one's actions, a dedication to truth and balancing.In the second section, Peck considers the nature of love, which he considers the driving force behind spiritual growth. The section mainly attacks a number of misconceptions about love: that romantic love exists (he considers it a very destructive myth when it is solely relying on the "feeling in love"), that it is about dependency, that true love is NOT the feeling of "falling in love". Instead, Peck argues that "true" love is an action to take with one's willingness to extend one's ego boundaries by including others or the humanity and therefore is the spiritual nurturing of oneself as well as the person's beloved.The final section describes "grace", the powerful force originating outside human consciousness that nurtures spiritual growth in human beings. To do so he describes the miracles of health, the unconscious, and serendipity-phenomena which Peck says:nurture human life and spiritual growthare incompletely understood by scientific thinkingare commonplace among humanityoriginate outside conscious human willHe concludes that "the miracles described indicate that our growth as human beings is being assisted by a force other than our conscious will" (Peck, 1978/1992,[6] p281).(Wikipedia)