Road Less Travelled

Certain administrators, educators, and medical professionals in our ranks are recommending strange books which teach skepticism, atheism, and New Age philosophies.

This present report draws the curtain back, so you will not be ignorant when these concepts and their corollary code words are presented in your area.

It may all sound very exciting, mystifying, and life-changing. But it is old-fashioned Oriental mysticism in a new guise.

There are churchmen and medical professionals in our ranks who claim that these books will change a person's life. We agree.

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

M. Scott Peck, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist. His most famous book is The Road Less Traveled, which was initially published in 1978. It has been a national best-seller ever since. This book, and its companion volumes by the same author, are increasingly being urged on our people.

The subtitle of this book is A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. Sounds pretty good, does it not? Do not be fooled. We are giving you an advance warning. You may find these theories taught at your own church one of these days.

Peck excites the imagination to lofty flights of fancy while subtly instilling pride in one's own wisdom. This is the secret of its fascination. It lures one on to seek a wisdom hidden from, and unavailable to, commonplace people.

One might think that M. Scott Peck is a very wise man, in view of the profundity which people imagine they find in his writings; yet we will learn that, by his own admission, he is a tobacco and alcohol addict. The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.

"The wisdom which spiritualism imparts is that described by the apostle James, which 'descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish.' This, however, the great deceiver [initially] conceals."--Great Controversy, 554.

M. Scott Peck teaches his readers that they must forsake the half-truths their parents have taught them and become skeptics in order to attain the level where wisdom begins:

"Science is a religion of skepticism. To escape from the microcosm of our childhood experience, from the microcosm of our culture and its dogmas, from the half-truths our parents told us, it is essential that we be skeptical about what we think we have learned to date. It is the scientific attitude that enables us to transform our personal experience of the microcosm into a personal experience of the macrocosm. We must begin by becoming scientists."--The Road Less Traveled, 195.

In the next paragraph, he claims that true spirituality is to worship "the truth." As you forsake the religion your parents taught you--you leap far beyond them into a new sphere of enlightenment. You have left the lie of religion for the truth of skepticism, your new religion:

"Many patients who have already taken this begin to say to me: 'I'm not religious. I don't go to church. I no longer believe much of what the church and my parents told me. I don't have my parents' faith. I guess I'm not very spiritual.' It often comes as a shock to them when I question the reality of their assumption that they are not spiritual beings. 'You have a religion.' I may say, 'a rather profound one. You worship the truth. You believe in the possibility of your growth and betterment: the possibility of spiritual progress. In the strength of your religion you are willing to suffer the pains of challenge and the agonies of unlearning. You take the risk of therapy, and all this you do for the sake of your religion. I am not at all certain it is realistic to say that you are less spiritual than your parents; to the contrary, I suspect the reality is that you have spiritually evolved beyond your parents, that your spirituality is greater by a quantum leap than theirs, which is insufficient to provide them with even the courage to question."--195-196.

In the next paragraph, Peck notes that science is greater than religion and other things he had been talking about.

"Science as a religion represents an improvement, an evolutionary leap, over a number of other world views."--196.

One aspect of attaining to the deeper wisdom, Peck declares, is to obey the promptings or impulses which urge us to do things. We must listen to and obey unconscious self. We must obey our random impulses!

"If we identify our self with our self-concept or self-awareness or consciousness in general, then we must say concerning the unconscious that there is a part of us that is wiser than we are. We have talked about this 'wisdom of the unconscious' primarily in terms of self-knowledge and self-revelation."--251.

Peck then attributes this to something of a godlike quality that is in all humans.

"The unconscious is wiser than we are about other people as well as ourselves. The fact of the matter is that our unconscious is wiser than we are about everything . . Among the possible explanations, one is that of [Carl] Jung's theory of the 'collective unconscious,' in which we inherit the wisdom of the experience of our ancestors without ourselves having the personal experience."--251, 252.

Those who have read the present writer's reports on Neurolinguistic Programing, LEAD, and Ericksonian hypnosis (see our Hypnotism Tractbook) will recognize that M. Scott Peck is actually traveling the same road they are! It is a pathway which leads to destruction. Yet this is what is being recommended at Southern University. It very likely is at some of our other educational and medical institutions as well.

On pages 263-268, M. Scott Peck discusses the similarity of physical evolution to spiritual evolution. He says both evolve all the time. Just as man is ever evolving physically, so his spirit is spontaneously evolving into higher spheres. We are naturally getting better all the time.

On page 270, we are told there may be some kind of he, she, or it god, and that we are to grow into it. We are to become this god. We are to attain all its power, all its might. We are to be god.

"God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution . .

"It is one thing to believe in a nice old God who will take good care of us from