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Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Towards Spiritual Growth

Product ID : 11878490


Galleon Product ID 11878490
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About Further Along The Road Less Traveled: The Unending

Product Description Further Along the Road Less Traveled takes the lectures of Dr. Peck and presents his profound insights into the issues that confront and challenge all of us today: spirituality, forgiveness, relationships, and growing up. In this aid for living less simplistically, you will learn not to look for the easy answers but to think multidimensionally. You will learn to reach for the "ultimate step," which brings you face to face with your personal spirituality. It will be this that helps you appreciate the complexity that is life. Continue the journey of personal and spiritual growth with this wise and insightful book. About the Author M. Scott Peck, M.D. is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Road Less Traveled, with six million copies in print. His other books include Further Along the Road Less Traveled, The Road Less Traveled and Beyond, Meditations from the Road and Golf and the Spirit. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Consciousness and the Problem of Pain All my life I used to wonder what I would become when grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I never was going to grow up -- that growing is an ever ongoing process. So I asked myself, "Well, Scotty, what is it that you've become thus far?" And as soon as I asked that question, I realized, to my absolute horror, that what I have become is an evangelist. An evangelist is the last thing on earth I ever thought I would become. And it's probably the last thing on earth you ever wanted to encounter. The word "evangelist" carries the worst possible associations and probably brings to your mind the image of a manicured and coiffed preacher in a two-thousand-dollar suit, his gold-ringed fingers gripping a leatherette-covered Bible as he shouts at the top of his lungs: "Save me, Jee-sus!" Fear not. I don't mean to suggest that I have become that kind of evangelist. I am using the word "evangelist" in its original sense -- the bringer of good news. But I must warn you, I am also the bringer of bad news. I am an evangelist who brings good news and bad news. If you are anything like me, you are into delaying gratification, so when you are asked, "Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?" you answer, "Well, the bad news first, please." So let me get the bad news over with: I don't know anything. It might seem odd that an evangelist, a "bringer of truth," would confess so readily that he doesn't know anything. But the real truth of the matter is that you don't know anything either. None of us does. We dwell in a profoundly mysterious universe. Evangelists are also supposed to bring "glad tidings of comfort and joy." The other piece of bad news is that I am going to be talking about the journey through life, and in so doing I cannot avoid talking about pain. Pain is simply a part of being human and it has been so since the Garden of Eden. The story of the Garden of Eden is, of course, a myth. But like other myths, it is an embodiment of truth. And among the many truthful things the myth of the Garden of Eden tells us is how we human beings evolved into consciousness. When we ate the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we became conscious, and having become conscious, we immediately became self-conscious. That was how Cod recognized that we had eaten the apple -- we were suddenly modest and shy. So one of the things this myth tells us is that it is human to be shy. I have had the opportunity, through my career as a psychiatrist and more recently as an author and lecturer, to meet a great number of wonderful, deep-thinking people, and I have never met such a person who was not basically shy. A few of them had not thought of themselves as shy, but as we talked about it, they came to realize that they were in fact shy. And the very few people I have met who were not shy were people who had been damaged in some way, who had lost some of their humanity. It is h