M. Scott Peck's books are a tragic example of the means by
which professing Christians are being deceived. See Four Ways Christians Are Being Deceived
1. M. Scott Peck, M.D.
a. "Educated at Harvard (B.A.) and Case Western Reserve
(M.D.), Dr. M. Scott Peck has served in administrative posts in
the government during his career as a psychotherapist. He has
been the Medical Director of the New Milford Hospital Mental
Health Clinic and a psychiatrist in private practice in New
Milford, Connecticut." (The Road Less Traveled)
b. "After many years of vague identification with
Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm
Christian commitment - signified by my non-denominational baptism
on the ninth of March 1980..." (People of the Lie)
2. Books
a. The Road Less Traveled - 1978 A Touchstone Book by Simon
& Schuster, Inc. "A New Psychology of Love, Traditional
Values and Spiritual Growth" (See quotes in section 4)
b. People of the Lie - 1983 A Touchstone Book by Simon &
Schuster, Inc. "The Hope For Healing Human Evil" (See
quotes in section 7)
c. The Different Drum - 1987 A Touchstone Book by Simon &
Schuster, Inc. "Community Making and Peace: A Spiritual
Journey Toward Self-Acceptance, True Belonging, and New Hope for
the World" (See quotes in sections 5, 6, 8, and 9)
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3. M. Scott Peck's
books can be found in both Christian and New Age bookstores.
4. Evolving to god-hood
a. "God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or
Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of
evolution."
b. "To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within
us."
c. "I am indebted for this analogy to [Carl] Jung, who,
[described] himself as 'a splinter of the infinite
deity'..."
d. M. Scott Peck has never refuted or modified in subsequent
books the views expressed in The Road Less Traveled. In fact, his
later books continue to express the same metaphysical world-view.
5. Mystical Transformation
a. "Patterns of Transformation" - "Stages of
Spiritual Growth"
Stage I : Chaotic, Anti-social
Stage II : Formal, Institutional
Stage III: Skeptic, Individual
Stage IV: Mystic, Communal
b. Stage II Conversion
"But for most, the institution to which they submit
themselves "But for most, the institution to which they
submit themselves for governance is the Church."
"There are several things that characterize the behavior
of men and women in Stage II of their spiritual development,
which is the stage of the majority of churchgoers and
believers."..."their attachment to forms (as
opposed to the essence of their religion)...formal...
institutional...threatened when someone seems to be playing
footloose and fancy-free with the rules." "Another
thing characterizing the religious behavior of Stage II
people is that their vision of God is almost entirely that of
an external, transcendent Being. They have very little
understanding of the immanent, indwelling God......And
although they consider Him loving, they also generally feel
He possesses - and will use - punitive power....they need a
legalistic religion for their governance."
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c. Stage IV - Becoming a Mystic
Every Shade of Religious Belief "Yet through the
ages, mystics of every shade of religious belief have spoken
have spoken of unity, of an underlying connectedness between
things: between men and women, us and the other creatures and
even inanimate matter as well, a fitting together according
to an ordinarily invisible fabric underlying the
cosmos."
Deeper Mysteries "Mystics acknowledge the enormity of
the unknown... they seek to penetrate ever deeper into it
that they may understand more... They love mystery, in
dramatic contrast to those in Stage II, who need simple,
clear-cut dogmatic structures and have little taste for the
unknown and unknowable." "Mystics throughout the
ages have not only spoken of emptiness but extolled its
virtues."
One World Community "...they are the ones most aware
that the whole world is a community.... they know this to be
one world."
Psychoactive Drugs "...after he had drunk a bit of
whiskey or smoked a little marijuana, Michael would begin to
talk of life and death and meaning and glory and become
'spirit-filled', and I would sit listening at his feet
enthralled. .....See the early 'Don Juan' books by Carlos Castenedas for a description of the role of psychoactive drugs
in his Stage III to Stage IV conversion.....I do not mean to
bless the use of drugs for such purposes but simply to state
the reality that in his case they loosened him up enough to
flow in the direction he was being called..."
All Religions and Interdependence "Stage IV
therapists do best leading highly independent people toward a
recognition of the mystical interdependence of this
world." "My experience suggests that this
progression of spiritual development holds true in all
cultures and for all religions. Indeed, one of the things
that seems to characterize all the great religions -
Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism - is
their capacity to speak to people in both Stage II and Stage
IV. In fact, I suspect this is why they are great
religions."
No End to Conversion "...the whole point of life is
the development of souls... we are all on an ongoing
spiritual journey and... there is no end to our
conversion." "The individual journey through the
stages of spiritual development is also a journey into and
out of culture. Erich Fromm [in The Sane Society] once
defined socialization as the process of 'learning to like to
do what we have to do.'"
The Perennial Philosophy "Aldous Huxley labeled
mysticism 'the perennial philosophy' because the mystical way
of thinking and being has existed in all cultures and all
times since dawn of recorded history. Although a small
minority, mystics of all religions the world over history.
Although a small minority, mystics of all religions the world
over have demonstrated an amazing commonality, unity. Unique
though they might be in their individual personhood, they
have largely escaped free from - transcended - those human
differences that are cultural."
Jesus the Mystic "Nowhere in all of literature is
there a better description of someone who had transcended
culture than in the Gospels. Before and since Jesus, from
time to time there have been saints who have transcended
their culture and also had 'no place to lay their
heads'."
Global Leap of Human Evolution "But they were one in
ten thousand, if that. Today it is different. Because of..
mass communication that brings foreign cultures to our door,
and... psychotherapy that leads us to question [the way] we
were raised - the number of people entering the mystical
stage of development and transcending ordinary culture seems
to have increased a thousandfold in the course of a mere
generation or two. They remain a minority - currently no more
than one in twenty. Still, one wonders if the explosion in
their numbers might represent a giant leap forward in the
evolution of the human race, a leap toward not only mystical
but global consciousness and world community. Perhaps the
greatest prophet of this leap was Teilhard de Chardin."
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6. Meditation
a. Hindu Mystic Krishnamurti
"Our responsibility as individuals to empty ourselves
in order to achieve peace was stated clearly by the Hindu
mystic Krishnamurti twenty years ago in his book Freedom from
the Known.
b. Emptiness - What Comes In Is Beyond Our Control
"It is important for people who find the concept of
emptiness frightening to remember that meditation - emptiness
- is not an end in itself but the means to an end. It is said
that nature abhors a vacuum. So it is that the moment we
become empty something comes into our emptiness. The virtue
of meditation is that whatever comes into emptiness is beyond
our control. It is the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new.
And it is only from the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new
that we learn."
7. Psychology and Education
a. "God does not punish.... God cannot destroy; He can
only create."
b. "In one [scenario] all human souls, having been
converted to light and love, reach out to the spirit of hate and
falsehood in friendship. Finally realizing itself to be totally
defeated, with no human body left to possess, with all immune to
its power, out of utter loneliness it breaks down and accepts the
offer of friendship, and thereby in the end even Satan is
converted. That is the scenario I pray for."
c. "The final major model [of evil], that of traditional
Christianity, I label 'diabolic dualism.' Here evil is regarded
as being not of God's creation but a ghastly cancer beyond His
control. While this model has its own pitfalls, it is the only
one of the three that deals adequately with the issue of murder
and the murderer."
d. "It is the principal thesis of this work that these
specific [evil] people - as well as human evil in general - need
to be studied scientifically..... A psychology of evil must be a
healing psychology.... a psychology of evil must be a religious
psychology...it must not only embrace valid insights from all
religious traditions but must also recognize the reality of the
'supernatural'".
e. "The effort to prevent group evil - including war -
must therefore be directed toward the individual. It is, of
course, a process of education. And that education can be
conducted most easily within the traditional existing framework
of our schools. This book is written in the hope that someday in
our secular as well as religious schools all children will be
carefully taught the nature of evil and the principles of its
prevention."
8. Community - Salvation of the World
a. "In and through community lies the salvation of the
world.... peacemaking must be the first priority of
civilization..."
b. "I am dubious, however, as to how far we can move
toward global community - which is the only way to achieve
international peace - until we learn the basic principles of
community in our own individual lives and personal spheres of
influence."
c. "But what is spiritual salvation, particularly when we
think of the spirit as immortal? Here the work takes on more the
meaning of healing... Spiritual healing is a process of becoming
whole or holy. Most specifically, I would define it as an ongoing
process of becoming increasingly conscious. Even Freud, an
atheist, said that the purpose of psychotherapy - healing of the
psyche - was to make the unconscious conscious. And Jung ascribed
human evil to the refusal to meet the Shadow - the Shadow being
those aspects of ourselves that we do not want to own or
recognize and that we continually attempt to sweep under the rug
of consciousness."
d. "The key to community is the acceptance - in fact, the
celebration - of our individual and cultural differences. Such
acceptance and celebration - which resolves the problem of
pluralism and which can occur only after we learn how to become
empty - is also the key to world peace."
e. "And that community, which includes all faiths and all
cultures without obliterating them, is the cure for 'the core of
our greatest contemporary trouble.'"
f. "One of the roots of the community movement was what
has been called the T-Group.... [which] became the model for the
sensitivity-group movement."
g. "Empowerment - What to do now? Start communities.
Start one in your church. Start one in your school. Start one in
your neighborhood."
h. "But there are rules!...The hope of the book is that
we will learn them first in our personal lives, then apply them
universally. For that is how the world will be saved."
i. "But what, then, does such a rare group [a true
community] look like? How does it function? What is a true
definition of community?"
j. "Community is a spirit - but not in the way that the
familiar phrase 'community spirit' is usually understood.... The
spirit of community is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. This
does not mean that community is solely a Christian phenomenon. I
have seen community develop among Christians and Jews, Christians
and atheists, Jews and Muslims, Muslims and Hindus. People of any
religious persuasion or none whatever can develop
community."
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9. One World Government - "The
Obsolescence of the Nation-State System"
a. "Instead, our primary goal should be as rapidly as
possible to turn our swords - and our guns and bombs and tanks
and missiles - the whole kit and caboodle - over to the United
Nations or another variety of supranational government."
b. "In fact, a supranational government is incompatible
with the nation-state system."
c. "A society must be able to work through an economic
depression in order to make the changes it needs to make to
remain a sane and healthy society."
d. "If we were willing to undergo an economic depression
voluntarily, there would be time for planning, for gradual
change, for innovative changes it needs to make to remain a sane
and healthy society."
e. "If we were willing to undergo an economic depression
voluntarily, there would be time for planning, for gradual
change, for innovative strategies that would minimize economic
disruption. The key to large social change is substitution - not
demolition of institutions but their transformation."
f. "In the process of achieving peace I would not, for
example, suggest that we simply do away with our military.... I
would propose the transformation of our military into a national
service corps, an idea that many of our best minds have long been
espousing.... [to be used for] slum clearing, education, and
conservation... self-defense through nonviolent means: a cadre of
brave men and women thoroughly trained in the techniques of
passive resistance and nonviolent action."
g. "In December 1984 nine of my colleagues and I met
together to form The Foundation for Community Encouragement
(FCE). The purpose of this tax-exempt public foundation is 'to
encourage the development of community wherever it does not
exist, and to assist existing communities, whether secular or
religious, to strengthen themselves and their relationships with
other communities ultimately thereby fostering the movement
toward world understanding.'"
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10. Endorsements
a. People of the Lie - "The Washington Times",
"Contemporary Christian Magazine"
b. The Different Drum
- Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy and
Care of Mind/Care of Spirit
- Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle In Time
11. Aquarian Conspiracy
a. The Aquarian Conspiracy, was written by Marilyn Ferguson in
1980.
b. Called the "Handbook of the New Age" by "USA
Today", it describes an "underground network" that
is "working to create a different kind of society based on a
vastly enlarged concept of human potential."
c. The Road Less Traveled is listed under "Readings and
References" for chapter 11, "Spiritual Adventure:
Connection to the Source"
12. New Age Catalogue
a. The New Age Catalogue, was published in 1988 by the editors
of "Body, Mind, and Spirit" magazine.
b. The catalogue includes books on channeling, Edgar Cayce,
crystals, tarot cards, meditation, yoga, etc.
c. The Road Less Traveled, is featured in an audio tape format
in the section called "Create Your Reality" ("Dr.
Peck... shows you how to cultivate your own religion and open up
to the positive force he calls grace.) The Aquarian Conspiracy,
is featured in the section called "The Planet".
d. The Different Drum, is promoted in a section called,
"New Lifestyles/Communities - The Meaning of
Community".
